Lots of people have told me stories of setting off too fast on the marathon and regretting it later. I'm not sure what one can do about that though - as far as I can tell the start of the London Marathon is a massive adrenaline hit, with thousands of runners and thousands of spectators so I can see that forcing an apparently slow pace in those circumstances is hard (though it's possible that crowding may come to my aid).
I have a setting on my running watch that is supposed to buzz at me if I stray more than 15 seconds off my target pace, but I've been experimenting with it and its processing of the GPS signal is sufficiently erratic that I merely find it annoying the way it keeps buzzing me when I'm 90% sure I'm maintaining pace. B. has suggested I should try turning down the GPS sampling interval and see if that has a smoothing effect on the pace calculation so I may try that.
The other possibility is that I believe there are supposed to be official pacers so if I could find the right one and stick to them that might help with maintaining pace. But that does depend upon being able to find the right pacer in some massive crowd of runners at the start and the pacer actually knowing what they are doing.
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I have a setting on my running watch that is supposed to buzz at me if I stray more than 15 seconds off my target pace, but I've been experimenting with it and its processing of the GPS signal is sufficiently erratic that I merely find it annoying the way it keeps buzzing me when I'm 90% sure I'm maintaining pace. B. has suggested I should try turning down the GPS sampling interval and see if that has a smoothing effect on the pace calculation so I may try that.
The other possibility is that I believe there are supposed to be official pacers so if I could find the right one and stick to them that might help with maintaining pace. But that does depend upon being able to find the right pacer in some massive crowd of runners at the start and the pacer actually knowing what they are doing.