Perth City to Surf Half Marathon

Hello my good friends.

Aaahhhhhhh, what a beautiful day it is today! Today is one of those Perth blue skied days, its Tuesday morning, most people are at work, but I am not. But despite all this, the reason today is more beautiful than other days is because I don’t have to go for a run! Yep, no more running for me, no little voice in the back of your heading going ‘Hap you must go running now, if you don’t go now you have to go later, you have a 1/2 marathon coming up, no don’t sit down with your friends and relax, go for a run!‘. LEAVE ME ALONE ANNOYING LITTLE VOICE!

Yep Sunday signalled the beginning and end of my running career.  It was about 5 weeks ago that good friend and fitness fanatic Ngaire suggested we do the Perth City to Surf Half Marathon, which for those of you that don’t know involves 21km of running fun.

I have only done one other 1/2 marathon and that was over 5 years ago at Outward Bound, and I have always wanted to have another shot at doing one, so there was no better time than the present, since I have semi “settled down”.

The last 5 weeks I have been doing my best to train, but its usually pretty hard when your at the mines, doing 12 hour shifts doesn’t leave much time (or daylight) to go for a decent run, although I did my best and ended up getting pretty fit.  I also totally embraced the psychological form of preparation, (its just easier, and it doesn’t involve running). My goal was to get under 1hr30min, which was pretty ambitious, but I had a good feeling.

Anyway, race day came around, sickness and injuries had depleted our crew, Ngaire the ring leader guttingly for her had to pull out due to a virus.  But there were still myself, Mandy, Stu and Sam (the evening before when we were coming back from climbing and I suggested to Sam he take Ngaires race pack and do it, he couldn’t think of any good excuses why not, so he did it – that’s the spirit!) 

So where was I, oh yeah Race Day. Kick off, or what ever you call the start for a half marathon was at 7.15am.  By this time I had already done number 2’s 3 times. I must have been nervous, why? I don’t know. What makes you more nervous is using a public toilet early on a Sunday morning with no lock on the door and 37,000 City to Surf participants converging on central Perth!

Long story short, well actually its not that long.  I hated life for nearly an hour an a half, I crossed the line, continued to dry heave my guts up while concerned volunteers asked if I was OK “I”m OK……..I just need to find a place to die”.  Then over the loud speaker booms the commentators voice “and about to cross the line is the second placed female competitor with a time of 1 hour and 27 minutes”. My first thought was, ‘if I had had a had a sex change before the race I could of picked up the womans 2nd place prize’ and my second thought was ‘wooooohooooo I got under a 1hour 30minutes’ and then I continued trying to give oral birth to my insides.

As I was walking to the booth to collect my complimentary water I bumped into a couple of older competitors. He says to me in good natured banter “your the guy that past me on the last hill wearing jeans and dreadlocks” (I think he was just having a laugh that I didn’t really look like a runner). I had a bit of laugh, but it must be a little bit demoralising when you have the latest Nike running shoes, matching short shorts and singlet and spend your lunch breaks in on-line running chat rooms discussing your training program to have a dread-locked hippie run pass you in board-shorts and a t-shirt from his snowboard season in Canada a couple of years previous. Priceless. 

OK, so basically its taken me 800 words to tell you that I did a 1/2 marathon in the weekend.

Nuthing but love Hap

PS All the other competitors our little team totally dominated and reached all their goals aswell, high fives!

PPS Just got the official results back, I placed 56th with a time of 1:26:33.