Chariots of Fire

Click below for the music.  I've always loved that music.

And actually, if we'd wanted we could have taken our shoes off and run through the water and sand too.  We might not have been able to feel our feet by the time we were done, but that's just a minor problem.

Meredith and I were in White Rock today for a couple of other reasons.  Since it was also one of the days that we do a training run, we figured we'd change things up a bit and run along the promenade at White Rock beach.  We were lucky, the day that had started out sunny, then turned to rain and wet snow, had conveniently cleared up again by the end of the day.  It was lovely.  

We started out by having a laugh over the parking sign.  I suggested that we not pay for a ticket at all, since Feb 29th was not actually included on the sign. Then I thought that they might be able to get us with the 'Every Day' line.  Then down at the bottom where it says the hourly rate, since we were still in February, we just paid the $1.00 an hour and not the $3 an hour it goes to on March 1.

The view was wonderful.  The light was brighter than is suggested by the photos, but they were taken with Meredith's phone.  There weren't a lot of people walking, and we only saw three other runners.   After we got going a little bit, we looked at everyone else as seeming very overdressed, as we quickly shed our jackets and were down to a t-shirt.  It didn't take long for us to get our jackets back on once we were finished though, as the sun was down by then, and the temperature was dropping quickly.

This bear statue was called Grizzlee, and was donated to the city by a father in remembrance of his son, Lee.  That was the start and finish of our run.  We did a few stretches, here's me looking a little odd doing an illiotibial band stretch at the end.










Overall, the run training is going great.  We started with intervals of one minute running, and two minutes walking in the first week.  We are now in our seventh week, and have moved up to ten minutes running, one minute walking, repeated four times.  That was what we did on Monday night.  Monday is always the hardest run of the week, Wednesday is quite a bit easier, and Saturday's run in somewhere in between.  I was a little worried about this week, as we had moved up from doing 5 minute runs the week before, but it went amazingly well.  Maybe it was because I finally seem to have got rid of the cold that I got three weeks ago.  There were a couple of nights at least that I probably shouldn't have been running, but I did it anyway.  I felt wonderful after Monday's run, just so proud of myself, who I always considered as being a non-runner, to have come through that training session feeling so good.

Last night we went to a free assessment night.  A whole whack of physiotherapists assessed our flexibility, muscle strength, muscle tightness etc.  We came out of there with some good exercises to help us, and had our feet and movement assessed and bought ourselves new runners.  We both needed them.  A funny coincidence though, we were assessed separately, and not by the same people.  We each tried on multiple pairs, and when we met at the checkout, we were buying the exact same pair of runners, only a half size between them.  Six more weeks to go, to the Sun Run on April 15th!