Around the Bay (weeks 9 & 10)

The last couple weeks have been nothing special. I was fighting a bug (thankfully feeling better now) and so I cut down a lot of my runs in order to get my energy back, and to save my legs and my health for Around the Bay on Sunday, so this post will be about Around the Bay

Around the Bay


The expo was awesome first of all, lots of elite athletes walking around. Seriously, the amount of Boston jackets there was inspiring, and intimidating. The race shirt was awesome ("Older than Boston!") and I bought a jacket, as well as a New Balance shirt that said "Excellence is measured one bay at a time" (which I totally wore on Monday- not nearly enough people commented on it for my liking, lol), and a technical t-shirt that says "I know I run like a girl- try to keep up" (love it right? I've come across the saying before- it inspired this blog). Afterwards my dad and I walked through Hessville in Hamilton and found this sketchy little Mexican dive bar that had the world's best burritos (including a tofu-vegetarian one!) and some fries- carbed up for the race!
The weather on Sunday was beautiful- cool and overcast, but warmed up as the day went on. No rain, a little bit of sun, but luckily the heat and the sun didn't hit until after we were done running. Dad and I had an awesome run- we finished in 3:50, which we were extremely happy with because as a training run we were going pretty slow and we expected to finish at 4:00 at the earliest. The first 10k consisted of us getting into our groove, and the second 10k flew by completely. Before we knew it we were at 20k and about to hit the hills. They were rolling hills through the suburbs of Burlington/Hamilton, and the big hill at 26k didn't even phase us too too much, because we thought that we weren't going to hit the big hill until 27/28k. The entire time we were running up the hill we thought we were going to hit a bigger one next- so mentally this one didn't seem so detrimental (but it was one hell of a hill- long and steep!)
The finish line was inside Copps Coliseum which is neat- first finish line I had experienced like that. Video footage of the finished line was being shown across the jumbotron over centre ice and my dad and I held hands and crossed the finish line together.

It was definitely the best training run by far (after all we did get a medal!) but we both felt good and strong and it was a nice change of pace from our usual tours of ajax. Though we lucked out extremely when it came to the weather, this run is definitely going on our list of races to run again.
As my dad and I were discussing- either we run in crappy weather at home, or we run in crappy weather in Hamilton and get a medal!!

Until next week!

2 months until the Marathon!