Monday, May 4, 2009

Sporting Life 10k race report


Sunday Morning got up early ... AGAIN! and headed into the downtown core in Toronto to run the SportingLife 10k. This is the second time I have run this race and to be honest I had not originally planned on running this race with Mississauga coming up next weekend. Last year I found all the down hills really pounded my quads and left them a bit tired when I ran the Missy HM the next week. However Kim got us free team entries through her work so how could I pass that up. Once again FREE being one of my favorite words.

TTC ride was a pain with the subway not running yet. It appeared that there were no extra buses on Bloor but some extras on Younge. You would think that with an event with a start and finish line 10k apart and therefore a good number of the 12,ooo people running this race forced to use transit or cab it that the city might think about starting subway service early. Oh yeah its Toronto what was I thinking ... but I digress.

Kim and I got start line in lots of time, checked the bag, hit the washroom and did a warm up and was still in the corral with 5 minutes to spare. Great morning for a run, sunny, cool but not cold maybe around 8-10 degrees and no wind.

Race started right on time and with the new corral system this year was running a good pace right from the starting line. From there it was all downhill ..... literally.

The course for the first 6.5k was the same as last year, mostly downhill with a couple of uphills mixed in just for fun. This year the last part of the course was changed and in my opinion for the better. Instead of going west then down to Lakeshore and running under the Gardner the course went east on Richmond down Peter and across Front finishing at Fort York. This was so much better and a great deal more pleasant then being trapped under the Gardner so a big thumbs up to the change.

Finishing area was a bit of a cluster F......K. I had to wait in line for almost 15 minutes at the bag check. Once you got your bag to get to the food and post race area you had to go into Fort York which is a real bottleneck. I don’t want to be to hard on the race however as it was the first time with the new finishing line / area. I expect they will work out these kinks for next years race.

Overall had a decent race, ran a little bit slower then I wanted (shouldn’t have done a track workout on Friday night) but had a good time. Finished in 46:14. Kim ran a PB of 1:03:57 which was 2o minutes faster then her Sportinglife race last year... way to go Kim!!

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