34 Seconds

34 measly seconds. Less time than it takes to boil a quarter of an egg. That's all that got between me and managing to hit my target of a sub-two hour half-marathon this weekend.
It's hard to describe how annoying that is. Three seconds faster each mile and I'd have been inside the two-hour mark. One and a half seconds each kilometre. If only I hadn't been held up at the start by the pack of runners in front of me. If only I hadn't stopped for those two drinks breaks. If only I'd  been able to go a bit quicker at the finish. Regrets? Like Frank Sinatra, I've had a few.

No excuses though. Not even the weather. It was a glorious day for the Thames Path Half, sunny but not too hot, bracing but not too windy. Conditions couldn't have been better - which came as a surprise as we'd driven there through torrential rain which miraculously cleared up just as we got to the start at Walton-on-Thames. 
I was running with two parkrun pals - John and Dee Churchill (in the pic below) - which is always nice. Running 13 miles can be a lonely business sometimes, and it's a real comfort to have a familiar face or two alongside you, helping you pace yourself and offering encouragement and support.
Or, in John's case, berating me loudly for going too slowly as he galloped past me at the 12km mark. He's a strong believer in tough love when it comes to running, and he's also faster than me, so I tend to get quite a bit of berating. But it's good for me - so he tells me.
I started well (or in John's words "set off like a demented jackrabbit"), hitting and exceeding my targets for the first few kilometres. I'd hoped to run at about 5.30 mins per km, at least until the halfway mark, thinking this would allow me to run the second half at a slightly slower pace and still make my set time.

It's not an easy half-marathon to run, to be honest. When you're running along the river, the path is narrow and packed (especially to begin with), when you're running through the town the roads aren't closed, so you are somewhat at the mercy of cars and shoppers despite the marshalls trying to keep your way clear.
But I was still some way ahead of schedule at the halfway mark, managing to reach it in 57 minutes. It was after that things got sticky.
I made a fatal error, deciding to take a walking break to reward myself for being a minute or so ahead of where I'd planned. I should know by know this is dangerous psychologically, because it gets you out of the rhythm of running - that one-pace-in-front-of-another metronome that keeps us all going when we're tired and lacking strength. And having lost that rhythm it's hard to get it back.
I started losing pace and found myself needing to take continual short breaks just to keep going. At the ten-mile mark, I was still - just - ahead schedule, but the next tortuous four kilometres put paid to that. As the last mile post came into sight in the distance, some way up the towpath, I knew it was going to take an extraordinary effort to break two hours.
And then, POP! Something like a small explosion happened in my right calf. I shouted out, more in surprise than pain I think, startling the other runners around me. I'm always anxious about stuff like this, ever since I tore my hamstring a few years back, so I hobbled for a little and then gingerly started running again.  
At first it felt OK, so I took a wild guess at it being cramp. When I did my hamstring, I could hardly walk for about half an hour, let alone run, so maybe this was nothing serious. Then 300 metres further on - POP! again. Twice more before I gratefully stumbled over the finish line in 2 hours 33 seconds, each time making me wince and pull up before carrying on.

So I ended up, just outside the 2-hour mark, about a minute off my half-marathon PB, with a mystery ailment in my leg. What does this all mean for my chances of being able to comlete a marathon? I'm not sure. I do know that right then and there I couldn't have run another step.
And what about the mystery ailment? Having read up about the symptoms, I'm reasonably sure that it was a muscle tear of some sort. There's a thing called a "calf heart attack" when the calf just gives out like that, which involves tearing some of the muscle fibres. The cure? The usual - rest, ice, compression, elevation, with the emphasis on rest. A serious tear can take anything up to 2-3 months to sort out. Run on it again too soon, and you disrupt the fibres as they heal and put back your recovery.
This, thankfully, seems to be minor. I've iced it and rested it for 10 days and it feels fine. Today is the day when I put it to the test again. A nice gentle - and definitely short - run. Let's hope it stays in one piece.