Olympic Dream fun run

This morning Andrew, Laura, Michael and I completed the 5 km Olympic Dream fun run. It was the kids' first fun run, which made it pretty special. Laura and Michael's parents came along to watch, which was lovely. It was also handy, as Lynda looked after our stuff for us. :-)

We met at a Southbank car park, as explaining where Birrarung Marr was to my sister was beyond me the other day. Every time I said, "You know where such and such is?" her answer was no. Of course, once we were there, the obvious land mark jumped immediately to mind. I should have remembered her horse obsession and organised to meet her at Champions.

The kids were amazed by how many runners and walkers were there. Mike explained, with enormous eyes, that he'd seen numbers in the 4900's. We lined up for the start and I reminded them that we'd be dodging around people and they'd be dodging around us. Fortunately we managed to start off with a group of runners rather than walkers which made it a lot easier. We stayed to the far right at the start and managed to get ourselves into a clear space fairly early on.

We told Lynda and Pat that we thought we'd be back at around the 35 - 40 minute mark. Lynda took a few photos of the start for us. After the race they told us they'd found a place to sit near the finish line and had just sat down when they heard all this cheering. The winner was just crossing the line about 15 mins after the race started. They were pretty impressed.

The four of us stayed together for the first part of the race. We started off slowly, at about 7 min/km pace, as Laura wanted to run as much of the 5 km as possible. Near the 2 km mark she was struggling a little, so I told the boys they could run on ahead, while Laura and I slowed down. She was determined to run further than the 2 km she did last week before stopping to walk so she was aiming to make it to the 2.5 km mark. She made it to about 2.7 km before walking up a hill. Overall, Laura managed to run a little more than 4 km of the 5 km course, which was a great effort.

As we neared the end we were running down the last hill. I told Laura that if she wanted to go faster I'd be able to keep up. She took off, I sped up and next thing you know we were passing lots of people on the way down the hill. One lady tried to speed up when she heard us coming, but we had no trouble passing her. It was great fun. We managed to cross the line together, which was a really nice way to finish the run.

Our splits were 6:54, 7:03, 7:47, 8:07 and 6:17 (5:29 - my Garmin measured the course 0.15 km short). The official results aren't back in, but our unofficial time is 35:21. The boys finished a couple of minutes ahead of us.

At the end of the race the kids were bubbling over with pleasure. They were delighted with themselves for finishing the race. They enjoyed their bling. Lynda, Pat and I gave them heaps of postive feedback. I'm pretty sure I've got a team of running companions any time I want them. I've put the photos up on Facebook. Here's one of the four of us at the end.