So my big and most exciting trip this year was traveling to Vancouver to run in the Lululemon SeaWheeze Half Marathon. Registration was an experience all in itself, as it sells out fairly quickly. Me, Brian and our friends Aixa, Allen, Herb, and Cheri were lucky enough to all get into the race!
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| Vancouver from our hotel room |
Fast forward to August 2015 and we were off to Vancouver! I've never been there before and I had such a fun time exploring the city and going to Whistler for a day trip. I would highly recommend visiting these two cities to anyone who has ever thought about going. There is so much to do and see. I definitely plan to go back and do more exploring there. Apparently they were having a heatwave with their temps of 80 degrees. We laughed at all the locals and said that we would take their heatwave any day!
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| Exploring Whistler |
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| Zip lining Whistler! |
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| After about 2 hours of waiting we finally made it into the convention center - to wait some more! |
madness of the Lululemon expo. Ironman expo lines have nothing on this. I guess with 10,000 runners the lines are going to be longer, and the girls there definitely had a plan to make sure they got the gear they wanted. If I do this race again, I most likely will be skipping this part of the experience. Not that I'm not happy with the gear I did pick up, but there was a lot of standing the day before the race and we had to miss the yoga that was being held because we were hungry and tired and didn't care about yoga at that time.
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| Ready to run! |
Race morning came and, just in time, so did a cool front. We woke up to cloudy skies and breezy weather. We grabbed a taxi for a quick ride down to the race start and after checking in our gear we found our place in the corrals and before you knew it "Oh Canada" was playing and then we were off!
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| All the happy finishers! |
I quickly fell back from Brian and Aixa and settled into my own rhythm. Running through the downtown area was neat and there were tons of spectators lining the roads cheering us on. The crowd support was awesome all along the run course. There never seemed to be an empty spot along the road as far as I can remember. Pretty soon I was running through Stanley Park and along the sea wall and I was blown away by the gorgeous views. It was so pretty and I was so happy to be running there it made it easy to ignore the fact that I was running 13.1 miles. When I hit the 10 mile mark and started to make some calculations in my head I realized that I was on pace to go sub 2 hours. I made sure to keep my pace steady and hunkered down to ignore the pain and go for it. I ended up crossing the finish line in 1:54 and change - a 4 minute PR!!! This was not something I was expecting and it made this trip even more unbelievable for me.
Afterwards we grabbed some food and went back to the hotel to clean up and relax before heading out to the Sunset Yoga Festival and Concert in Stanley Park. We got there and Aixa and I finally got to do some of the group yoga. That was a lot of fun doing yoga in the park with 1,000's of other people. Then the music started and we just relaxed and hung out listening to the music and enjoying the wonderful weather. The clouds from early had cleared up and the sun was out and it was a beautiful day.
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This is definitely a great racecation and one that I would love to do again!
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