I picked up Dawn on the way to the Confederation Park 3 x 4k XC relay early Saturday morning. The race wasn’t to start until noon, but we had some work to do before the race. We had both volunteered to make soup, so we delivered it to the kitchen and then went to a fence close to the end of the race course. We put up three team's worth of signs saying "Go teammatesnamehere Go!" and hoped the new runners (and regulars) on our teams would feel welcome and encouraged. The Penguins' October Challenge has been to write a haiku about running, and we put up a "pep haiku" written by Erica from a Penguin list in the U.S.

Take Heart. Falter not,
weary, noble champions.
All who finish, win!

There were quite a few racers there, despite the recent large dumps of snow we’ve received this week. Not a whole lot of kids braved the 1km kid’s race (maybe a dozen), but my 9 y.o. daughter was amongst them. She’s done this race before, but I tag along on it for moral support and to curb her exploratory nature (keep her on the path!). She did great, and I warmed up nicely before my race.

Krista and I were running first legs for our teams and we’ve been training together, so we stuck together most of the race. On the uphills about 5 minutes into the course I slowed down a bit, and she chugged up past me. I followed her about 20-30 meters behind until after the last big uphill, and caught up to her on the flattish ridge. I say flattish because while we weren’t going up or down, we ran along the side of a hill, making our right feet land higher than our left. Tricky, when you consider we were running in ankle-deep snow.

I left her while I bounded down the last big downhill. Have I ever mentioned I LOVE running down hill? I gave a big, yodelly yahoo and careened downward, boing, boing, boing.

Daughter-dear was waiting for me near the finish and ran in with me. What a great cheering section! Krista came in within the same minute as me.

We waited with friends for our other team-mates to do their bit and chatted with others we knew. I held Dianne's heavy, sleepy baby and kept an eye on her other kidlet while she and her husband raced. We had fun cheering in everyone we knew, and a few we didn't. When our teams finished I collected my girl from the nearby toboggan hill and we headed to the hall for soup and sweets. I had my favourite, spicy carrot soup, with a couple of brownies and cookies on the side.

Someone asked me before the race today how long I was expecting to take to run it. I tried to recall how fast I’d done it last year in dry, warmer conditions, added on 3 more minutes to account for the ankle-deep sticky snow at my feet, and estimated 25 minutes. I did it in 25:01. Heck, I should get a prize for that.