Race results! 5K Ottawa

My apologies this should have been uploaded weeks ago. The race was INCREDIBLE! An overall great learning experience but a difficult adventure to get to the start line.

In short, I live about 2 hours away from Ottawa so it was a long day, upon arriving in Ottawa I had made arrangements to leave my car at a family’s residence. It turned out to be a mistake because I learned that race bib pick up and race start were different locations (3.7km apart). Alot of people complain about this issue however it makes sense now after learning and seeing the thousands of participants. This specific weekend is known as Ottawa Race Weekend or Expo which involves an international community of runners from all over the world competing in 5K, 10K half marathon and full marathon races. So that makes the city even more busy than it already is with its 1 million population.

I was attending the event by self so it was difficult at times to navigate the city and locations to get required race supplies and to the race start location. This extra element of stress began to give me doubts and fears about the race itself. However I managed to hold it together and arrive at the start of the race surrounded by over 7000 runners, those are just the ones running that doesn’t include all the spectators. I was able to arrive just 5 minutes before the start time after I just ran close to 4km to get there from my car. Seeing this amount of people was a truly a fascinating site (I took some pictures)⬇️ I had never seen 1000 people at a race and now I’m looking at over 7300 racers like me ready to run a race.

As I was given advice from a local experienced runner I know, I was advised to kindly push my way to the front to try and be part of the front fast wave of people to motivate me to run faster with them. Which I did as I made my way accoss the gigantic crowd of people and then right up to the very front. I received many bad looks, shove’s and pushes so apologies to any of the people I pushed to get in to the front. At this point I am a bit tired from all of the drama and running I endured in the last 3 hours so I assumed this would be difficult.

The race starts with a tremendous cheer from the surrounding crowd that lined the streets of downtown Ottawa on Laurier St. It was amazing! Scary and elevating to be apart of this historic 50 year anniversary event. I started strong with lots of energy and adrenaline to stay close to the front with the first 20 runners, as the race progressed my energy and ability to perform declined as I would watch runners pass me. Still running at a moderately fast pace I continued through the beautiful city of Ottawa Ontario, over bridges and beside the famous canel. I made my way to the finish line and ended up having an official time of 18:29, this was good enough for 74th place out of 7399, 16th in my age group.

It was an experience I will never forget and hope to be apart of again next year. Although if I attend I will have much better plans in place to ensure I don’t go through some of what I did for this event. Running across the highway, climbing fences, crossing rail tracks, navigating Ottawa during an international event, waiting with thousands in

line to get race bib, driving closer to event, navigating downtown Ottawa with a dead phone.

Thanks for reading. Getting ready for a 5K race in a week in a smaller city with less runners but still a great event in Napanee.