Vancouver Half Marathon

Tomorrow I am racing the (Scotiabank) Vancouver Half Marathon. The race starts at 7am. My BIB number is 912 and I plan to pick up my race package tomorrow morning, as I did not have the energy nor the time to drive back and forth to Vancouver today or yesterday.

It's been a great but somewhat exhausting week as I started working as a copy-editor at a newspaper in Vancouver. It always requires a lot of mental energy to get started in a new role, including the part-time one this is. I am excited about this job, which is similar to what I did at the Australian Financial Review in Sydney before moving to Canada, and I enjoyed my first three days this past week.

I also spent a considerable amount of energy preparing electronic copies of my books for the Ibooks store, which requires them to be in .epub format. After spending much of Monday trying to figure out what was involved, and several hours on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before heading to the city for my new job, I still didn't have the answer.

So yesterday, Friday, I started at 7am and, aside from a couple of breaks to walk the dog and have dinner, I worked until 11pm in the evening. My rate of progress throughout the day felt slow, even absent, but by 5pm I had made a significant breakthrough and by 11pm I was 99% sure I was able to solve the remaining issues the next day (ie today).

And I did. After resuming my work on this at 7am this morning, I had my files submitted by 10am and they are being processed. Pfew. I am pretty tired now, but in a very satisfied way, as I had begun doubting I was going to be able to fix the technical issues involved in the submission.

This all means I have spent little time thinking about tomorrow's race. I had a look at the course profile today. It looks good. As for my training this week, I took Thursday and Friday off (mostly because of work).

Today I did a 10-minute easy warm-up, followed by 12 times 30 seconds fast with 30 seconds easy jogging in between.

While I didn't feel particularly energetic today, I might feel superb tomorrow. We'll see, I am just excited to race, even thought it means the alarm will ring around 4am for Tim, Luka and I.

We're driving to the race start at UBC, with the new magnetic car door ad to help spread the word about my books.

Tim was pretty tired, too, after cycling to Whistler and back this morning, at 120km his longest ride since he did Ironman Canada 10 months ago. Luka joined him for a powernap on the back deck afterwards.