City2Surf

This is just a quick post to mention my trip to Sydney on the weekend to do the City2Surf fun run. Simon and I ran it together (he took it really easy and ran at my pace). We started with the "back of the pack" group (last to start), as we left it late to sign up, so we had lots of people to get around. It was over two minutes from the starter's horn to when we crossed the start line and a bit longer still before we had room to start running. Once we started running, we ran all the way.

This is not so much of an achievement for Simon, who's done three 32km runs in preparation for his first marathon (which is less than two weeks away now), but yesterday's 14km is my longest run to date. My previous longest run was 13.5km, but that was totally flat. The City2Surf is not flat. It has many hills, including the infamous "heartbreak hill", which was long and tough, but not heart breaking.

I already mentioned that Simon was taking it easy, but I wasn't pushing it either, at least not until the last 2km anyway. The thing that was most fun about it was that, because there were so many people and so many of them were walking, there were lots of people to dodge around and overtake. For someone like me who is always the one being overtaken (I am the slowest runner at triathlon training) it was pretty exciting. With all the weaving we did, we probably ran quite a bit further than 14km!

In the end, our time was about 1hr 31min, though this was from when we started running, so our official time (to be released tomorrow in the SMH I believe) will be a few minutes longer. Still, it's under 100 minutes, which I believe would qualify us for the second start group next year should we wish to do it again.