The Running Diva

Sunday, March 24, 2008

So it looks like there will be an island team heading over to race the Vancouver Sun Run with Paul as the team coach. We will all be going over in a van with Cliffy driving and will stay at the Hyatt which is right at the race start. It’s pretty amazing that 50,000 people run this race so being close to the start is a good idea.

Juice and I drove drove out to Lake Matheson Park this morning and met Kev, Slaw, Pork Chop, Syl and Merm for an out and back run along the Galloping Goose Trail. I’ve been wanting to coordinate a Sunday long run out this way for a couple of years now so I was excited.

This section of the Goose is just beautiful and I wasn’t disappointed one bit. The run started at Lake Matheson close to the 32km marker and we headed north towards Sooke.

Syl with his morning fix. Check out those gams!!

The pace was pretty relaxed at the beginning with everyone yakking about you name it…mostly razzing Slaw about his article on Flotrack with Cheryl and the fact that she mentioned in her interview that she finds her cross-training helps her running…Slaw is a big Lydiard fan (only running will improve your running) so it must have killed him to post that interview! Ha! We had a lot of fun with that and he took it all in good stride (no pun intended). As we continued along, the group split in two with me, Kev, Merm and Slaw leading the way…and that’s when Merm starting singing…Johnny Cash songs, very loudly. It had me laughing so hard, I couldn’t run straight. The more I laughed, the louder he sang… “Burn, burn, burn…the ring of fire..” It was unreal. When we hit 52:30 minutes of the “out”, we did an about-face and started the “back”. PC joined us as we caught up to him. Then things got serious and quiet. The pace quickened just a smidgen as we wanted to run a negative-split. Kev and I looked at a couple of our kms and figured we had moved into a 4:00/km pace. With 6km to go, Merm slowly pulled away and within minutes completely disappeared as he picked it up all the way back to the p-lot. Kev and I held our pace, happy not to go any quicker. The last couple of kms were tiring but we were anticipating it so we just buckled down and focused on getting back. We did run a negative split by about 5 minutes which just meant we had to run another 5 minutes to make our 1:45 target for the day. I was happy I felt so strong today on a longer run.

Brunch was chez Juice and Mar. Waffles, blueberry pancakes, bacon, sausage, croissants and fruit smoothies and 6 hungry runners…the food consumed at the table today was staggering! Ha! Pork Chop’s lovely better-half watched the feasting with amazement, I’m sure! Kev brought his espresso machine so we even had special coffees made! Merm provided a lot of the entertainment…he’s insane! 

After everyone left Juice and I watched Lost, cuddled under a blanket while the weather outside turned nasty. Sylvan came over for Easter dinner. I made him a veggie drink and he managed to drink the whole thing despite its strange colour!