Confederation Bridge Run 2010

I've been meaning to write about the Confederation Bridge run for a whole week now but it's taken until now to actually get around to it. And even now, I have a list a mile long of other things I should be doing right now, but I decided it couldn't wait any longer.[Waiting (and waiting!) at the start line]

Every runner was assigned a start time, I'm pretty sure we were all assigned the same start time, and then the walkers were supposed to start about an hour after us. My designated start time was 7:00am and it was advised to be at the start about an hour before the race in order to get registered and find parking. My parents and Alex parked over on the New Brunswick side and then took a shuttle bus to the PEI side, so I parked my car at Gateway Village in PEI and met them at the start line. I had to leave my house around 5am to make sure I was there on time, and I ended up leaving a bit early because I had no idea where my parking lot actually was. I had it in my mind that there were going to be several different parking lots and that I would end up going to the wrong one and would need a lot of extra time to figure everything out. I also was convinced that since this was a fairly big race and seemed to be well organized, I'd need to give myself time to get my bib number and maybe a chip timer or something. I was wrong about everything! The only designated parking was a giant grass field, registration consisted of bingo-dabbing my hand. I sat in my car for an hour before it was actually time to approach the start line.

I met the fam jam at the start line and got to see my dad for the first time since June which was awesome. My Dad and sister aren't exactly morning people, and it was pretty chilly out so I was met with a bit of disgruntlement. I was planning on spending the day in New Brunswick to see my grandparents and to watch Big Al play in Mt A's home opener soccer game against SMU. This meant I had to carry my change of clothes with me for the 12.8 km run. I was dreading wearing a backpack so I crammed everything into a neon fanny pack. I was pretty impressed with my mad packing skills, but I'm definitely not jumping at the chance to run with a fanny pack again any time soon. It conveniently bounced around right on top of my bladder the whole time. I got it at value village a few years ago so it was definitely not meant to run in.

The start ended up being an hour and a half late, so we all had to wait at the start line freezing our butts off. Fred Fox, Terry's Brother started the race by saying "on your marks, get set, go!" and ran the race with all the runners. It was really cool to be running across the bridge! Every few minutes you'd look around and see nothing but runners and water and realize, I'm actually running across the confederation bridge right now. I even got to peak over the edge of the railing, which was terrifyingly high up and made me a little dizzy. Driving over the bridge will never be the same!

I would definitely run it again, despite how unorganized it was. Next time I think I'll train for it though. Apparently my Kenya Treadmill regime didn't quite cut it.