It was awesome to get out racing again! I haven't done a serious race since the TC10K back in April, although the Thetis Lake Relay wasn't very serious as you can see in the photo... I joined up with Simon, Nate, and Mike to make up the PIH Prancing Bambies relay team. It was a fun day: good weather and very muddy trails, and lots of great headgear. The highlight for me was Simon running the relay with the impressive horns on his head, and seeing everyone's reactions. It was also great to be on a very evenly balanced team! All four of us finished the ~4.3K loop within 2 minutes of each other, and ended up finishing in a time of 1:14:35. This was 6th in the Senior Men's division, and 11th overall. Pretty impressive considering we were all out there just to have fun...
I did the first lap in a time of 18:08. It wasn't pretty, as usual went out to hard and died near the end on those hills. Next up was Nate who came in right around the 20 minute mark. Third was Simon who flew up the hills (I think he was part goat) and came prancing in at 18:02, and the Mike cleaned up the last lap in 18:20.
Anyway, since it's been months since my last post you can probably guess that I haven't been running much, or at least not running anything worth writing about. The knee is slowly improving, I hope. I've been seeing Scott Simpson (physio) for the last few months and I've certainly improved quite a bit in that time. But the knee still isn't strong enough to let me train properly on it. So to keep me busy I've started going to the CrossFit Zone gym down town. CrossFit is an amazing full body workout which combines a lot of basic exercises (pullups, pushups, situps, burpees, squats, etc) with some olympic weight lifting (deadlifts, cleans, jerks, etc) and some short running intervals. It takes boring gym workouts and makes them fun, competitive, and often time-based and always leaves you feeling like you really got a good workout. It is free to try as well.
