Ok, this time I did one ON PURPOSE rather than being left in the middle of nowhere by my wife.. Troy from event promotions was kind enough to offer me an entry to their first ever Rotorua Half Marathon and well frankly I don’t turn down free stuff

I’ve done the marathon version a couple of times and enjoyed running around the lake, but given I’ve only been running very short distances recently (e.g. 5-12km), there was no chance of completing the marathon.

In case your wondering, you start halfway around the lake rather than an out&back approach. The first 10km was great, but my lack of long distance training really kicked in around 15km, with one of my knees deciding it had, had enough of this..

..and by 16km my other knee which had been seriously favored for the last kilometer decided it had also had enough, which made for a very slow and somewhat painful 5km hobble back to the finish.

Still, I made it and no regrets, other than perhaps I should have trained some My finish time was about 1:45 in the end so not too shabby but heaps of room for improvement.

Definitely want to get back to marathon and ultra marathon shape so I can run through the grand canyon again, so it was a good reminder I need to start a proper training plan, which will be underway soon -next year half in sub 1:25!!