What a treat! It's been a few years since I was last in BC, so I was happy to pull my almost dusty passport out and head to the border. I signed up for the Half on a whim, I felt like I needed a late fall event and this one seemed perfect.
When I travel for races, I try and make it as economic as possible. Thankfully due to travel points I've earned through the years, I can make these sorts of trips very affordable. I'm definitely not made of money, but I can cut a lot of costs out....so I guess I'm pretty lucky! Work Hard, Play Hard I guess!
Usually I travel solo for these events (I can only imagine...the only thing worse than running....is probably having to watch someone run ;) but since I was driving up from Seattle, my Mom and Uncle ended up joining me for the ride up. We have family in Vancouver, so it was great to spend some time with them as well.
Vancouver is quite possibly one of the most beautiful cities. It has a very "Pacific Northwest" feeling to it (Shocking, I know). However it reminds so much of all the best aspects of Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Downtown is easy to walk, safe and is very diverse.
As soon as we arrived, we headed to the Race Expo, picked up my packet, took some photos and then met our cousins downtown before heading to their house.
The best part about knowing locals, is getting to see the city from their eyes. We were taken to a beautiful park, around sunset set and had a great walk that helped stretch out my muscles before the morning.
Race day was fantastic. The sunrise over the city was just beautiful and with a late race start (8:15 am) I got to have a fairly relaxed morning. My hotel was really close to the start/finish line, so there wasn't any worry about parking (the worst on race morning).
This was my first "out of country" race, so it was crazy hearing a different national anthem---but so awesome. And the mileage being all in Kilometers totally threw me off, but I still loved it. It was sort of fun trying to calculate the mileage as I ran past each marker.
The course, like the entire city was really pretty. We started downtown, ran in some direction and ended up in Stanley Park. I loved that part of the course. We didn't spend much time on the Seawall, but it was amazing getting to run in the wooded areas. Definitely reminded me of WA.
Couldn't have asked for a better day all around. We had to head back to the ole USA pretty quickly afterwards, as I had a flight back to CA. I did get to stop for a few seconds and get a snapshot with this beauty:
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