Rachel Cliff reveals how she PB’d by 1:44 to break the Canadian 1/2 record

One minute and 44 seconds.

That’s the jump Rachel Cliff made at the Woodlands Half-Marathon in Texas on March 3 on her previous personal best to break the Canadian record (pending ratification by Athletics Canada). In simple terms, that’s a nearly five-second improvement per kilometre for the duration of the race.

Lanni Marchant held the previous half-marathon record by a Canadian at 1:10:47 as Cliff clocked 1:10:08 to win the relatively low-key race in the Houston area. (If you’re interested, you can see Cliff’s kilometre-by-kilometre splits here.)

Cliff says a big factor in her half-marathon improvement is simply learning the distance. “I’m pretty new to this event,” she says.

“I went out a little faster and held it this time,” Cliff says adding that in Houston she “started fast and backed off” as she wasn’t as comfortable pushing the pace. She and her coach, Richard Lee of the B.C. Endurance Project, discussed before the race of being confident in a faster early pace and holding it.

In recent years, Cliff has been a 5,000m/10,000m specialist – she still races on the track – but has more so been challenging distance road races on a regular basis since the fall 2017. Dating back to California’s Monterey Bay Half-Marathon in November where she ran 1:14:25, Cliff produced performances of 1:11:52 (Houston), 1:12:21 (Vancouver) and the Woodlands. Houston was her PB prior to the March 3 half-marathon.

The 29-year-old Vancouver resident says she used the Woodlands Half-Marathon as a build towards the Commonwealth Games in April. (In fact, the Woodlands race was a bit of a last-minute decision.) She qualified to represent Canada in the women’s 10,000m at the Gold Coast, Australia competition.

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In the past year, Cliff says she’s focused a lot on tempo runs during the transition to the longer distances including the half-marathon. “There hasn’t been one silver bullet [workout], just consistency of mileage and my average workouts this year are better than they were at the same time last year.” Cliff revealed she’s running 80-85 miles per week (128-135K) and shared one workout of note, 3x5K in the low 17-minute range off of two minutes rest/recovery. (A 1:10:08 half-marathon roughly averages out to 16:37 for each 5K.)

Mentally, Cliff says, knowing she can average 3:20s for 21.1K, instead of her previous PB, which reflects an average pace of 3:25 per kilometre, was a big reason for racing Woodlands too, to prove that the faster pace was within her capabilities. She notes that being on the brink of a sub 70-minute performance (no Canadian woman had broken 70:30 before Cliff) could open the door to similarly big jumps in again lowering the half-marathon record in the future.

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To get the pace right, Chris Winter, a 2016 Olympian and Cliff’s husband, raced Woodlands too. As Winter was himself registered, racing alongside Cliff was within the rules. And, according to Athletics Canada’s rule book, “road records can be set in mixed competition.”

“In road races it is common of course to have pacers specifically designated, and these are usually male pacers for the women,” says John Lofranco of Athletics Canada.

RELATED: Original race recap.

Cliff continues to race without an apparel and shoe sponsor as she has done for at least the past year. In the Woodlands, she raced in the Nike Vaporfly 4%, the variation of Nike’s Breaking2 shoe designed to break the two-hour marathon. On the topic of footwear, after Cliff appeared on a podcast with Rob Watson, she received an anonymous donation from a show listener in the form of a pair of new trainers.

Cliff departs for Australia and her first Commonwealth Games towards the end of March.