Killing yourself to live (my City to Bay Fun Run experience)

I can now add the "City to Bay Fun Run" to the list of my lifetime accomplishments (right between "Hired 700 movies from Atlantic Video" and "Lived with Paul Force for a year without once suffering from food poisoning").

Waking up Sunday morning I was a little apprehensive. I hadn't had a lot of sleep the last few nights, and I'm not a morning person at the best of times. Nor had I trained much in the last fortnight. Once we got in to town though, I started to feel a little bit better. There was a great atmosphere waiting in Elder Park for the race to start, surrounded by 23,000 competitors. Amazingly, there were 4,000 more women than men (OK maybe it's not amazing, but I thought it was interesting at least).


The elite runners (those expecting to finish the race in less than 50 minutes) went first, we didn't cross the line until about 8.10am. The first km wasn't too hard, but I was surprised that some competitors had dropped back to walking by the end of King William Street.


I decided the night before that I was going to take my camera with me to capture the event. I figured it couldn't be that much heavier than my ipod, which I had to leave behind so that Dad would have someone to chat to during the race. I'm glad I brought it along, it allowed me to take photos like this one, which I took at the 2km mark.


Just kidding, that was just a km or so out from the end, as you can probably tell by the look on my face of exhaustion crossed with pure terror.

There were a heap of interesting things along the way. Probably every km or so there was a band, including one rock band that was made up of 8-9 year old kids. They were pretty good too.

About half way along I came up behind a large woman in a wheelchair. I was rather impressed with the speed she was travelling at, until I realised that she was in an electric wheelchair. So basically she was just going for a ride. The funny thing was, as I passed her I took a look back to see that she was sweating! From just pushing forward the little toggle on her wheelchair that makes it go . . .

The run itself was reasonably difficult, mainly I think because I pushed myself a bit harder than normal. In my training I'd been running at 10km hour, which would have meant a finish in about 72 minutes, but we ended up crossing the line in a little over 65. Once we turned the corner from Jetty Road and we could see the finish line I started sprinting - much harder than normal when you're surrounded by hundreds of other people. I may have pushed someone out of the way as I came through, it was hard to tell.

I read today that the winner ran it in a little over 34 minutes which is a pretty awesome achievement. By my calculations that works out to around 17 seconds per 100 metres, which means pretty close to a sprint the entire way. I kind of wish I could have seen the first two runners come in along the final km, in the end there was only two seconds separating them.

It probably sounds stupid, but it's actually a really good feeling having random strangers clapping for you and cheering as you run past. Normally I would make fun of people who do this (kind of like the woman on Seinfeld who once cheered on the competitors in the New York Marathon by screaming "You're all winners!"), but when you're actually there it makes much more sense.

I'm pretty keen to do the run again next year. I'll see how I go with my running until then, but I'd be happy if I could finish in under an hour next time.