Well hello again, avid readers! I honestly thought that it would be longer before I regaled you all with another tale of running joy and woe, but apparently, I am insane. Or something very close. And there's significantly less woe in this particular tale than there are in some of the others.Just this very morning I had the pleasure of running the Rubber Ducky Half Marathon, which is 2 laps around the picturesque Burnaby Lake in the heart of the greater Vancouver area. Why, you ask, did I decide to run this seemingly unknown race? Well, the Royal Victoria Marathon was at the beginning of October, and due to a lengthy vacation in the UK in which I did absolutely no running, I was in no shape to be there for the fun. I wanted to be, but alas, I was not. I might mention at this point that I will never again take a vacation in which I do very little physical activity. Not at all owing to the vacation itself, but to the fact that getting myself back to my regular pace and endurance level afterwards is nothing short of hell. Next time I shall be packing my running gear. That said, after missing the RVM, I was feeling a little lazy and a bit left out. I felt as though I needed an event. A race I could run with a whole bunch of other crazy people. So I went online last week and found the Rubber Ducky Half, and took about 5 minutes to decide I wanted to sign myself up.
I went into this race with full knowledge that I would not be gaining another personal best. It just wasn't gonna happen today, and it didn't. But having known that going in, I am totally satisfied with the way the race turned out. I took almost a full month of holidays without running even once, and have been working my butt off since. The first few weeks after I got home, actually ended up being some of the slowest runs I have ever done (for those that know pacing, I was doing about 7:20 km's, I coulda cried). So crossing the finish line today to find that I had run solid 6 minute km's the entire race made me feel pretty damn good. I'm back, baby!
It still didn't feel like enough. As I have said in this blog before, and as most of you know, my favorite distance is a full marathon. It has been since I ran my first in 2007, and I think it always will be. Halfs are good, they just aren't really long enough. So today's race just reminded me of that. Not that the 21.1 km's were easy, but it was that feeling of crossing the finish line and thinking, "is that it?" So when's the next marathon, then?
It was a good race, and I was in a reasonably good mood for most of it, so I don't really have much to report. But I do have a few things, so here goes.
The Lulu girl. Oh, yes, there was one in today's race. You may remember my nemeses from this year's Vancouver Marathon, but if you don't, scroll back to that particualr blog and you shall understand. It wasn't the same girl, but she was wearing the Lululemon running shorts and bouncing around for the first few km's like she was all that and the expensive shoes she was wearing. Well, I passed her, in all her tiny shorts and new shoes glory. Me, in my Brooks shorts and shoes that needed replacing several months ago. So take that, Lulu girl. Eat my dust, as it were.
The terrain. Normally, a race would be run on asphalt and pavement. On the street somewhere. But this race was run on the trails around Burnaby Lake, thus essentially making it a trail run. Which, if you're a runner, makes a gigantic difference. Unlike pavement, trails wind through the trees, have tree roots and other debris on the actual trail, and they aren't flat. Burnaby Lake, in particualr, is in no way flat. It can't even see flat from where it's sitting. This isn't to say that it's a hilly course. It's not, far from it. There are no siginificant hills, it's just that the trail undulates up and down with very small hills. And there are ruts on the trail that make it difficult to pick where on the trail to run, especially since the ruts keep moving. And there are spots along this trail, some of them cover several hundred metres, that are squishy. It's a boggy area, so that makes sense. But when you're running, and you need the ground to be reasonably hard so you have something solid to push off from with your next step, when the ground is spongy it doubles the amount of work you have to do with each step. Energy sapping squishy ground. It's a nice course, but you just have to go into it knowing it's a trail run, which fortunately I did know thanks to my previous forays to the lake.
Glen and the camera. As many people know, Glen is my pit crew. And he's normally an excellent pit crew. He's ready with extra water bottles, chapstick, or anything else I might need when I see him along the way. Well he lost it today. It was 2 laps of the lake, so he saw me start, then go by once, then at the end. Well, that was the theory anyways. He did see me start, and he did see me on the first lap, though he was a little slow on the uptake, since when I was going past he was half-way across a field 'cause he thought I'd take a little longer than I did. Then at the finish line he totally missed me. He said it was because with his calculations I was going to finish at 2:15. Oh Glen, how wrong you were. He missed me by a good 10 minutes. In fact, I was just finishing off my second delightful orange slice when he came waltzing along to the finish line. I have no idea how he figured this 2:15 out, since every time I passed a km marker I saw that I was running solid 6 min km's. Like, seriously solid. I think I was off by a few seconds near the end, but only in the last couple km's. So there's no victorious picture of me crossing the finish line from this morning. But I think I may take this as a sign that he needs to start running his own half-marathons. He just doesn't know it yet.So that's one more adventure for me. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned for the next one!
