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There are always a few things that goes through my mind Saturday night before I go to bed for a race, mainly why the hell am I getting up at 5am on a Sunday. With a 7 am start for the halfers downtown Vancouver, I would need to be on the road for 5:30.  I got into Vancouver about 6:30 and had to scramble a bit to find parking since they had some new road closures. Found parking about a half a km from start, then got to the start with my fellow racer with a few minutes til start.

We didn’t have the “prick” attitude that we probably should have to get us to the front.  We opened up the fence and got to 5 or so rows back from the 1:30 pace bunny.   I thought that would have been fine but it kinda proved to be too far back.

I started the race off a little pissed off,  I was pissed at those people that push to the front and start their race by walking or running at a 2 hour plus pace.  Right off the bat I was dodging people, walkers and joggers.  Took me til about 5 km to settle in and push away from the groups of people.  After getting spoiled in New Orleans with mile markers every mile, even on the full, it also took me til about 5km to figure out actually how fast I was going.  I was a little behind on what I was hoping for but figured I could still finish up with a solid race.

Going into the last 1km for both the full and half. These guys are all the full runners going in at about 4 hours.

Water, specials, and gels were littered all over the route which is awesome, but I would have obviously like to see more km or mile markers.  I guess I better get a fancy watch with gps.  I  was able to pull away and ran most of the race chasing after the people that were ahead of me.  At about 10km I ended up running with a few people that we switched going back and forward passing each other through out the race.  I felt like I was playing catch up the whole race instead of really settling in on my pace and relaxing, but the finish line came fast enough and crossed just above 1:24 chip  time.  Looking on the week before the race I should be happy with the result but wanted to be faster.  My next race will be the run for water in Abbotsford on the 29th, one week before the oliver half iron. I still haven’t decided on what distance, and thinking I am going to go after the half on the 29th, which could back fire on my on the 6th of June.

Overall I thought BMO was a pretty solid event and will always have it in my racing  schedule.  Lesson learned…get to the front so you have no excuses!  New route next year, so I’ll be looking forward to that for 2012.

Girl on the right, really has to go pee.