After little training, too much weight to carry, and the occasional sneaky cigarette lately.. I am very happy with a time of 1:54:54 for the SMH Half Marathon on Sunday.

My personal best time for this distance is 1:54:14 back in 2003 which I was training 4 or 5 days a week so with a bit more effort I should be able to beat that, and maybe 1:50, sometime this year.

Next planned event is the Cairns olympic tri in August, then the full marathon at the Sydney Running Festival.. I’ll need to work hard for the last one, I won’t be able to do that on 1 or 2 training runs a week.

This month, 5 mins into a planned 2 to 3 hour training ride, my gear lever broke. That, and the goal race being completed at the end of March meant motivation went out of the window (and pizza went into the body). I have a half marathon in less than two weeks so need to pick things up again – plus my bike is repaired and ready for collection.

Bike: 16h 14m 35s  - 380.6 KM
Run: 9h 26m 35s  - 98.06 KM
Swim: 9h 21m 19s  - 20400 M

I’ve put a spreadsheet of the run and tri races I’ve been in over the years – or at least the ones which I can remember and have online results – it’s here. Tri’s then running, reverse date order.

In the tri results, O G and C are Open, Gender and Category.

Percentile divides my finishing position by the number of finishers, multiplied by 100. So if I’m in the 85% percentile, 85% of the finishers were in front of me, 15% were behind me.

Some thoughts:

I thought my half marathon times from 2003 were better than that – I was sure I had a 1h48mXXs finish. Oh well.

There is at least one 10K run missing but I was accompanying someone to a 1h+ time so I’m not too worried about finding it… :-)

I’m happy that my percentiles for tri’s are improving – 97, 95, 92, 89, 86 is a good curve. What kind of curve? Well, like this – lower is better:

Based on this trend I can expect to win my first tri around 20th November 2010. I’ll start looking at race calendars for likely candidates now.

Edit: formatted screwed, will retry.

I should mention that I’ve moved from running to doing triathlons, the most recent being the Mooloolaba Olympic Distance triathlon on the Sunshine Coast. First one at this distance (1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run) so also my best time.. :-) 

I was aiming for 3h30m (50m swim, 1h30m bike, 1h run, 10 minutes in transitions) so was very happy with the resulting times:

Bib    Name                      Swim       Bike        Run         Finish     Gender  Gender Place  Category  Cat Place  
1041  PAUL WAKEFORD  00:38:12  01:28:37  00:52:27  02:59:17  MALE   967                 M35-39    167  

(before any smarty pants points out the category != my age, it’s based on your age on December 31st 2007).

Sorry for the formatting, hopefully you can get the idea that I finished under three hours. Transition times were included in the bike leg – I actually did 1h21m for the bike distance.

A touch of the TV movie about it but a great tale with some quite brutal parts. Yet another 7/10.

Pic of the day is going on over at my Movember Flickr Set.

A couple of things have become obvious:

• I’m way, way greyer than I imagine myself. Looking at blown-up pictures of yourself isn’t flattering.
• It’s hard to shave evenly. All off is so much easier.

Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Movember Foundation" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 79179. Please mail cheques to: PO Box 292, Prahran VIC 3181. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

The money raised by Movember is donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative, which will use the funds to create awareness, fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and male depression.

Thank you,

Paul