Pacific Spirt Run 2007

You know what I think is a good idea when your foot is still sore from last week's half marathon? Pop an ibuoprofen and an acetaminophen and run 10K through a tree root-infested, rock-laden forest path. You know it sounds like a good idea.

This marked Dani's first ever race where it wasn't raining. Of course, the majority of it was in the forest, so you didn't really see the sun until the end, when you were already overheated. But then it clouded over right away so that we could freeze post-race. Good times.

I finished the race in 58 minutes, 47.8 seconds (pace = 5:53 minutes per km)* - 489th out of 924 runners (113th of the 283 females in my age category (20-39 years)).

As I mentioned before, I was on the Brain Research Centre team. The team was put together by a woman in, not surprizingly, the Brain Research Centre, and people just invited others until we had a team of 10 (the minimum needed to make up a team for this race). I only knew one person on the team, a member of my former "sort of" lab**. We had two strange coincidences on this team... first of all, my friend who had invited me to join the team just got a new summer student working for her... and it turned out that the summer student was on our team, having been invited to join by her sister, who is in the BRC. And then at the post-race brunch, I was chatting with another guy on the team and it turns out that his wife is a woman who works at the same centre as me, with an office across the hall from mine. Small. Freaking. World.

I would also like to say that I really liked my bib number, which was 742. Seven is cool, 'cuz I was born in '77 and everyone knows that the meaning of life is 42. I think the only bib number cooler than mine was this one:

You can't read it from here, but he had written on it: "I run like the devil." Too clever!


*For comparative purposes, my pace on the half marathon was 6:50 mins per km and I came in 410th out of 626 women in my age category (30-34 years).

**I call it my "sort of" lab because although I didn't technically work in that lab, we collaborated with them and did a lot of our lab work in their lab space. A super fun lab... I still go to all their parties.