Melbourne Half Marathon

Well the day arrived. I was up at 5.30 am eating 3 pieces of toast (apricot jam), glass of orange juice and two multi-vitamin tablets. When picking up my race kit on Friday from Melbourne Town Hall I purchased a whole box of PB sports gels but have never used them in my training. I considered maybe taking one prior to the run and during, then common sense took over, I didn't. Next week though I'll try them out. My running mate and his wife picked me up about 6.25 am. We had one stop to make at the Arts Centre to pick someone else up and then to Rickets Point. We got there about 7.30 am and it was bloody cold. We parked about 300 meters (maybe more) away from the start. We stayed at the car, in track-suits, did some stretching and then back in the car; as I said, "It was cold". About 10 minutes to the start, off with the track-suits and a slow jog to the start, or as close as we could get as it was packed. The 'cold' was no longer an issue. The race started though I didn't hear the siren or gun, I just saw the pack in front surging forward. I didn't start my stopwatch straight away, I wanted to start it on crossing the start line. Well, I stuffed that up, completely missed it. It wasn't that obvious where the start line was, too many runners. I guestimated that I had run about 400 metres before setting the stopwatch on my Garmin Forerunner 301 (GPS gadget). I soon got into my stride and was running around 4:30 pace from about the 2nd km onwards. Very hard to get to pace for the first km due to the number of runners. About the 16 km mark I had planned to up the ante somewhat but it was also at this point that it was becoming more of an effort. I was starting to feel my calfs tighten. I couldn't up the ante but at the same time I was not going to slow down which I didn't. At the 20 km point, running up St. Kilda Road the finish line was in sight and then put a bit of a spurt on. Well I went through at 1 hr 36 min and some seconds. I'm reasonably happy with this. I had set two goals, first to run a sub 5 min pace and second to run less than 100 mins. My third goal was to break 90 mins but unfortunately this wasn't to be. Update : Official Time : 1:36:58 Overall place 427 of 2823 and 24th in my age group (45-49)