The popularity of half-marathon races has grown throughout the past years. Something I witnessed for myself when attending these races. And it is totally understandable. The 21.1km are something that is challenging to conquer, but still not as crazy as a full marathon. At the same time training for a half-marathon consists (in my case) of runs between 8-12km which can easily be completed in the evening after returning from work. Even without a race on the horizon I tend to run these kind of distances frequently. As a result I am therefore generally in half-marathon readiness which might explain why I have done some of these races in the past.
Recently I was curious to see how my performance has developed during the past. Since my time in Finland I have been constantly improving my time (except my last race which was no PB due to some stomach issues) but I could not remember how my race times looked like from previous years.
Going through some old results (hooray to internet archives) I managed to compile a list of half-marathon races I attended in the past:
| Schwarzwaldmarathon | 19.10.2005 | 2:27:33 |
| Maratona Ticino | 13.11.2005 | 2:16:32 |
| Rhylauf 2006 | 27.03.2006 | 2:12:44 |
| Rhylauf 2007 | 27.03.2007 | 2:19:39 |
| Schwarzwaldmarathon | 27.10.2007 | 2:13:22 |
| Pääkaupunkijuoksu | 18.09.2011 | 2:04:56 |
| Rovaniemi Halfmarathon | 29.06.2013 | 1:57:39 |
| Helsinki Halfmarathon | 07.06.2014 | 1:53:40 |
| Espoo Rantapuolikas | 20.09.2014 | 1:51:44 |
| Helsinki City Run | 16.05.2015 | 1:52:45 |
Throwing these into Excel nicely shows the trend I had and which I hope to follow as well in the future:
I’m currently training for my next half-marathon which will be a situation analysis for my progress towards the full marathon at the end of the year. The race prediction function on my new Garmin watch tells me that I should be able to run a half-marathon in 1:31:46 – still plenty of room to improve myself then… :-)