Barcelona Marathon 2012

Sounds good to me buddy, I'll give you a shout!

Looking for a marathon for next year now too, preferably Spring(ish) time, and most preferably abroard. A nice place, a decent drink and flat would also be a bonus...not that I'm asking much......!

Bedders, I did Milan last year, that was very flat, a good city to visit and I got some good flights. The Marathon itself was OK, nothing like Barcleona but pretty good. You start a bit out of town and spend half the marathon coming into the centre then the 2nd half take in a few sites. It was very hot last year, got up to about 28 degrees.

Tealsocks, the more I look into Ljubljana the better it seems. Check it out....

I actually had a very good race. My unambitious aim was 3h06m and finished in 3h09m.

 The only problem i had is that I actually relaxed a little too much the first 10km. I started slow and let people overtake me to the point were i had way too much energy right up to km 40.

 By km 5 i realised i had been overcautious and was over a minute behind. I did not want to make the extra effort to gain the time back and I was feeling extremely good so I only increased the pace slighly and finished the first half 2 minutes behind schedule in 1h36m.

 From then on I pushed on to do 1h33m for the second half.

 I'm sure I could have  done 3h05m or better but in the end i had a great race feeling strong up until the last 2 km and I have to say that for a chance it was nice not to suffer the whole time.

 Maybe next time I'll push a bit more and attempt the sub 3h

Sounds like I had a very similar race to Bedders, was on target for 3hr10m up to around 35k and then it started slipping away and I came home in 3:14:26... Still another 3 mins taken off my PB, so was still pretty happy!

Thought the organisation was brilliant and will definitely go back there at some point in the future.

Next marathon for me is likely to be Budapest in October (although did like the look of the Athens medal when I was wandering round the expo!) and then Milan or Rome next spring, if not successful in the VLM ballot...

Nice running JD and a great negative split Yasunaga, that gives me a bit of confidence for London, I think I'm going to hold back a bit for the first half and try and push on for the second. I did that in Barca last year but faded in the last 3k so was about 30 seconds slower in the second half in the end. I'm going for 3:10 in London to make sure I keep my good for age place. Sub 3 can wait until Ljubljana.

 I didn't realise there was a cut off time for the first half tealsocks, Mrs Nails is going to to the half, that's about the time she will do I should think.