A Journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step

Vale of Pewsey Half Marathon - 2007

As a part of my Jersey Marathon training I included this Half Marathon.

Instead of driving there and potentially having problems parking, I thought I would us the 20 mile cycle there as a 'warm up'. It was certainly a good day for a warm up and my cycle ride started on a warm sunny morning, luckily by the time I had arrived at Pewsey it had clouded over a bit so was not too warm for running. I had planned to take around 1:45 for the ride to Pewsey and maybe I should have because I arrived after only 1:30 and this must have affected my running performance.
I was aiming for 1:37 in the half marathon because I wanted to do the Jersey Marathon in 3:30 and this seemed to be a reasonable target based on the reading that I have done about extrapolating a marathon time from shorter races.
I got changed out of my cyclng gear into running clothes and shoes. This was to be my first road race since the 3 Peaks, 2 Legs and a Bike, I had been mainly doing cycling Time Trials and duathlons so I was interested to see if I could achieve my target time.
There were a few hundred runners at the start and it was hard not to get carried along with others, I had not had a problem with this before but because I am trying to get into the frame of mind for racing events rather that just running them I found that after 2-3 mile I was going faster than I intended so I slowed a bit ( I was using a HR monitor and should have been payed attention to my effort levels earlier).
It was not a hilly course but there were some rises, a longish one at around 3 miles and a couple of other shorter ones.
At each mile marker I found I was trying to calculate my minute per mile times, generally seemed to be in the right area. I do remember that at 10 miles I had been going 75 minutes, which was pretty close to my target time.
My start had been too fast because now with the sun out the last 3 miles took me nearly 30 minutes which meant that my finish time was about 5 minutes slower than I hoped. This might have been because I started too fast or I am just not fast enough or maybe.. the cycle ride there had affected me!.
After I finished I got a couple of cups of tea and some cake to help fuel me on the 20 mile ride home. I spoke with a couple of runners who I knew from the Runners World forums and then went to change back into my cycling gear.
As I left the start on my way home there were a few tail enders just finishing. I did not ride back fast which I had thought of doing but I got home in 1:33 so not much slower than my ride there.