Around the Bay results, 2011 (for LOST Swimmers and other friends of LOST Swimming!)
A bunch of us did the Around the Bay, 30k road race in Hamilton on the weekend. It is a spring classic and actually predates the modern marathon. It is the oldest road race in North America, as its tag line “Older than Boston” indicates, as it started in 1894, three years before the first Boston Marathon. Prior to ATB there was no such thing as a marathon… just long races. The first Olympic Marathon was in 1896, the first Boston Marathon in 1897 and the official 26.2 mile distance wasn’t even established as the official marathon distance until the 1924 Olympics!
Anyway, that’s what a whole lot of the LOST swimmers did on the weekend. I have included the results of a bunch of the LOST swimmers, other local running groups like Connor’s Runners and our no-name rag-tag collection of fast-boys… we’re a friendly group! There were some spectacular times as the results show, and a big “Congrats” to those that had a great day on just about perfect conditions… however, my race report below shows, mine wasn’t one of them!
ATB… so I was off sick on Thursday and Friday… first sick days I’ve used in 6 or 7 years… apparently some of my coworkers think I’m a pain in the butt because I have been known to reminded them that I haven’t had so much as even a little cold in 3 1/2 years… or at least I hadn’t… but over the course of the last 2 weeks I acquired one of the worst “man-colds” know to man… Thursday I slept for 12 hours… woke up, had breakfast, sat down in one of our comfy armchairs and fell asleep for another 3 hours… but my superior defense system kicked in by Friday and by Saturday I was in fine shape… doing so well in fact that I decided I was certainly well enough to do the 30 km “Around the Bay” race in Hamilton yesterday… turns out it was one of my lesser good decisions… my wife and I got separated at the start… actually she went and did an 8 km warm up (what the…?)… and I took off like a shot… felt like a champ… right up until the hills at the 20 km mark… then I started going backwards… looking at the results after, I was 11 minutes ahead of her at that point… a bit slow, but about where I thought I should be, all things considered… then the wheels fell off completely… she caught me with about 50 feet to go… grabbed my lifeless carcass by the elbow and literally dragged my sorry butt across the finish line… not one of the finishing photos I’m thinking of framing… me looking like I’m on death’s door and her all laughs and giggles… I thought the race was long… but I’ll tell you… the ride home was a lot longer.
Cheers,
Rob