2025 - Ottawa Half Marathon

• A Goal - Finish under 2:00:00 hours

• B Goal - Somewhere about 2:10:00 hours

• C Goal - Finish the Race

After a year of consistent running I thought it would be a good idea to redo teh same race I orginally challenged my sister, to see how much improvement could be made. Her and I did have a discussion about racing it again with an other to see who’d be faster again. Overally I knew I’d have a better race than the year prior and wanted to change my mindset with it a bit and enjoy the day and take in the experience. Mind you this time around I would be in the middle of prep for my first 70.3 Ironman. I was a little unsure if I should race the event or leverage it more as a training day. I did have some goals in mind that I wanted to acheive but it was highly dependent on the day itself. As well over the past year I have been training with a solid buddy John, who also signed up for a 70.3 Ironman but is a great runner to begin with. Even after speaking with him, he signed up for the same race in Ottawa but had the plan to pace his gf in the half-marathon. John gave me the option to to run with him and pace the both of us but I did not really know where I wanted to end up.

On the day of event my sister and her bf could not make it to the event and race so I ended up completing it myself. No pressure right, so I showed up to the event with still the logic of having fun. Later in the day I realized I did not even see my friend John running with his gf along the whole course, mind you we ended up running within a couple seconds of one an other.

Leading into the event I would need a solid pace of 5:43 min/km pace to be on pace for my A goal. Around kilometer 5 I noticed I was running routinely around 5:30 min/km and was feeling great, at this point in time I was noticing how heavy people were breathing around me. Where I found myself it was a solid effort but I was adding this extra time as ‘Money in the Bank’ if near the end I needed to slow down. Around kilomenter 16 I could tell it was definialty starting to get touch and how the course was setup we were on a long straight stretch of road where one section had shade from trees.

With my mindset I went out more in the middle of the road, full sun and kept on pushing, as I was doing this I noticed as I ran was that everyone turned into a single file line to have some of the shade but no one was passing, and realize that people were likely slowing their pace due to playing ‘Follow the Leader’ in this section. I was slowing picking people off one by one and increasing pace as this was the fasted continuous 3 kilometer section I threw down on the course. As I was in the last few kilometers now I felt this feeling that I was blowing up and just wanted to stop. As I knew the course quite well, I played with my mind by telling myself once I got to a certain point I would stop and walk for a portion of it. But I also kept extending this out after each time I got to said indicated point. I knew if I kept on going of got myself closer to the finish line I would gain the excitement and adrenaline boost from the crowd. Which is exactly as to what happened in the last kilometer. I threw down the fastest in my race. In the last 400m or so I looked down if I was going to break my sub 2-hr goal, which I was sitting just around 1:54:00 at this point and knew I could do it, so for simplistic sake the goald was now to get a sub 1:55:00 finish. With this in mind I knew it was gonig to be close but I sprinted the last portion to get myself there with everything I had in me and crossed over, 1:54:54 was the official time.

Overall I would say this event was a success, finished healthy with being able to achieve me A goal. I defiantly raced it which I knew was going to be tough with being in the middle of my 70.3 training but it was a great day.