I like to travel-run, which means hauling along a race kit to the US or even more internationally. Basically, we leave Canada to find a holiday and often that holiday involves me running a race.
Ready to run?
Sunday Runday, and just over a week after rolling through the finish line of three Florida Disney World races, I did a (socially distanced) ten klick run back with the crew through the icy streets of Edmonton.
Amazing. Crazy. Chaotic. Nostalgic. Insane.
What other words can one use to describe the first international mega race back after a multi-year break from the same.
On the first day of August I woke up shortly before six in the morning, laced up my sneakers, walked down towards the pond near where the swans were still dozing, and started to run.
San Fransisco was a whim.
I mean, who doesn’t have “run across the Golden Gate Bridge“ on their bucket list? Or, at the very least, the flexibility to add it when six weeks before a race there a cheap flight is discovered online and karma aligns for a weekend getaway in California?
Las Vegas was, believe it or not, a family vacation.
We connected with Jenn and family and planned a multi-week trip that started with a race and ended with a theme park. Vegas was not the first choice for a race, tho. Originally, we had been talking about a California adventure that included Disneyland and one of those great RunDisney races I'd done previously. But the RunDisney folks seemed to have dropped all plans to continue running through Anaheim.
Plan B was to fly to Vegas, run the Rock'n Roll down the strip, then drive over to California.
Alright, so this post is about two weeks late… but I have a million excuses for that, not the least of which is that (even though it was only two weeks ago) the New York City Marathon is not even the most recent race I’ve run.
But I ran it.
I finished it.
Barely more than a year after completing my epic Dopey four-race challenge in Disney World in Florida, I found myself once again staring down the start line of a RunDisney event in the wee pre-dawn hours a few hundred meters from yet another a famous theme park Disneyland, ready to run twenty-one-point one klicks.