Kids Marathon Race Report

On Sunday morning it was Owen's turn to run a race. He'd been looking forward to this for months and we were very excited for him to run his second race. Although we didn't follow the rules for the Kids Marathon since I didn't realize what they were, the idea was that the kids would have already completed a total of 41km in training over the course of the past month or so and come to this race to complete the final 1.2km in order to earn their marathon medal. Well, Owen is planning to keep track and run the rest of the marathon distance, but he still earned that medal as far as I'm concerned. The number of kids that he had to negotiate, the fact that he was one of the youngest, and that he was running it alone without any friends made this a great accomplishment. It looked like most of the other kids were there in groups representing their schools so their support was evident and put them at ease. When Monica and I left him in the start area and went off to find a suitable spot to cheer and take pictures we felt really quite concerned.

Like I said, the number of runners for this event was huge and my little guy was in the middle of it, somewhere:



Then the horn went off and the kids were running! I was not really expecting to see Owen, let alone get a picture of him as he went past with the others, but I managed. It really helped that he was wearing a special hat which his grandparents brought back from Spain a day before we arrived:



If you can't spot him yet that's OK. Once you know what to look for he'll be easy to pick out.

After the start we ran off to the Finish area in hopes that we'd once again see him go by. It was tough, but again I managed to snap a photo of him running past:



Then it was a mad dash to the Athlete's Village to pick him up. After a few tense moments (for me) I finally spotted him while standing on the bench of a picnic table and snapped a picture of him wearing his shiny new medal:



You can see what I mean about the hat. Those little yellow horns helped a lot with spotting him in the sea of other runners!

What was also cool about the event was the free engraving that one could get on the medals and so we went off to get Owen's name and finishing time put on his. While we waited Owen played a game of Scrabble on this huge inflatable thing and ended up winning $20 worth of Subway Sandwiches gift certificates by one point over another couple of kids. He had some help from his grandfather, but he's the one who got to climb up onto the "board":



The stats ended up as such:

• Gun time: 6:36.1
• Chip time: 6:16.0
• Pace: 5:31/km (8:52/mile)
• Place overall: 468/1341
• Gender place: 310/642
• Category place: 42/131