Blog Archives: October, 2008
Autumn in Waterloo
A solitary maple leaf Early autumn is my favourite season in Waterloo — I love the transition from summer, the fresh air, turning leaves. (Although, now we’re into mid-autumn, with rain and more rain, and the leaves are almost all gone. This is less good.) 
Silver Lake Given that this may be my last autumn in Waterloo for a while, I went out for an autumn photoshoot in Waterloo Park to capture the late afternoon look of the park. Click here for the full gallery.
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Half Marathon
Race number On Sunday, September 28, I ran my first half marathon at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon.
My friend Dan and I had been training since April. Although there are lots of detailed training guides available on the web, our plan was pretty straightforward: run three days a week, with one long run per week, and increase the distance in the long run at a rate of about 1 km per week. 
Training summary Once we got past 10 or 11 km, each long run was a new long distance record for me — I had never run a race longer than 10 km before and had probably never run more than about the same amount in practice. By mid-August, we were up to an 18 km long run and I did a 21 km long run three weeks before the race. The 21 km training run was pretty tough and I was sore for a few days after. My time was 2:11:11, a bit longer than I had hoped. I decided that my goal for the half marathon was to finish in 2 hours.
The starting line on Bay Street The race was at 7:30am Sunday morning in Toronto. We decided to wake up early and drive in to Toronto. I knew that there would be a lot of people at the race but I was still surprised by the turnout — nearly 10,000 runners, according to the results. All lined up along Bay Street beside City Hall. We queued up about half way back, and it took us about 7 minutes to get to the starting line after the start of the race.
The course took us down Bay Street, across Wellington, down to the Lakeshore, and out the Lakeshore past Ontario Place to in front of High Park, then back along the Lakeshore and up Bay Street to the finish. At about the 7 km mark I saw the lead runners coming back in the opposite direction: all of the runners along the way were cheering for them as they passed, which was awesome.
Finish line photo I still felt pretty good near the end of the race. Since I had on my GPS watch, I was able to keep a close eye on my pace and tried to keep it between 11 and 11.5 km per hour. At about 19 km, we had a bit of an incline as we took some on ramps around the Gardiner and that was tiring, but I was pretty energetic in the home stretch up Bay Street and managed to up it to around 14 km/hr for the last 150 metres. I crossed the finish line 1:57:17 after I started, almost 3 minutes under my target time, and with an average speed of 10.7 km/hr. (Parenthetical comment #1: How could I end up with an average speed of 10.7km/hr while running at 11-11.5 km/hr according to my GPS watch? The GPS signal got screwed up quite a bit while we were among the tall buildings in the core, so the watch records me having run 21.6 km, not 21.1 km.) (Parenthetical comment #2: The time in the photo, 2:04:25, is from the time the gun went off, 7 minutes before I crossed the starting line.) The race results place me 2320 out of the 6350 participants in the half marathon.
Laura, Dan, and I after the race I made my way through the finish area, getting my finisher’s medal and picking up some drinks and food. The three steps behind City Hall that we had to walk down in the finish area were killer! I watched Laura finish the race and then three of us met up for a celebratory photo. Then it was back to Waterloo for some more stretching and a nice warm shower. All in all, it was a lot of fun. My friend Cecilia was right: “The training is the hard part. The race is the celebration.” I intend to do it again.
