Well another Sole Sisters has come and gone. We have ran it 3 years out of 4 and hope to continue with it. As we have said before it's a great first race for women as it's all about comradery and just enjoying yourself while reaching your goal of running/walking 5k.
Last year we ran this race with our friend Flo. It was her first 5k and this year another one of our friends (CS) signed up making this her first 5k race ever. She started running last summer/fall and has been working her way up to 5k. She did awesome. Again, this is a great race for a first timer.
Once again this year it rained the day of and we mean rained. Torrential rain. All. Day. Long. We prayed to the rain gods. The weather brought back horrible memories of our 1/2 in Ottawa back in September. The only difference was the distance and in Ottawa it didn't rain until we started running but on Saturday we thought we'd actually have to go out and begin in the rain.
As you can imagine the texts to each other started very early in the day about what to wear. The shirts this year were made a little loser we found which was good because you could fit clothes under it with room to spare and they were comfy. Twin 1 and CS decided to wear their rain jackets underneath their shirts while Twin 1 just wore a thin long sleeve shirt underneath. We had also gotten purple tutus in our race kit. Twin 1 wore her but Twin 2 did not. She thought that as it was elastic and didn't fit snugly it may be up around her boobs by the time the race was over. Twin 1 thought the same but wore hers anyway. So did about 3000 others.
The tutu that never got worn:
The race started at 6 pm but we had to be at Dartmouth Crossing at 5:30 pm so we could walk from the meeting spot to the start line which was about 1 km away. It's fun to see 3200 women all dressed in purple doing the walk up to the start line. Twin 2 left her house at 4:30 pm and picked up Twin 1 and CS and we were on our way. On the way over we were telling CS about how horrible runs were in the torrential downpour. Afterwards we realised we should have just kept that to ourselves as this was her first race and we weren't helping her with our rain bashing and her being nervous already for her first race.
Once parked we pulled on our ponchos and used the bathroom and got ready to roll.
As we were waiting to walk up to the start line the rain gods had heard us and answered our prayers. It stopped raining. We kept our ponchos on until we got to the start line and then we stuffed them under a pylon with the intention of going back for them later...we didn't end up going back.
At 6 pm the race started and we were off. We did a lot of dodging people. More so in the beginning and around the water stations but we did pretty good at finding holes to run by people. As usual they had a few water/DJ/hug/hi five/chocolate stations, etc. I didn't find the hugs to be plentiful which was a bit disappointing. In previous years you could not get by without getting a hug but this year neither one of us 3 manged to get one. We kept an eye out for the homeless man that wouldn't let Twin 1 go last year but he was a no show.
During the race we kept a steady pace and walked about .5k of the 5k. We took the break on the uphill towards the chocolate station which was about half way. The best thing about this race is the finish line is on a downhill so you can get some pretty good momentum to make it home.
CS' boyfriend and sister/brother-in-law came to cheer her on. That was pretty great of them and they were pretty proud when she crossed the finish line. After the race we proceeded to get our medals from the firemen.
All our pictures had us with one hand behind our back because we were trying to hide our banana peels. YAY for bananas!
We originally planned to play afterwards by ear to see if we wanted to go out to eat or not but in the end we decided not to and will another day to celebrate. We dropped CS off and then we headed to Starbucks for a warm drink and treat. We went through drivethru and the barista noticed that we had our medals and race bibs still on and congratulated us on the run. She asked if we had any big plans to celebrate. Our reply was "No. This is our treat. We are now going home and going to bed". 8 pm on a Saturday night...what else are you supposed to do?
After we got home we stuffed some newspaper/flyers in our shoes and ate our treats and went to bed :)
The awesome thing about Sole Sisters next year is they are still having their 5k run in June BUT they are also adding a 10k and 1/2 marathon in October 2016. That's awesome. We will probably do one or the other...we are hoping to talk some friends into it as well.
Another year, another Sole Sisters race in the books.
