Ran by effort since milemarkers weren't there. Kept a solid effort the whole time. I wasn't a 100% on the hills since my training has been pretty flat lately because Vancouver is flat. Did well on the downhills and flats, but got passed by a few guys and girls on the uphills. Strong finish. Last 1/2 mile was downhill and then one lap on the highschool track. I managed to pass two girls before entering the stadium and ran pretty fast on the track which demoralized them I think, so they couldn't catch up :) This got me 5th place!

If it was my goal to run this as fast as I could I would have trained more on hills. But, my main focus is the marathon in 3 weeks, so I feel I did pretty well.

Drank some water, ate a banana, stretched, got in my warm clothes.


Not enough hill training.


Destination race and all that comes with it: cute town, beautiful countryside and ocean-view roads, and very poor organization. The web site claimed that there'd be a technical t-shirt, but it's a plain cotton one, oversized, of course. The course was a loop and they sent the first portion of the runners the wrong way around it. They corrected their mistake at some point, so it was quite surprising to see a bunch of slower folks coming in the opposite direction about 8 miles into it. As a result of that screw up we had no mile markers until mile 12. I don't have a GPS, so I had no idea what pace I was running. At the end they didn't have finisher's medals in time for the first finishers. There was not much going on at the finish line, so I had some water and bananas and left (it was really cold too). Later, I saw some runners in a sandwich place with their half marathon medals. Nice medal too, bummer that I didn't get one!
I wouldn't do the full marathon - too hilly and lonesome. Probably won't come back for the half either just because of the poor organization.