8km walk on Sunday

Today was the Vancouver BMO Marathon.  I had a friend who was running the half marathon and for the past few weeks I've been following her twitter and facebook updates as she has been training.  I went to the BMO website to see the route as I was thinking we may head into the city to cheer the runners on.  It was when I was on the site that I noticed that they had an 8km run as well.    For a few days I toyed with the idea of walking the 8km's in the race.

I've signed up for my first race to be on June 8th, a 5km run/walk which I will be walking in.  I know that the course is open for 90 minutes and I've been working to get my time under an hour for the 5km walk.  That would mean, if I did the 8km BMO walk it would take me about an hour and forty five minutes.

I was about to register for the 8km when I started wondering how long the route was open for?  The 8km run was to start at 630, the half at 7 and I wasn't sure about what time the full marathon would start.  On the Vancouver BMO Marathon site they had a box over on the right for an instant chat or support.  I clicked on it and was connected to a great lady named Dana.  I told her I was wanting to walk the 8km's, was that allowed and of course was there a time limit.  She told me right away that they welcome walkers, and she would check the length of time the route would be open for.  A few minutes later she came back and told me that the race starts at 630 and ends at 8am, that's 90 minutes.  I thanked her for her help and discarded my registration page.  There was no way I was going to be able to participate.

At least not there.  On Saturday night, using www.mapmywalk.com I plotted out a couple of routes for an 8km walk and decided I was going to do it.

Sunday morning was a beautiful sunny day, it was a bit windy with no clouds in sight.  I got ready to go and decided I didn't want to take the dog with me for this walk.  I'm not sure if the 8km would be too far for him, and honestly, I walk faster if I'm not stopping every 50 feet for him to sniff around.  I told my awesome husband the planned route and off I went.

I had to change my route once I got going.  There was a farmer spraying his fields with liquid gold and I just didn't want to spend the day smelling like manure. I sent my husband a text with my route change and continued on.  It was a beautiful day for a walk!  It did however get very windy when I was on my long straight stretch.  It was a head wind that I found myself leaning into!  I had a great walk and with the Garmin that Gary gave me I was able to see how long each km was taking me, what my heart rate was, how far in total I had gone and how long I had been.  I am LOVING this device.

I was really eager to get home and look at my splits to see how I did.  I was very surprised to see that my fastest kilometer was actually kilometer 6.  I did it in 11min and 49 seconds.  My longest one was the 3rd Kilometer.  That was when I was leaning into the wind going up hill.  It took me 14min and 10 seconds.

Here is a picture of my splits, I took a picture with my camera as I haven't yet figured out how to get the stats page from Garmin Connect to transfer over:

1	13:49.0	1.00	13:49
2	12:28.9	1.00	12:29
3	14:09.8	1.00	14:10
4	12:11.4	1.00	12:12
5	12:25.9	1.00	12:26
6	12:33.5	1.00	12:34
7	11:49.8	1.00	11:50
8	13:31.5	1.00	13:32
9	:44.8	0.05	14:06

I don't think that an hour and forty three minutes is so bad for doing an 8km walk.  I'm going to work on speeding up so that next year I'll be able to actually participate in the Vancouver BMO 8K.

The best part of all, I earned 14 activity points for my walk and I've done 19,372 steps.  Woohoo!