50% 15:07, 50% 16:00

A few days ago was the Oasis Zoo Run 10k, which also serves as the Canadian National 10k Championships.  Seems like add odd concept, holding a national championship race in a zoo, but it actually works (mostly).  The Toronto Zoo is pretty impressive, and has a lot going on.  Unfortunately though, it also means that the zoo has an abundant amount of trails and foot paths going all over the bloody place and we had to race on them.  Thankfully the first few kilometers were outside the zoo, on the wide open roads which felt a little more natural - like animals running free in the wild.  I went out with the leaders right from the gun because I didn't want to loose visual contact in the later parts of the race.  I have no idea what our splits were but the course started downhill, and then went up hill for nearly a kilometer, then rolled a little, and included two 180 degree turns (all within the first 3.5km).  I was still the the pack at 5km (15:07), but after that it started to spread out a little in the twisty and complicated parts of the course.  The frustrating part for me was not knowing where we were going.  I can say I studied the map the night before, but it didn't really help at all.  We'd go around a corner and have no idea what awaited us on the other side - quick left, long straight (actually there were very few of those), or maybe a sharp right.  Anyway, I survived it and crossed the finish line in 7th overall, 6th for the Canadian Championships.  I think I surprised myself a little with that.  The field included a lot of very talented runners so finishing in the mix was a nice feeling. Congrats to our BC team which won a bunch of team categories and had a lot of solid individual performances.

Raccoons in a zoo

Raccoon in my parent's house

But as awesome as the race was, the cool down was a lot more awesome.  We got to see animals.  Now I have mixed feelings about zoo's and I don't really know if I'm for or against them, but there is something pretty awesome about seeing some of these amazing creatures up close.  I saw giraffes and monkeys, and bears, and lions, and moose, and cougars, and a rhino.  Oh, and most importantly, I saw an elephant.  It was probably the most useless cool down ever as I stopped every minute to take another picture of some random animal.  They also had the fattest raccoons I've ever seen.  I'm pretty used to raccoons because they're everywhere in Richmond and frequently wander into my apartment when I leave the back door open.  But seriously, these guys at the zoo were well fed.  Now that I think about it, I'd also never seen so many fat squirrels either. 

Now its back to business.  I don't have any races until the end of October which means nothing but quality training for a few weeks.  It is certainly a nice change from the spring and summer when I was racing every other weekend, or in many cases several weekends in a row.