Lighthouse 10km Night Race 2011 in Mouille Point, Cape Town

My first half-marathon – Randolf does the Cape Town Peninsula Marathon 2011

While my original plan was to premiere with my first half-marathon in April 2011 for Two Oceans Marathon 2011 a spontaneous decision made me enter and run the Peninsula Marathon in Cape Town on February 20th. 9 days prior to race I felt fit enough for the 21km race, even though I’ve never done more than 16 km before, and I was bold enough to signed up for start number 4227.

My Problems only began thursday before the race sunday, when my new Asics running shoes I had just bought in December were stolen and I decided to go for a last pre-race 13km run in my 5 year old Nikes. Just after the race I realised that my left Calf did hurt and it didn’t got much better until Saturday evening. I knew I couldn’t do the race in my old shoes, so I went to buy new running shoes and got new Asics and some great advice at The Athletes Foot at V&A Waterfront. The very helpful advice I got from Athletes Foot owner Grant Bryant was that I should be using my old inner soles in the brand new running shoes.

Race day:

With this in mind I arrived in Bergvliet on time for the 7am race start – see photo above for my impression, standing at the end of the start block. The start went well and after few minutes everybody was able to run at his or her own pace without accidentally running into others. The ache from tension in my leg didn’t really got worse during the race and I only felt weak towards the 16k mark but had no serious struggle to finish the race. My only serious issue was Runkeeper on my Android phone that crashed after 8 km just to restart with a new session that I can’t merge together. This is the reason why you can only see the last 13 km on this map.

The race is seriously beautiful and despite the strong South-Easter wind I fully enjoyed the run past Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, Fish Hoek and Simonstown. Without my Runkeeper tracking my run I couldn’t check for time and was really surprised to end 1:58:20 and was #346 out of the 1265 half-marathon runners when the Peninsula Marathon results were published!

The Atmosphere at the finish was really pleasant, as drinks were available, 15-minute massages could be bought for a mere 50 Rand and I met four friends from the The Drinking Club with a Running Problem who just finished the full marathon in 4:29 running together for the whole race! After some glasses of Moreson bubbly we were strong enough to move to a very late breakfast at Boulders Beach restaurant – aaaah – I love these beautiful days in Cape Town!

Randolf Jorberg right after finishing the Peninsula Marathon

Peninsula Marathon 21 and 42 km results

Despite the strong South-Easter blowing the Peninsula Marathon 2011 was a very well organised event that saw 3131 runners completing the Peninsula Marathon & Half Marathon on Sunday. I’ve also published a personal report from my first ever half-marathon at the Peninsula Marathon 2011. The following table shows the provisional results as issued by the race organizers. To look for your result, just start typing your name into the search box of the respective distance you went for:

Full Marathon results (42.195 km)

[table id=4 /]

Half Marathon results (21.0975 km)

[table id=3 /]

I did run the Marathon myself and made spot #346 🙂

Running with gadgets – RunKeeper, iRun and more…

I did only start running when I realised that there are tech toys to help me doing so. I started in 2007 using Nike+iPod – but only started running more regular when I found out about the beauty of GPS based route trackers and installed RunKeeper on my iPhone in 2009 and now you can see most of my runs in public on their site. As there is a huge growth for these tools and many of my friends join the running sport and let me and the world know about it using RunKeeper aswell, I am sure there is more behind it and we’ll see a whole new generation of runners to join this sport, based on a paradigm shift that’s accelerating growth for social media tools that are surrounding us every day.

For every global trend there’s always at least one example of someone who overdoes it. For some million of runners who get hooked onto RunKeeper to keep track of their own performance there is one ‘crazy guy’ who puts it to extremes:

Enter Joseph Tame and his iRun. He makes his running success or failure 100% transparent to his internet followers with a setup that he describes himself:

“It features four iPhones on rotatable mounts, an iPad, an Android handset, three mobile wifi routers, a wind turbine (ok, so it’s a kid’s fan that turns around…), a 4-in-one atmospheric monitor, a heart monitor, a plastic doughnut and of course the very important satellite dish for high-speed data connectivity (cunningly crafted from a bird-feeding dish).

This technology will allow me to broadcast live video on two cameras (using either skype or FaceTime to a local studio for re-broadcast), send live location/pace/heart rate data via Runkeeper on the iPhone, transmit temperature, COx/humidity/noise levels via a custom-made Android app – and do all of this while looking incredibly cool.”