Race Report - Lisbon Half Marathon 2011

It's all over now and my legs are in recovery but here is how it all played out.

I woke up at 7:30am and had my breakfast of porridge, honey and banana, drank about 500ml of water, put on some suncream and waited to be collected.  My wife's brother João was also running the half and arrived just after 9am to bring me to the train station.  João's girlfriend Ana was taking part in the mini marathon, a 7km track on mostly the same route.  We got the train at 9:34am and had only one stop to go.  Anyone with a race number could use the public transport system free of charge to get to and from the race, which was great.  It was nice to be staying so close to the start of a race so there wasn't much travel time involved.  This, however, didn't prevent me from being late for the start.

I'm going to complain a bit here so apologies in advance for this.  We arrived at Pragal station and I left the group in search of a toilet.  I had hopes that this would be a well organised event but the toilet facilites were definetly lacking.  On paper there were a lot of toilet locations at the start, on the race route and and at the finish, unfortunatley at those locations there were not a lot of toilets, and each toilet had it's own queue, so you could be stuck a long time waiting.  I tried three toilets, all with no toilet paper, poor organisation.  Losing a lot of time at this point I decided to jog to the start as part of a warm up.  There were two large roads leading to the start and lots of space to jog until both came together in a bottleneck with a huge crowd trying to get past.  At this point I knew I would miss the start but felt that I would still have time to reach the gate I was looking to start in.  When I finally got through the bottleneck (there was a nice group standing in the bottleneck making it smaller having a group meeting with two organisors watching them, not moving them on) it was on to the start.

The race starting point was at the beginning of the bridge on the way into Lisbon and the race had already started.  My stretching was quick and brief, not really what I wanted but I was in a hurry.  I had assumed that one side of the bridge would be for the half and the other for the mini, but I was wrong.  I also assumed that they would start the race in waves with the faster wave first and so on, it seems I was wrong again.  I asked which side was for the half and was told both, it doesn't matter.  It also seemed that they started everyone together, I was 8 minutes late for the start, but I think if it was started in waves I wouldn't have had to wade through lots of people walking.  As a result I spent the first 1km run/walking as the majoity of people were walking, stopping, taking photos, meaning I had to weave between people and stop abruptly on a regular basis, more bad organisation.

Ponte 25 de Abril - The Race Start

OK, further complaining about the organsition of the event can wait a little... The Race.  I had said in my previous post that thoughts of a PR were shelved due to the weather, of course I was just saying that but still harbouring hopes it might be possible.  This half is considered the fastest in the world as it is almost totally flat with probably 100m uphill and 1km downhill outside of that flat, a great opportunity for a PR.  At the 3.5km mark we came off the bridge completed our little bit of uphill and then began winding our way downhill to the lower river level.  At 5km the mini marathon went to the right and the half to the left.  At this point there was lots of space.  It was also the first water stop and bit of live music.  With the temperatures at 23ºC it was great that there were so many water stations on the route, good organisation :-) and the live music along the route also was a welcoming factor.

Songs I heard sung live along the route:
Michael Jackson's Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Phil Collin's Easy Lover
Katy Perry's Hot N Cold
Britney Spear's Toxic
Wham's Wake Me Up Before You Go Go
Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode

Around the 8km mark we past the main square of Lisbon's downtown, Praça do Comércio.  Up to this point my race was going quite well and my pace was well on for a sub 2 hour half.  We turned around and ran back the direction we came from.  As soon as the turn was made the lovely breeze that had been in my face on the way up completely disappeared, replaced by a dead heat.  At the next water station I poured a bottle of water over me to cool down, a slight mistake as my t-shirt became really heavy, at least in the heat it didn't stay heavy for long.  At 10km I passed Hennessy's Irish Pub for the second time and I'm sure I could hear it whisper "Come in for a cool drink".  At this point my heart rate was also suggesting a break.  Shaking this from my head I plodded on.  At 13km we passed the point again where the mini and half orignally seperated and went the other direction.  We continued down this new stretch of road along the river towards Belém.  Along this route there are some great views.

The Discoverer's Monument

Torre de Belém

At 15km I was gone.  I stopped and walked each time I took a drink.  At 17km we ran by and past the finish line and it was tempting to jump the barrier and run towards it.  At 19km we reached the end of this long stretch of road turned around and ran back along the other lane.  Just over 2km left and the breeze had returned.  At 19.5km banana's and orange slices were handed out and the next 1km was spend making sure you didn't step and slip on any of the peels.  I pushed and pushed myself over this last stretch as a sub 2 hour was still possible but it was going to be close.  I ran through the finished line, tired, glad to be finished, with nothing left to give and collected my medal and finish pack in front of Jeronimo's Monastery.  In my opinion the toughest race I've ever run.  My son, my wife and her dad were there at the finish line to great me.  The finishing pack had two bottles of water, one energy drink, a carton of milk and a small museli bar.  I was so happy that my wife brought lots of sugary jellies for me to snack on at the end of the race.

Jeronimo's Monastery

At the end of the race with my free Chocolate Cornetto (I love Ice-cream, Wonderful Organisation)

Me and James celebrate the end of the race

Me and my wife Ana who gratefully brought jellies for me to eat.

Look what I won

I later got my offical chip time off the website 1:59:31 a new PR.

The classification gave me a finish of 4128 out of 6331 which is based on the offical time but on chip time I finished 3577, not bad, and out of the 23 Irish people who entered the race I placed 8th.  Out of the 2752 in my age category I placed 1663.

The trip home was an adventure.  We decided to get the boat back across the river.  The queue was long as there was no change in the public transport timetables.  At the weekends in Lisbon the public transport service is reduced and the day of the race was no different.  With 36,000 people decending on Lisbon, over 6000 for the half and the rest for the mini all with the right to free access on public transport you would think that the service would have been increased even just for the time of the race and two hours after but no.  Agression levels were high and two men had to be physically pulled apart while waiting for the boat amongst aqusations of skipping the queue.  I've been told a few times before that queue skipping is a big no no in Portugal and I saw evidence of that first hand.

We got home, showered, changed and the it was out on the tiles for the night.  We went for dinnner to an all you can eat Brazillian Restaurant called Chimarrão and ate until we were about to burst.  A couple of drinks later and a fun day ended.

Portuguese beer "Super Bock" in a Guinness glass, nice :-)

Despite some of the organisational hiccups it was a great day, a great race, great spirit around the place and wonderful sceanery.  I'd do it again, but hopefully on a cooler day.  If you made it this far, thanks for reading.  Hope you enjoyed it, I did.