The Race

6:25am this morning, my alarm goes off and as always I was already awake. Well how could I still be sleeping on such an important day. The day of The Race, Victoria's annual Times Colonist 10k. It's 7am and I am leaving my house to pick up Flo. Shortly after, there we are: downtown among all the other thousands of runners. Most of them are already warming up and running around the parliament building. So we decided to warm up as well and ran about 200m. That's enough, there were another 10k to go, so why run lots now. Shortly before 8am, we went to the starting point, where runners were divided according to their estimated time. Meaning Flo in the front and I am in the back, but that's okay. I put on the running music Russ gave me and was pumped. May the race begin!

There were so many people, you can't imagine, and each and every single one was in a great mood and highly motivated to run, jog or walk. There were even parents running with their kids in a stroller, amazing (and some of them were faster than me...).

The race started of behind the parliament building, went though the Beacon Hill park and then along the ocean, which is an awesome scenery for a race (see map). It was a little depressing to see the first people passing the 6km sign when I didn't even finish the first 2km, but oh well I knew I wouldn't win the race. And it didn't matter how fast you were, there were people standing at the side of the road cheering for everybody. The whole atmosphere makes you run and keeps you going without even thinking about how long you still have to go and all of a sudden you reach the point where somebody screams, yeah only 1k left. By now I was actually quite tired, but there was only one 1k left and I could almost see the finishing line. And there it was, the last turn and I am trying to sprint the last meters. DONE. I feel great, but, boy, I am tired and I need some water, water, water. Besides water they also provided all runner with cookies, fruits and yogurt drinks. I quickly graped some cookies and 2 drinks and went to find Flo, who was supposed to wait for me at the parliament building. I didn't find him there, instead he was trying to take a picture of me running, but hehe I guess I was faster than he thought. And there we are the happy runners.

After a little sunbath in front of parliament building, we went home, where I took a nap outside on the tramp. I was way more tired than I actually thought :-)

Oh and yes, you can call me Speedy Gonzales from now on, because I managed to run the 10k in 59:18min (see results), which for somebody who only started running in February (and that not even on a regular basis) is awesome.

As for me I will run next year again. Are you joining?