Rattle Me Bones run, by the 50 minute pacer

Sunday dawned cool and rainy, but fortunately by race time, the rain had pretty well stopped. After gorging myself on Tim Hortons coffee and timbits (carbo loading a half hour before the race counts, doesn't it?) , and donning my cute little black skeleton outfit, complete with plastic bones sticking out of my cap, I was off, with several hundred others. I did the first k in 4:23, obviously too fast for a 50 minute 10k, so gradually slowed the pace. I settled into a 5:00 or so, for the next few k, but then noticed that according to the time for each marked k, I was about a minute and a half too fast. My Garmin said the pace was good, however, so I stuck with that, believing the k markers to be misplaced.

I crossed the finish line in 49:52, a bit slower than planned, but I had deliberately slowed in the last k, as I was still a bit too fast. My colleague who did the 45 minute pace was a full minute over target, as the k markers got him confused as well, and he had only a stopwatch to guide him. Not sure how many in my pace group stuck with me, as I might have discouraged some at first. A few did find me afterwards and thanked me.

I then got on my scary green monster mask in addition to the rest of the outfit, and led the 50 or so little kids in some gentle aerobics to warm up, blasted the airhorn, and off we went on the 1k "funnybone" run. This time we did have marshals in place to make sure the kids turned around. All good fun, and the race raised some $55,000 for the Ottawa Hospital. At least a dozen of the Hash House Harrier gang showed up to volunteer, and that was great. The food is prepared by one of our Hashers, who is a professional chef, and it was truly delicious chili, (so good on a cool wet day), fruit, bagels, cookies and so on.

Now some serious training for the 11k Jim Howe cross-country race next Sunday...