After years of fruitlessly petitioning upper management to start our own version of the Vancouver Sun Run called the Courier Scurrier, the occasional joggers of Team K&K finally gave up and decided to take part in the popular event that every year inconveniences thousands of people living or working in the downtown core.
Big mistake. We naively figured, seeing as how the Sun promotes it as “the third largest timed 10K in the world,” that trying to reach the finish line as quickly as possible would sort of be the point.
For plenty of participants, not so much, although if you instead want to find out how fast you can run 10 clicks through a gauntlet of children, leisurely strolling couples and selfie-snapping narcissists, the Sun Run offers the perfect opportunity.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong with choosing to walk instead of actually run in an event where the word “run” is right there in the name, we assumed the two groups would be kept more or less separate.
To be fair, it’s not really the organizers’ fault. Everyone is asked when they register what their estimated finishing time will be and is then placed in staggered groups released in waves with the fastest in front and the gradually slower behind them. In theory, this will allow everyone to go at their targeted pace.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are idiots.
As desk-bound office workers and enthusiastic supporters of the city’s burgeoning craft beer scene, we figured completing the race in an hour to an hour and 15 minutes was probably the best we could do and so chose to join the crew wearing white bibs.
While there were thousands of people ahead of us at the Georgia Street starting line on Sunday morning, there were also thousands more behind us who signed up to do it in either 1:16-1:45 or more.
So it came as a surprise when a large number of “runners” began walking straight out of the gate. We initially assumed this was because some folks like to warm up by walking at first, which didn’t seem unreasonable given we’d spent the past hour standing cheek to jowl in the chilly morning shade waiting for the damn thing to start.
But, as the kilometres went by and we had to continuously dodge and weave past these slow-moving obstacles, it became clear not all of them were winded runners but instead dedicated walkers who butted their way to the front of the line. Either that or random people who simply joined the route midway. (It was hard to tell because official bibs are worn on the front, not the back.). Reaching the finish line soon stopped being the biggest challenge. It became suppressing the urge to elbow them in the ribs when passing, especially in the bottle-necked Cambie Street onramp near the end.
Presumably these are the same people who stand side by side on escalators. Or merrily putter along in the fast lane on highways, which has become such a problem in B.C. that MLAs, in a rare show of bipartisanship, unanimously agreed last week to give the cops greater power to ticket drivers who aren’t using the left lane to pass.
But while last Sunday’s Sun Run will surely be our last, it won’t necessarily be our last timed 10K run seeing as how we all own smartphones perfectly capable of measuring our relative success.
