I have to say, there’s a huge draw for me in doing local races – a 9:30 race start means getting there at 8:30 and leaving the house at 8:10! So much better than the 4:00 am start last month! 🙂 And we were fortunate enough to score the closest wheelchair accessible parking spot to the race, making the day even easier!
Today we were joined by our friend Adria. Adria works at the YMCA and works out regularly, but had never pushed me in my chair, so it was a bit of a last minute adventure – but you have to keep it real somehow, right?
Trevor and I had decided ahead of time to just make this one more training run. We’re working on putting down the miles to be in shape for the Toronto Half Marathon October 22 (by which time we should have my NEW CHAIR!!!!!!) so we were aiming for a nice slow pace.
The Waterfront in Barrie is going to be beautiful … in about a month … but unfortunately we were still running between the fences and through the parking lots.
However, they’d done a pretty effective job of making all of the turns clear, I thought, and had strategically placed some volunteers around with signs to help make it clear wherever things got challenging. I always love good signage!
We ran out from Heritage park towards Centennial and around the Bay to the Southshore Centre. Then they took us down the very steepest part of the slope towards the Canoe and Kayak club docks, which was a fun adventure (the brakes on this stroller leave something to be desired when descending a 45 degree angle hill!) Then it was back towards Heritage Park where the 5K racers finished before those of us silly enough to sign up for the 10K continued on towards Johnson’s beach along the rail trail, turned around and back one more time to Heritage for the finishing shoot.
We set an easy pace of 7:16, and loped around the course. I’ve been working on learning about base training – in particular, how to tell from the sound of someone’s breath whether they are still training in that zone – so my job for this race actually involved a lot of saying, “slow it down” … and “remember we’re base training”.
We were able to put down a very reasonable 1:12:33, which for base training left me feeling pretty happy.
Now we’ve got the summer mostly race free (for some reason there aren’t many races over the summer months) so we’ll be working towards our fall races: the Toronto 5K on September 9 and the Toronto Half-Marathon on October 22.
We’re still looking for extra runners for both of these days – please be in touch if you’re available and interested! 🙂
Heather R. Morgan 