City to Bay

City to Bay
At some point in time this year one of our clients suggested that we might like to get involved with them in the corporate cup. The event consists of 8 runs each of 4.5km length over a period of 16 weeks. With the soccer season getting close to a close I thought it would be a good thing to do and so I signed up for it.

I then promptly managed to be away travelling for the first two of them but did get to the third. With a total of one training run under my belt, I wasn’t really all that sure as to what sort of a time I’d be running. I’d kind of rationalised that something around the 25 minute mark would be reasonable for a first effort and set off with the guys that I’d joined up with. I let them run off ahead of me after the first one and a half kilometres or so and was surprised when I finished with a time of 22 minutes and 2 seconds.

Not too long after that, someone suggested that we should do the City to Bay as well. Now that’s a 12km run. I had actually been considering running it anyway and at one point even thought that I would get Michael to come along. Then I realised just how close the event was (it was under 4 weeks at this stage) and decided that that would probably be silly. Not so silly however that I didn’t get talked into doing it anyway, just silly enough to let Mikey off the hook.

That left me facing the task alone. I did manage to get one more short training run in and one more of the 4.5km corporate cup runs (I even managed to improve my time!).

So on a Sunday morning where the temperature promised to hit close to the 30C mark, I made my way into town to join 30,000 or so ‘close friends’ for a quiet run to the sea.

The first thing that was noticeable was the number of people that were busy running around before the event started. Here I was ever so slightly worried about minor things like potential heart failure and there they were running. Running TO the event! Bloody lunatics I say.

The time came to take up position and I ran off with the crowd, watching some people disappear ahead of me, others disappear behind me, but at a pace that turned out to be pretty quick. I had decided that there were two targets for me. Under 75 minutes would have been acceptable. Under 65 would be the point at which I was truly secretly pleased with my efforts.

I had had a theory at the start of the even that all I would really need was some attractive woman running at about the same pace as me that I could follow to the end. The problem was that it just didn’t work like that. Either they were too quick or not quick enough and so I was left to simply run my own race and see what I could do.

At about the 3km mark there was a bunch of cheerleaders giving everyone a rev up to help propel them along the way. Call me wrong, but there was a minor temptation to simply stop and watch! At 3kms I had surprised myself with my pace as I was at about 15 minutes and 30 seconds. By the time that I had made it to 6kms, I wasn’t ticking along quite so quickly but was still on time to run sub 65 minutes. It was also further than I’d run in any of those very few training runs.

By the time that I managed to get to the 9km part, things were really starting to hurt. At that point I had run for longer than any run I’d undertaken in the last …I don’t know … 10 years or so? The time had slipped a bit further, but I was really starting to want to beat that 65 minute goal. It was around that time that a young girl slowly started to overtake me. She wasn’t zooming past, but inching past. She was the tipping point for me. I was able to say to myself, “No, she’s not going to beat me.” I stepped things up just enough to keep up with her and I have to thank her for that, because for the next 2 kms I paced myself against her, running a couple of metres away, just keeping pace. At least up until the last km that is, because it was around that point that I found that she was dropping off. I worked my way down Jetty Road, which for the record had never seemed so long, dodging around the thickening crowd and pushing through to the end. When I turned the last corner I stepped things up again, pushing hard and running at as close as I could manage to a sprint at that point.

As I hit the button on my stop watch, I was thrilled to see the digital read out frozen at 63 minutes and 41 seconds! I was indeed ecstatic. It turns out that my official time was slightly better than that at 63 minutes and 37 seconds. This translates to 4663rd position overall or 98th out of male 41 year olds. There were174 in the category so I didn’t quite crack the top half, but far from disgraced myself too.

After some recovery that predominantly consisted of very slow walking and some agonized moaning, I walked back up Jetty Road to catch the tram back home. I wsa happy to be there, but did have to wonder whether the air conditioning of the tram had really been designed to cope with the rather powerful smell of a packed tram full of fun runners?

I really felt sorry for the girl that squeezed on at stop 3 from departure, obviously dressed up for a day in town. Boy did she pick the wrong day to get on the tram. As a contributor to the BO of the occasion I could only wonder what it must have been like for her to step into a tram full of it!