Perth Relay Marathon - a win!

Fantastic run today. Felt really good right from the start. Simon Elliot gave our team a great lead-off, and Biscuitman backed up with an excellent second leg – I reckon he had the worst of the conditions. I was a 3:47 minutes adrift of first place and 7 seconds off second when I set off for my two legs - from Troy Park back to the finish, but figured all I could do was hit my pace, not burn out, and see what happened.see what happened.

Went into second place after about a k and just kept hitting my kms at a good pace - they didn't vary too much. Had a few problems getting past the 3:30 bus ; I had to wait behind runners for oncoming relay and marathoner, so the run was a little fartlekky for the first 8k or so until I got clear. Hit the changeover in 34 minutes (making the last leg ~32:45), and saw Jim Langford anxiously looking for his runner - the guy who *was* in second. At this point I was just over 2 minutes behind. Jim's guy was still 5 minutes away...

Just about had a heart attack when I saw the leading runner about 200m ahead with about 3.5 km to go. I could see that I was reeling him in quickly, so I relaxed, tried to go really really quietly and then went past him. I knew who it was and that all I had to do was maintain my 3:37’s and it was all over ; we won in the end by over a minute and a half.

Splits:
4:19(to 24k mark)/3:32/3:34/3:41/3:36/3:41/7:24(2k)/
3:38/3:35/3:39/3:40/3:37/3:37/3:35/3:35/0:41(195m)

18.6km in 1:06:45 (3:35 min/km)
9.4km Leg 3: 34:00 (3:37)
9.2km Leg 4: 32:45 (3:34)

Great team effort, and we ran the time I thought we would – 2:35:02. Didn’t beat the leading solo marathoner, but it was close. Roberto Busi had a great run and won it in 2:32. That’s next year’s target…..