Beat The Bridge

I've been doing a good amount of running on the treadmill at the gym. I mean, not long distances, more like 3-4 miles. But, I wanted to do an outdoor organized run, just for fun. David suggested "Beat the Bridge." The start and finish take place at Husky Stadium, so it's right by our house. It's an 8K run, which would be longer than any run I've done so far (if you don't count the Vancouver half marathon that I didn't complete).

My friend, Andrea, whom I ran the St. Paddy's Day Dash with this year, signed up to run this race with me. Woohoo! And, so we set out at 8:15am today, IN THE RAIN, and yup, we beat the bridge! The bridge is about 2 miles from the start, and we had about 30 minutes to get there. I was pretty confident about it, but I've had a cold for the past week, and I haven't been exercising because of Tyler's injury. I guess I've been lifting weights...about 30 pounds of it, carrying that kid and his cast around. Plus, the rain. Oh, the fricken rain. And, rain it did, the whole time we walked to the start, the whole time we ran the race, and the whole time we walked back to our house.

Andrea and I ran pretty hard to start off. We ended up starting in Wave 1, but it was a little later than scheduled, and we had ants in our pants, and needed to go! Since we were running with more serious runners to start, I think that made us go at a little faster pace. With my cold, I was having some difficulty breathing, so I had to take a break and walk for a few minutes, somewhere around mile 1.5. Nonetheless, we made it over the University Bridge before they lifted it up. Andrea was ahead of me when she crossed the bridge, and waited for me to catch up. Then, we walked for a short while, and started back up. She ran the rest of the way, and I took little breaks to catch my breath as needed. In the end, she crossed the finish about 30 seconds or so ahead of me. I'm so proud of her for running so well today. And, I'm proud of myself for getting out there and finishing.

Here are my results:

Time - 53:48

Pace - 10:50

And, I believe I placed 3533. BUT, in my division of age 30-34, I was 289/378, and for my sex, I was 1729/2274. So, what I'm saying is, I did just about what I expected.

The happy runners

After the run, David rushed Vincent to a birthday party at the gymnastics academy while Tyler and I stayed back and chilled.

After the party, David and Vincent picked us up, and we drove out to Sultan to spend the afternoon/evening with the Hutyra/Nowewijski/Reeder clan for a bbq.

Whew! What a day!!