Run Wild (2013)

Distance
Race Status

 My athletic interest has me running epic runs these days. I’ve run a couple of races, one for each of the last weekends:

First… a pretty little bedroom community just a gnat’s breath to the North of Edmonton, the City of St. Albert played host to the RunWild race series on May 5. I had found myself registered in the half-marathon, and had been actively maintaining my training for that race over the last few months.

Then summer happened. No, really. All in one day. It’s as if on Friday morning we were thinking about how great is was going to be when the snow finally disappeared and spring arrived. On Saturday we were in shorts, doing yard work. And on Sunday — race day — we were full-on in Summer, having skipped Spring altogether.

The consequence was multi-fold. The race course, which was meant to be a relatively flat run through the river-creek trail system that bisects the City, was flooded. Really flooded. So much flooded in fact that I was surprised to have seen a map of a creek on Google Maps when I loaded it up to find out the name of the lake we had run beside that morning. It was not a lake, obviously. And because of the flooding they had diverted the route up and into the neighbourhoods adding a multitude of more hills than I was expecting.

It was also hot… the hottest weather we’d run in for six months, in fact. It was even warmer than my December run through the streets of Las Vegas.

I ended up with a modest time of 2:08, a very nice finisher medal, and a goodly case of heat-stroke to boot.

April 23, 2013

My first half marathon of the season… year… well, since Vegas, anyhow, takes place in just a little less than two weeks. At least three of the fine folks from my running club are joining me on the RunWild course in St. Albert, Alberta on the first Sunday in May. A bunch of others are headed off to Vancouver. Long-story-short our months of scatter-shot training will be paying off in a mere thirteen days.

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