Sporting Life 10K Race Report (+Winner)

First and foremost, I am ecstatic to announce that Nolan's Dream Chasers collectively raised over $12,000 for Camp Oochigeas this year.



It was a pleasure to fundraise with the team again and I am so grateful for everyone's support. Many of us got together for dinner on Saturday evening and it was wonderful to catch up with everyone and see how well little Nolan is doing this year. He's such a champ!

Nolan got to finish the race once again this year, this time with his big brother Jacob who completed his very first 10K at 9 years old!

Thank you so much to everyone who donated to enter my fundraising giveaway! I entered everyone's name in an Excel spreadsheet once for every dollar donated, scrambled the names, then asked Nolan to choose a number, which is how I randomly selected the winner:

Congratulatons Aron at Runner's Rambles

There will be a box of goodies coming your way!


***

Yesterday was my third consecutive year running Sporting Life 10K, but my first time not racing. Dave and I decided to run together once again and since we both have a marathon coming up, we knew we could pull the reigns on one another as needed.

We arrived just moments before the race was starting (oops!) to find nearly 15,000 runners crowded in the corrals on Yonge Street. We settled into the yellow corral (wave 2) although we had been assigned red (wave 1) since we had arrived so late. There were 5 waved starts this year for the first time, and this helped immensely with course congestion. We found there was a lot more room to move around this year, particularly at the finish. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

It was a humid morning and the forecast was calling for rain and possible thunderstorms. We brought along our mylar blankets from the Montréal Half Marathon to stay dry-ish before the race, but we didn't end up needing them; the only logical thing to do was tie them around our necks like superhero capes! Humidity and thermal blankets... hmmm, maybe not such a bright idea. We enjoyed them for a while (and got lots of "Superman! "Superwoman!" comments, and also ended up chatting with someone from Montréal who was at the race) but we had to ditch them at about 3K. We were sweating enough as it was and did not need the extra layer... not to mention that they aren't very aerodynamic. :)

At 8:05AM, we were off. The plan was to "just run" and not worry too much about pace, enjoying the sights and sounds of this massive race instead of barrelling down the street with a specific goal in mind. It was refreshing! We found that we had seeded ourselves appropriately and found a comfortable pace within the crowd quite easily, without too much weaving.

I remembered that last year my Garmin was way off due to the highrise buildings all over the place, so this year I decided to turn off AutoLap and keep track of my splits with each kilometre marker. This is something I've never done before in a race, and I only missed one. Not bad.

The kilometres were ticking by comfortably and before I knew it, we were at the half way point.

5:11, 5:01, 5:05*, 5:05*, 5:11.

Missed the 3K marker - kilometres 3 and 4 combined were 10:10.
We were sweating buckets in the humidity, but felt good and chatted away the entire time, which is how I know I wasn't pushing too hard. This is right around my half marathon pace, and I was just fine with that.

With 2K to go, we decided to pick it up a little bit and before long, we were running by the 9K flags. Dave looked at me and said, 'You wanna go for it?' I thought he'd never ask! I turned it on and started weaving around people all over the place, Dave trailing just behind. On the home stretch I cranked it up as much as I could. Is there any better feeling than sprinting through the finish line?

5:09, 5:12, 5:12, 5:01, 4:23

Final chip time: 50:31

Not a PR (in fact, it's a PW for SL10K), but another positive race experience and another medal for the collection!



ETA: race pics