Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon - RunHalf Marathon

Everyone started off really fast, and I kind of expected there to be a quick pace at the beginning. It only took just over a km for the pace to settle down, but I certainly had a lot of people passing me. I think some of the faster runners got caught at the back of the corral and were trying to make up a little time.

I noticed that my HR started to climb pretty fast even though I was maintaining my goal pace. I chalked this up to the fact that I was running on 4 hours sleep since our new little baby girl kept me up most of the night. But it also meant that my HR would continue to climb as we got further into the run.

Kept a good pace, until about km 4 where my Garmin stopped recording lap data. This was my fault since I needed to delete some of my previous runs but hadn't done so. So there I am running along with this thing beeping away at me and me trying to fiddle with the buttons and figure out how to delete laps. Eventually I had to turn it off and on again, deleted a run and thought I was safe - wrong. It happened twice more during the run so I lost about 3km of data. Not much I can do about that one.

Felt good for the first half (with the exception of needing to pee - recurring theme for me during races this year). Made the turnaround just a little behind schedule, but was maintaining a good pace. Made up that time in the last 4km as I picked up my pace and by the time I finished I had nothing left.

Except for the Garmin everything went according to plan and I ended up finishing exactly as planned. I had held some wild thoughts that if I felt really good in the early part I'd try and push the last 1/2 harder and try to break 1:40. That didn't happen since my HR was so high from the start, but for my first 1/2 marathon I can't complain at all.

Just walked around a bit, met up with people and ate some of the snacks.


I'm still a new runner (1 year) so I have no doubt I'll get faster with time. I'll spend the winter trying to create a strong base and we'll see how I perform next year.


Great event and highly recommended - they bill the event as flat and fast and that certainly helped for my first one of these.