After the heat of yesterday in Holland it was nice that this morning dawned cool and clear and it promised to be a much better day for running. After breakfast, I left Kevin in the hotel doing his stretching and took a Taxi to the site which was only about 10 minutes away. I met up with Arne Dahlberg and Per Vikman who were the coordinating team for the day and then went with Per to have a look at the course and help put out the route markings.Today's route was quite different from the last couple of days. After the start there were 6 laps of the site car park followed by 16 laps of about 2.5 km along roads around the perimeter of the site.
Kevin arrived on site soon after 09:30 and a group of eager support runners congregated for the start at 10:30. As expected, the temperature was about 10 degrees cooler than yesterday in Dongen and this made for much better running conditions and Kevin set off at a good pace.
After yesterday's tough running conditions, Kevin had asked that I provide him pace advice as he completed each lap. The maths suggested a time of just over 18 minutes per lap was needed for his desired running time of 5 hours and as he passed the end of the lap for the first time he was 4 minutes up on this pace. "Too fast" was my cry.....you need to slow down. 
The second lap was also 14 minutes......"Too fast" I shouted. The third lap was also 14 minutes....."Still too fast" I pleaded. The fourth lap was....well, you guessed it, 14 minutes. I gave up trying to pace him thinking that his legs would eventually slow him down a bit !!!!
The Jordbro team did us proud today with about a dozen runners coming out to run laps with Kevin....from one lap all the way up to Martin who ran the whole thing ! In the end, Kevin never did slow his pace and kept on pushing the laps out at 14 minutes per lap which resulted in an excellent time of 3 hours 54 minutes and 41 seconds for the full marathon distance.
After the race, Kevin suggested that the format of short laps had helped him keep a very consistent pace and along with the cool weather, it had made the event really quite straight forward. Certainly from an organisational angle, this format is the easiest to organise as it allows us to provide food, drinks and medical support at regular intervals without having to use loads of resources.After the race it was, once again, back to the hotel for the oligatory ice bath and then catching the taxi to Arlanda Airport for more food and then our onward flight to Oslo.
Distance travelled today: 550 km
Total distance travelled: 3725 km
Distance run by Kevin today: 42.2 km
Total distance run by Kevin: 126.6 km
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