On Sunday’s wet and cold morning we joined the throng of runners clad in red Nike t-shirts to run 10km through the streets of Melbourne in the Australian leg of the Nike+ Human Race, a global event with 25 participating cities including London, LA, Taipei, Buenos Aires, Vancouver and Munich. Each city’s run started at a different time, but all races were run on Sunday 31 August.
Despite the chilly weather there were heaps of people lined up at the start line, all ready to either run a PB or just finish without assistance from the St John’s Ambulance guys. We saw entire families running together, groups of friends helping each other up the hills (perhaps only running so they could get into the post-race Hilltop Hoods/Faker gig?), and of course the serious runners effortlessly bouncing along like gazelles. It’s amazing how they can run so fast for so long.
The course took in most of The Tan (including the infamous Anderson Street hill) before heading to Fed Square, up Russell Street and Collins Street, around Fitzroy Gardens and up the Lansdowne Street hill, then back past Flinders Street station to for the big finish in Kings Domain. The course seemed thoughtfully planned, taking in a bunch of landmarks whilst still challenging us with some good hills and long straights.
For me, this race was part of my training for the Melbourne half-marathon in October, so I was planning to take it pretty easy, run my own pace and finish inside 60 minutes without hurting myself. Jayne had two goals: to run the whole way and to finish in less than 1hr 20min. She hadn’t done 10km in training, so just finishing would be a PB anyway!
We thought it would be tough to avoid being swept along by the crowd at too fast a pace for the first few kms, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was burn all our energy in the first half of the race and fall in a jelly-legs heap with 500m to go, so our plan was to just maintain our rhythm and let others pass if they wanted to run faster. We weren’t running together (as we run at different speeds), but the plan worked pretty well. Jayne was zoned out to her iPod and both of us had done enough training runs to pace ourselves properly.
I crossed the finish line after a big sprint finish (had to pull something out of the bag for the crowd) in 54m16sec, a respectable time but not as quick as I’d run in training. Must have been the hills. After monging down a couple of free Powerbars and some Gatorade I walked back to the finish line and a few minutes later cheered Jayne through. She finished in 1hr 11min (official race time 1:16 but that included a 5 minute toilet stop!) and she was ecstatic that she’d achieved all three of her goals.
All up it was a great morning out. If they organise another one next year we’ll definitely be there.
Next stop for me: the 22km Melbourne half-marathon on October 12, and Jayne’s entered herself for the 10km race on the same day. She’s busting to beat her time now!
