T-minus zero days till race day: The race that was a brunch instead...

So - after all the humming and haing and yays and nays of the last week and a bit, not to mention my race day countdown...it turns out that instead of racing in the Halifax Hypothermic Half Marathon yesterday, I had the longest sleep-in I've had in years, watched OASIS tv with my hubby, helped shovel out the car...and then went for brunch.

All of the previous day I'd been sitting on a fence and leaning towards not going, but before I went to bed I'd agreed with my running buddies that we'd wake up early and make the call about the race then. I hydrated, I carb-loaded (kind of) and then I went to bed at a respectable time. But when I looked outside at midnight and the snow was still dumping on us, I had a pretty good feeling that I wouldn't be racing.

In fact, I didn't even set my alarm to wake me up.

Nevertheless, I woke up way early the next day, and started scanning my Facebook feed to see what folks had decided. By around 6:45, the flurry of messages started, and it looked like we were unanimous: with blizzarding conditions in Dartmouth and 50-kilometre winds, not to mention a -18 windchill, we decided to run 21.1kms together on February 17 and simply do the post-race brunch yesterday.

Had this been my first half, or the middle of summer, or if we hadn't had the option of running 21.1 and getting our medals the following week, I  might have been disappointed. But given that I've already fallen once this season and broken the side of my glasses, and that one of my friends had a scary incident where she lost vision on a long run by rubbing off the protective layer of her eyes in the cold (who knew), we all agreed that we were better to be safe than sorry.

And boy am I glad I made that call - because instead of 1.6-kilometre laps, the 60 out of 450 brave souls who did the run  yesterday ended up doing 500-800 metre laps. Which means something like 26 laps, and the course ended up short. Not to mention that it was too windy to put up the race clock anyways (I mean it was so windy I had trouble getting from my car to the hotel for brunch! I dropped my glove and had to run 400 metres to get it!).

Anyways - this means I have one more week to train, and then I'll have a fun run with friends next week. So you know what? I'm ok with that.

But to the 60 people who did yesterday's run - hats off, my friends! Nicely done!

~ HRG