 I'm super excited, quite nervous, looking at the elevation chart, analyzing how I'm going to drink and overthinking it probably a little bit, but I like that sort of thing. I'm here with my father, he's a driver today, and of course my brother behind the camera. And we are all excited and driving up this beautiful area of Norway and we'll be there in about half an hour and we'll check back with you there. I'm at the start, it's about 50 minutes until we go. I'm super excited, quite nervous, but feeling ready. It's a nice day, I think it's probably about 250-300 people total and we're all going to just have an awesome time. It's mostly on gravel roads, it's about 400 meters of elevation and yeah, it's just a perfect day. It's about 18 degrees Celsius which is really nice, I'm glad it's not too warm. Mass will be filming a little bit along the course and I'm going to just get ready, warm up a little bit, get my clothes off and just get down to the race gear and I'll see you later. Alright, so it's now three days after my first ever half marathon race and I want to give you guys a little bit of an idea of some of my thoughts leading up to the race during the race, most importantly. And after the race, how it went and what I learned. So, the race I did was Krogskogen Halmarathon which is a half marathon here in Norway, held on the 30th of July 2018. It's a yearly event, it used to be called Nordmarka Halmarathon before, now it's changed its name. It's not a huge event, small and cozy, probably like 400 people or something total, which was very nice and perfect for me. The course is on gravel roads and there's a fair bit of elevation, I think 300 something meters of elevation gained throughout the race. So, it's certainly not a flat course, it's not a race, it's not a course where you would have a personal best. But of course for me it was my first ever half marathon so it was a personal best. And I'll break it to you right away, I ran it in 1 hour 45 minutes and 47 seconds I think. So, that's super cool, I'm happy about it. I think certainly if it was on a flat course I would obviously run faster and I did a few mistakes during the race. And those mistakes are something I want to share with you here today. So, before I get to that, let's just talk about the days leading up to the race. I was super excited, quite nervous, like I always get before events of any sort, but especially running events. It's my third ever running race though, so I'm not really used to the racing scene and all that. I was positively nervous. I met a couple of my friends that are some of the best half marathon runners in Norway really. They were there and they both got John, one of my friends, he got third in a fierce battle for second. He got third and then Andreas got eighth. So that's really good, that's impressive. I arrived at the race on race day together with my dad and my brother. My dad has always been into running, he's done a lot of races in his life. So he has a lot of experience to sort of share with me about how to do the race, etc. He's run a lot of half marathons in his life and a few marathons too. And Matt was there of course as well for support and doing some filming and stuff like that. So it was a really nice day, perfect weather, just like now really. It was like 18 degrees Celsius, not a cloud in the sky. I mean ideally I would probably want it to be even a little bit cooler and a few clouds because that would run faster that way. I lined up at the start, there was a countdown kind of, one minute to start and I was just like, oh god, exciting. I placed myself at a point where I thought was logical for me to place. So I was like leaving about 100 people in front of me. And interestingly enough I finished 97th overall. So that was a pretty accurate guess from my part, 100 people in front of me. And then off we went. The first few kilometers are up, I'm not going to go through all the details of the course. If you're interested you could always check out my Strava link. I'll put a link in the description to the Strava activity. And you can read more about my details there, you can see the course, you can see my heart rate, you can see my pace. And you can follow me on Strava to stay up to date with all my training. Anyway, I had some ideas regarding pace starting out. But you know, I haven't done that much high intensity training in the last in my life. Just a few weeks now before the race and I didn't have much experience at those higher paces. So I didn't quite know, and especially because of the up and down nature of the course. I wasn't sure, you know, like what pace should I aim to hit. And in terms of heart rate, well I always need to stay below my lactate threshold, right? That's my initial thoughts of course, I mean it's more than an hour, I'm going to finish in more than an hour. And you can really just stay at lactate threshold pace successfully for about an hour in a race. So I certainly had to stay below lactate threshold, which is probably for me about 86, 87% of max heart rate. But in races, you know, maybe my heart rate is a little bit elevated. This is a problem that I had in my past races too, that I'm not quite sure if the heart rate on my heart rate monitor, my Garmin 630, you know, if it says 90% of max in a race, is that truly representative of that work effort? Or is the heart rate elevated because of the excitement? And so I was at 90% for most of the race in the beginning. And I thought probably a little high, but I was just going with it, you know. I felt like I could sustain it. I couldn't. I definitely couldn't. I worked way too hard for the first 10k, you know, I actually did a personal best 10k in the first half of the race in like 47 something. So that's already maybe a sign right there, like I'm running a personal best in a 10k. It's a sign. It's not necessarily, you know, you couldn't certainly do that depending on where you're coming from and how fit you are at the moment. But for me, that was probably just a little tad too ambitious considering the fact that there was so much elevation in the first few kilometers. Anyway, from the halfway point and onward, I just progressively slowed down. It was a painful, painful event. And after about two kilometers of a steady climb, I reached up to a sort of plateau where I just cruised for a little while. That's where Mads and my dad were standing, waiting for me. And I'll pull up a little footage so you can see how I looked as I passed them. Fresh and naive at like two kilometers in. Check it out. It's going fast. Probably too fast. It wasn't as bad as I thought. Good luck. Then I continued on with the race and, you know, I was pushing. I was really, really pushing. And also on the downhills, I was running faster than I've, you know, I was running at a really, really fast pace. I'm not sure if my legs were sort of able to handle that. Because as I ran, both in terms of my effort, heart rate-wise, probably over-lacted threshold, that sort of thing, but also in terms of my legs running that fast for that long, as I reached the halfway mark, things started going downhill for me, figuratively speaking. I really started to slow down and started feeling, feeling like total crap, basically. Slower and slower and slower was just harder and harder and harder to maintain the pace and even the effort. You know, if you look at the heart rate data on my Strava post, you can see towards the end of the race, I'm actually running at a much easier intensity than at the beginning of the race. It should have been the reverse, right? I should have started at an easier intensity and increased it throughout the race. But I did the opposite. I ran too hard, which is just like a classic newbie mistake. I feel like if I had another chance, and of course I can do this next year or the year after or whatever, if I had another chance like now with the knowledge I have now on that course, I would run it differently and I think I would actually finish faster. If I ran slower for the first half, I could probably run a little faster for the second half and I would actually finish three minutes faster probably. In terms of hydration and fuel, I had a little bottle of sugar water, just like super concentrated sugar and a little water and a little salt. And I just squeezed a little bit of that into my mouth, swallowed it down as I approached each aid station. There was like six aid stations in the race, which is a lot for 21K. But that was perfect for me because then I could just squeeze that and then grab a cup of water and just down like 150-200ml of water at each aid station and move on. Very much of a learning experience for me, this race. Very interesting. I feel like I know my body better now. I think also towards the end I was really struggling to maintain the pace. Even if I wanted to run for 20 pace per kilometer, I was just not able, even on the flat, I was simply not able to get there. I couldn't push past like five minute pace, which was just a strange feeling. I couldn't, I wanted but I couldn't. And it was really painful and I don't know if it was structural fatigue from all the downhill running or if it was maybe the fact that I was running above my lactate threshold earlier and just accumulated too much lactate, probably both. Well, I suffered through the last 5K. The last 5-6K was just... At times I was like noticing in my face that I had this kind of urge to cry almost and it made me laugh. I mean I was not like emotionally down but I was feeling this kind of... It was just so painful I almost wanted to cry a little bit, which is funny. So I just pushed, pushed, pushed through and I got to the finish line. I had to walk a couple of times just for like 5-10 seconds and then I got to the finish line and I finished kind of strong, you know, when I got to the place where everyone's watching and my dad and brother were filming again. I was feeling like I had to push harder at the end. I was able to do that a little bit and then I finished. Here's some footage from me approaching the finish line. Check it out. This is so good! 1.46K, something incredible. I haven't run for like... I've had two days of complete rest now and today I'm going to go out for a bike ride and tomorrow just an easy run and slowly building up to it again over a couple of weeks before I'll start my next half marathon build up which will go until September where I'm going to do a next half marathon. It's also a half marathon on the 15th of September and that's more of a flat course on pavement and that's... I have some goals there, you know, in terms of time. I'm trying to run a little faster obviously and we'll talk about that in another video. Anyway, summing up the race. It was a beautiful day. It was a great race. Really nice. The event management was done well. I mean, we all had our names on our bibs. The bibs was really nice. They were just a little smaller. I'm wearing my t-shirt actually from the race. I won a t-shirt. They just called out my name and I was like, I won a t-shirt. Good atmosphere. Good vibes. It was nice meeting my friends there. Talked to them about running. Nice to have my dad there, my brother. It was just a good overall day. I just... I loved it. And in terms of recovery, I've had in the past where I was less fit, I guess. I was really struggling. I got totally wasted, for example, after my first 15k race. I was just completely out of it for like the next day. But this time, I was fine. I mean, I was really, really tired, obviously. But I was okay, you know, in the evening after the race. And the next day, I was feeling much better already. And now, after three days off or two days off anyway, I'm feeling good. I mean, I can still notice a little soreness. Still tired a little bit. But I'm ready to hit out on the roads for a bike ride. Just easy into training again. And of course, remember, you can follow me other places too, right? You're watching this YouTube video, but I have an Instagram account. There's a link in the description. I post lots of pictures from my runs, etc. Check that out. I have my Strava profile, as I mentioned, where you can see all my training. And then, of course, there's a Facebook page for this channel. Please follow that and subscribe to this channel, of course. And click the little bell button next to the subscribe button so you get notified when I upload a video. I appreciate having you with me. I appreciate you watching this. If you made it this far in a long video about my race, then I really think that's awesome. I'm going to get ready for my bike ride. It's a fine day. I'm looking forward to just an hour or an hour and a half or something out on the road. It's just easy riding. Hope your day is going well. Let me know in the comments what you think. Thanks for watching. See you around.