For the past couple of months, Justine and I have been trying to be more dedicated to eating properly and exercising more. I have discovered (OK, it wasn't much of a discovery) that I am very goal oriented, and need some sort of end point in order to take training seriously. To that end, we had been training for the Fall Classic 10K race, which we ran this morning.
The start line for the Fall Classic - a cold, but sunny race day!
We had both been pretty good about our training, and were pretty well prepared for race day. It was sunny and cold - a rarity for this event which is usually known for rainy cold runs. It's the last event on the Vancouver race calendar, and so was our last real chance to get something in this year.
Justine all set to go before the start of the race.
A race day self portrait.
The race went quite well for both of us. I wasn't sure how I'd do, but ended up running an un-official 50:00. That was the time on my GPS running watch, from crossing the start line to crossing the finish at 10 km. My "official" race time was 51:20, which includes the delay from when they fire the gun, to the time it takes to actually get to the start. Justine managed a 1:02, which was a little longer than her one hour goal, but still really good.
You can look up the race details if you like. My bib # was 2087 and Justine's was 2069. There were 583 people in the 10K race. I ended up 20th in my age group, but it's hard to tell what that means as you can't easily look up the total number. I was also 97th of the men that raced. Better than I would have thought.
Justine racing to the finish line
Finishing strong!
All-in-all, it was a good first race, and I think I will keep at the training and see where it goes from here. It was good to have a goal, reach it and turn in a good time. Definitely the fastest time I've posted over that kind of distance in a long time.