My city2surf time is…..

photo credit: Brian Giesen

Saturday evening, the day before the city2surf I was nervous to say the least. It is was my first City2Surf race and obviously I wanted to run it in a good time.

My preperation has been moderate, a few months before I was running a lot but the past few weeks have not been as much as I liked it to be. Nevertheless, I knew I could finish it but the competitive person in me does want to do it in a time that you can mention outloud.

The Race

What an event, truly everyone should do something like this once in their lifetime. The enthousiasm, the kindness and the costumes are just amazing. My brother-in-law was running in a banana suit, which got him a lot of comments (he is 6,2) along the run and was given the creative name “banana man”.

While running I saw; Smurfs, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Guys pretending to be women, Gorillas, Vison Man, Duff Man just to name a few. Such a crowd running for various charities (we raised thousands for the Touched By Oliva foundation) which was great to see.

I started with a group of friends who all were experienced runners so I had to get my game face on. Needless to say, I lost them (read chasing them) within 10 minutes of the starting point. So I could only run my own race and find my pace and get to the finish line.

Heartbreak Hill was such a long stretch, I will never take the car ride for granted! I knew that after Heartbreak Hill things would calm down a bit and that on the 12km mark the course is only downhill. Once I passed that point it was pretty much power up and run down the hill like there is no tomorrow.

The longest section was the last kilometer. I knew that you had to the boulevard first and then you turn down onto the finish end but wow, that took forever!

I sprinted, in my head very fast, to the finish line and got through alright. I forgot to look at the time so I had to wait until the Tuesday newspaper would come out to see my exact time.

The rest of the day was relaxing and soaking all the glory of finishing the race in. On monday Sarah and I would also go on a cruise, just the perfect way to extend that relaxing feeling.

Tuesday morning, another great start of the day as during sunrise it was actually the perfect moment to ask Sarah to marry me. She said yes . We celebrated by getting up to fit in the bootcamp which we the previous day signed up for. A perfect way to start the day!

Anyway, more on how we try to keep fit on a cruise in a different blogpost but you probably want to know what my time was….

My first City2Surf time was: 1:20.20 I am very happy with that time and it gives me a great benchmark for next year.
Some of my other friends who you may have seen fly by on the website:
Sarah: 1:16.58
Nick: 1:17.51 (in a banana suit)
Alfons: 1:18.00

Anyway, there are probably 80,000 stories out there of each person who ran the race and I would love the read them either in the comments or you can submit your own story to MyRun.com.au.

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Stay running,

Ralph