Ottawa Race Weekend 2011

Race weekend 2011 was a different experience from last year!

On Saturday evening I ran the 10k with my daughter. We had a lot of fun, keeping a steady pace and enjoying the experience. A couple of people who saw us said they couldn't believe how relaxed the two of us looked, and asked if the other runners around us got annoyed. Not that I noticed, although it's possible that making a phone call while passing people might have gotten some rude looks. J went hard the last few hundred meters, and I actually had to work to keep up. My right Achilles was sore while running, especially for the 1st 5k, probably because the dog got his tie out behind my ankle and took off running a couple days before the race.

Saturday night I worked extra-hard to make sure I drank enough - water. I didn’t get into bed until near midnight, so 5:45 didn’t seem like enough sleep. My goal was to come in under 1:40, with hopes of breaking my best half time of 1:38:08. I went to get into the starting corral 15 mins before the race, but couldn’t find any entrances. The only entrance I saw was back around the 2:15 pace bunny. I hopped over the fence in the middle of my corral, and then realized there were lots of other people with the same problem. The corrals were jammed, and looking around it seemed like I should be farther forward, but I couldn’t move.

The temperature was ok (around 18C), but it was very humid. At the start it was clear they’d done a lousy job of placing people, there were a huge number of slower runners in front of me. For the first 3 km, I was constantly passing people. Even though I was only a few seconds per km slower than I wanted to be, I was working much harder than I should have been, my heart rate was over 180 (with my max at 190), hitting 185 at one point. I found this really frustrating, but at 3k decided I needed to relax, the crowds had probably only cost me around 20 seconds and I had a long way to go. Good thing, since I was passing people the entire way.

At the 9km mark I missed a water station, I was running past all the gatorade tables waiting for water, and then suddenly no more tables. This was a worry, but nothing to do. After that I stuck to gatorade. I hit 10km in just over 47 mins. One of my favorite race moments: Somewhere around 14k I heard someone I was passing say “Do you think there’s underwear under there?” I looked ahead and saw someone bouncing along in a very short skirt, and as far as I could tell the answer was “no”. Another runner commented that it was getting hard to run, and I decided it was best to keep passing.....

At 16km it started raining, lightly at first, then hard. This was ok, since I was finally getting into a decent groove & the rain cooled me off. The crowds were impressive in the last few km, it was raining hard but people were still cheering hard. My final chip time was 1:37:48, and I actually felt pretty good afterward.

It does seem like race weekend has gotten to the point where the organizers aren't able to deal well with the number of runners, but it is great having the city pay this much attention to running once a year.