Espoo Rantapuolikas – race report

Fitting perfectly into my healthy September program was the Espoo Rantapuolikas. A halfmarathon that I had on my radar for quite a while now. At first I was a bit shocked by the starting fee of 72€ (I know, I know… I should not wait until the last moment…), but then saw that it was possible to use the sports vouchers I receive from work… Yes!

Preparation-wise I embedded this into my healthy September activities. During the first two weeks I wanted to increase my running activities so that by week three (race week) I could focus on tapering and preparing myself for the race which was on Saturday. I also planned on having weekly long runs to get myself adjusted to the halfmarathon distance.

Theoretically it all went as planned with the small difference that after my last longrun the Sunday before the event, I could definitely feel some pain in my left knee… Worried about having to forfeit the race before even starting, I decided to take it a bit slower the last few days.

On race day itself my knee felt fairly ok and I therefore decided to give it a go under the restriction that i was not going to push myself too hard.. After all I was already really happy with the result I had at the Helsinki Half Marathon – so no need to risk any major injury which would put me in recovery for the next few weeks…

My traditional pre-race picture…

I was starting in the second group as my indicated time was between 2:00 and 2:15. Apparently I was already fairly cautious when I registered for this event. On the other hand this meant that I was more or less within the first 10-20 runners behind the starting line, which was definitely a new experience for me. The 2:00 pacemaker where right next to me, but I assumed that based on my last result I would leave them behind me very soon.

And off we go… I’m somewhere behind this first line of runners on the right hand side.

After taking off, I caught myself several times observing my knee, evaluating if this was a good idea or not. Around kilometer 4 I then felt like it was getting worse, but soon after decided that this was probably just me focusing too much on the knee and not really on the race. Therefore I decided to just enjoy the race and only give up in case it would really start hurting. And see there… after a few more kilometers I did not even notice any pain anymore…

The halfmarathon itself has a fairly interesting route. It starts off by following a highway – obviously not the nicest scenery, but at least on a footpath – and halfway through merges with the marathon route and follows the coastline back all the way to Otaniemi.

Especially the merging part with the full marathon was fairly interesting as I was suddenly passing a lot of people, but not knowing if they were runners from the full marathon, the first starting group of the halfmarathon or then maybe even from my starting group… At some point I even passed the 4:15 pacemaker and was surprised that their pace was not even that much slower than mine…

In the end I even managed to increase my pace a bit as I was feeling fairly well – (almost) no knee pains anymore – and I more or less was familiar with the last stretch of the race from the Länsiväyläjuoksu.

Final stretch of this race

At the finish line I was fairly happy already by the fact that I managed to complete the race without major pain from my injury. The end result was 1hr 51mins which was below the 2hr goal I set myself… Only a few hours after the race it started to dawn on me that this was actually a new personal best time! With the whole knee issue and me not trying at all to push too hard – this was truly a surprise, but a positive one!