Busselton Half Marathon report...

Where is Busselton ??? a lovely seaside town in West Australia. The town is famous in the Triathlon world for being the location of the West Australia IronMan...so almost everybody in town goes around with some kind of Ironman memorabilia....
It also boast the longest wooden jetty of the southern hemisphere (1.9km...)

What the heck was I doing there ?? Well, during the CNY holidays, we went there for a family beach vacation and the usual round of country parks, etc.... (at least my kids would understand what a cow looks like...).

Basically it was totally unplanned and one day going around town we noticed a banner advertising a half marathon for the saturday.... so, why not ??

This said, I was a bit hesitant to make a Half only 2 weeks away from the Hong Kong Marathon... but I resolved to take the race at reasonable effort and do not leave everything ...also having only a pair of Asics Kayanos was a good mental brake to avoid going "too fast"...

Reaching the beautiful seafront starting point I was deeply impressed by how much the "Ironman" culture was pervasive in that region... it seemed that 2 out of 3 were multiple Ironman veterans, sporting souvenir shirts from any kind of Ironman race around the globe...
So... I was only a modest road runner who can barely swim...

The course is a 2 loops back and forth on the seashore, so it is basically 4 times of the same 5km stretch...
it was really windy, with serious headwind on half of the course (heheh... tailwind on the other half...).
To get good data for my assault to the marathon, I run in full "data crazy" asset: Garmin, HR strap and foot pod.
The target was to run around 3'40" which seemed a reasonable pace for such a windy day. Also I wanted to keep the HR as close as possible to 170bpm in first half race, to leave space for climbing up to 177-180 only on a later stage. In this way, it was a fairly reasonable effort, but not a real "half marathon" full out (where I should start at 175bpm and later see the HR drift to 180-180bpm or even more...).
5bpm can make a huge difference in terms of effort and I am surprised by how many people wear a HR monitor without really taking profit of the information...

Anyway, right after the start, it was quick to realize that there were 2 runners much faster than the others and they soon disappeared on the horizon. I was quite comfortable in the 2nd pack and it was good to see that my HR was just around 170bpm as I wished (85% of my max).

As you can see, I kept a very steady effort (and 3'40" pace) until 16km, where the last headwind section required me to work harder to keep the pace.
Progressively our pack was losing pieces and we were left in 2 with 5km to go to dispute the 3rd place.
I was a bit hesitant to push too early, so I really put down the hammer only at the 20km mark with a 3'20" Km split and dropped the other guy....

So, final result: 3rd overall, 1st Master in a 1h17'46" which was right on spot of my targeted pace.
Results are HERE

If you do not have it yet, it is a real must to install the "weather plugin" on SportTrack 3....
You can get an exact picture of the weather conditions during the workout... for example during the race:

The temperature was not bad, but a constant wind at 26kmh made for a tougher than expected race....

So, if you happen to be in West Australia the first week-end of february (next edition is scheduled for 4th february 2012), do not miss this nice race www.busseltonhalf.com.au