When I picked Tam up from swimming on Wednesday, Emlyn was mentioning that he wanted to start doing some long, slow, distance running on hard surfaces. The Oliver Half Iron run was on hard surfaces, and he had done his training on the trails in the UBC endowment lands. I suspect he spent the last 10km of the 20km run part of the Oliver Half Iron Man pondering why this isn't such a good idea.

We met up on Sunday at 0900h at the Coast Guard station at the Burrard Civic Marina, and jogged down to Science World, past the Abreast in a Boat Dragonboat Festival, up to Stanley park.

And ended up on the finishing leg of the Scotiabank Half Marathon. It was kind of nice having people cheering us on. Some of them even asked where our race numbers were.

We cut off of the seawall just before the finish, ran around Stanley Park counter clockwise, ran back over the Cambie Bridge, and then back to where we started.

Denis, another Triathlon nut (anyone who does Iron Man is a nut) joined us. Apparently I work with him. No wonder he looked familiar.

I noticed a few things about running long distances:

• We had trouble keeping pace. We would start at 6 minutes/km, and 10 minutes later be running at 5:30 minutes/km.
• I went through about a litre of Gatoraide and about a litre of water.
• I wore out at about 30km. It was a sharp, short decline, so I took the bus home.
• Three hours is a long time to do anything.