jayneandmarty.com

Well yesterday was great and crap at the same time.

To get the crapness out of the way first, it didn’t really hit me how much I wanted to be out there running until I went into the MCG at about 8.45am and saw all the half-marathon competitors successfully finishing. (Their start was 7am) They’d reached their goal and I hadn’t. Nuff said.

But Jayne had fun, so let’s talk about her.

We’d arranged to stay at a friend’s house in Alphington the night before, so we had the luxury of a semi-lie in and a small breakfast before driving down Hoddle St to park in East Melbourne. We found a spot at the top of Fitzroy Gardens, which gave us a nice shady walk through them towards the G. That took around 10 minutes and soon after reaching the ground we found the competitor section and the spectator section, then met up with the work friend Jayne has been training with.

Jayne outside the G

The starting line was across the footbridge down by the Yarra, and walking over there it quickly became clear that there were loads more people around than the Nike+ race last month. Plenty of bods stretching, hydrating and eating bananas.

Jayne near the start line

The start was pretty chaotic. Your personal time doesn’t start until you run under the starting arch (you get an electronic timing thing to attach to your shoe), so the entrants who planned to walk the 10km could have done the right thing and started at the back. But no. Selfishness or perhaps just plain stupidity saw plenty of walkers right at the front of the 7,000-strong field walking 3 abreast and not caring one bit who they were holding up. The organisers could have arranged that a little better, no doubt, but there’s no substitute for actually using your brain.

A section of the entrants at the start

This guy fair dinkum sprinted the first 100m - clearly he wanted to be able to say he led the field at the start

Notice the Warwick Capper lookalikes not far behind him. And not far behind them were the first of the thicko walkers

Back to Jayne. Her route took her up to Fed Square, down St Kilda Rd and along The Tan in reverse to the top of the Anderson St hill, then back along the same route to the southern bank of the Yarra, along it and across the Anderson St bridge, back up to the tennis centre and then to the G, where all runners completed a lap before crossing the finish line. And when I say The Tan in reverse, I don’t mean she had to run it backwards, Rob and Kate.

Running under the Swan St bridge, about 6.5km in

Jayne crossing the line

Ignore the empty MCG stands in the background - where I was sitting was chockers. Probably 5,000 spectators.

In that last photo the clock says 1:13:33, but that’s the gun time. Her actual time (i.e. from when she crossed the start line to the finish line) was somewhere around 1:09:30, which is a PB by two minutes. I reckon that’s fantastic given how slow and congested the start was, but she’s disappointed she didn’t break 1:05! Clearly she’s hooked on the running.

After the race with her finisher’s medal

All up it was a great day out. She’s already talking about a 15km event at the end of November and we’ve been looking at race calendars to find other events we can be a part of. I don’t see running becoming a huge part of our lives but we both enjoy it, it’s (mostly) free, it feels good after a run (even just a short training run), our fitness is improving (especially Jayne’s - three months ago she found it tough completing 2km), and there’s a strong sense of camaraderie at the events, so we’re both hooked for now.