Nike Women’s Half-Marathon, October 16, 2011

At the race start in Union Square

So I’m pretty smiley in this pre-race photo – especially considering I’m crazy anxious about the 21.1k I’m about to run in the Nike Women’s Half-marathon.

And I wish I could say the race went off without a hitch, but lots went wrong — setbacks that would normally frazzle me during a race:

• Bag check took a long time – meaning I started the race very late (18 minutes into the race), meaning I had to work through the crowds more than if I’d started in my proper corral
• One of my shoelaces untied, which has never happened to me before in a race, the precious seconds I lost retying, eek!
• I accidentally paused my interval timer on my watch without realizing it, which completely threw off my intervals for walk breaks (and even more important, I use the walk interval as a reminder to hydrate so my hydratio was off as well)
• The music on my iPhone would stop playing occasionally, ack!
• I only know kilometres, and the pace bunny signs were in miles, so I just felt confused overall.

And yet so many things were great about this race that they outweigh these things, such as:

• Hello? Tiffany & Co. medals??? Sweet.

• Firemen in tuxes presenting you these Tiffany medals? Even sweeter.

• Running my own race, essentially taking it easy and comfortably is much less stressful than my usual race experience.
• I finished in 2 hours and 8 minutes — which is much longer than my spring half-marathons, but not too shabby considering I didn’t really trained for the race. I can just decide to run a half now it seems and have a level of fitness that’ll get me through it. Wowzers.
• The incredible energy of being surrounded by 20,000+ fearless women running the race, the largest women’s race in the world

For more on how my race went, check out my post on thekit.ca!

2 Comments October 24, 2011

Find yourself some new workout music

Need new tunes to work out to? If you’re a runner, cyclist or walker, jog.fm helps you find just the right music for your pace. “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine is best for a 6:17/km pace, for example.

(Interestingly, one of my Nike+ Powersongs, “Stronger” by Kanye West is for a 6:58/km pace and I’m (ahem) way faster than that.)

(The Sennheiser OMX70 earphones above were my fave running earphones, btw, until my bad cat–the one who eats just about anything (ie. not the one that insists on organic catnip)–chewed them up).

2 Comments April 14, 2011

Ideal pace

I  hit a wall when running my very first half-marathon in Ottawa, and it’s definitely not something I ever wanted to experience again…and then unlucky me I did, when running the Around the Bay 30k race about a year later. I felt like I was moving my legs (although just barely), and yet that darn Copps Coliseum didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I was convinced someone was playing a cruel joke on me.

Now a Harvard student has come up with a formula that uses your VO2max to calculate a reasonable running pace for a marathon without hitting a wall. Interested?  Get out your calculator and click here to get the details. I’d break it down for you, but it’s waaay beyond my arithmetic skillz.

P.S. Is it wrong that I’m thankful I can wear Nike shoes for running (as I’m a neutral runner, ie. I don’t overpronate or underpronate) because I love how flashy and stylish their running shoes are? Well, I guess we did just establish that I’m a fashion snob. But c’mon, check out the acid yellow detailing and bright crimson sole of the LunarEclipse+? Loves it. In fact, I’d be tempted just to ignore any pronation issues just to look mighty fine while running!

Kidding (kinda sorta). I’m not that shallow. Really.

3 Comments October 26, 2010