Race report - Rotorua half

I did the Rotorua half-marathon this morning... a much delayed attempt at another half (after intending to do Taupo in August, Hamilton in November...). I hadn't really done enough training, but went anyway. It's an off-road run through the forest, partly on forestry roads, partly on mountain-bike trails. I was attempting to improve on my not-particularly-impressive PB (from my one and only half-marathon race) of 1h51min.

The weather was perfect - partly cloudy, cool, and in the forest we were completely sheltered from a pretty stiff breeze. I'd managed to forget to bring a watch, so I had no idea what sort of pace I was going at - I thought I was on target, until I got to the halfway mark and found that about 57min30sec had alredy gone by... I was about 5min off where I'd really wanted to be! There was no way I was going to make up that much time, but I made a valiant effort - in the end I managed negative splits (second half faster than the first), but only by about a minute. So I had to make do with a 1h54min time. The course was certainly not overly easy, being off-road, and not particularly flat, but still, it would have been nice to go slightly quicker than that. Oh well, next time.

EDIT: Just checked the actual results on the website and discovered that my negative split was actually better than a minute... 2min30sec actually.  Which is a reasonably substantial speedup.  Just a pity I was speeding up from such a slow start...