Wednesday, September 09, 2009

XTerra 6 and a Crazy Few Weeks

August 31st was the last race in the XTerra 2009 Trail Run series. This one was up at Shakespear Regional Park, a nice short drive from Albany. I ended up running with a few coworkers from ASB: Marco and Stephen, who also did the Riverhead race, and Rohith.

As usual for the XTerra races, the organizers did an excellent job in designing the course. We covered some of the same ground as the night run the evening before, but we also made our way all the way around the headlands on the rocky shoreline. I'm really bummed that all my photos from my little waterproof camera came out overexposed (I was trying an experiment with higher ISO setting to keep the shutter speed fast). But suffice to say that it was pretty tough keeping 10k per hour pace across slippery low tide rocks. :-)

After the coastal part, we cut into the center of the peninsula and did some running through the paddocks with the cows and sheep. That portion went a lot faster, even with the hills.

This was actually the first XTerra Long Course that I managed to finish in under two hours! It was only 17k, but still, I'm quite happy with that. My overall rank at the end of the series was 11th of 114 in the Men's Open Long Course category. Overall, there were about 300 runners in the Long Course group.


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In other news, for those of you that haven't heard: I'm going to be moving back to the states at the end of October. So yesterday was my last day at ASB, and today is my last day at Datacom. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be doing some travelling around. First up is a week and a half in Rarotonga with Kel, Gayle, and Claire. Then Kel, Claire and I are headed around the East Cape, and back to Chateau Tongariro for some Skiing at Ruapehu. Kel and Claire are then headed down to Wellington for a weekend, then the three of us are headed to Sydney for a couple of days. Yow! Anyway, probably lots of photos coming soon!

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