Average pace: 4:31/km <– new personal record
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Distance: 11.41 km
Weather: Variable cloud
Temp: 12ºC
Wind: moderate to strong
Calories burned: 774
Total distance to date: 1985 km
For some reason I was very unmotivated for today’s run. There was a 50% chance of precipitation and the sky did not look threatening but I held off, skipping the morning. I had lunch then finally changed and headed out around 1:15 p.m. It was only 12ºC so I wore my long-sleeved t-shirt, which has been extremely stinky since last Friday’s soggy run–even after being washed. It’s slightly less stinky now, having been aired out for the run.
En route the Brunette River had gone back down after the heavy rain of the weekend and was once more quite shallow in parts. This made for good salmon-spotting and as the title of the post indicates, they were coming upstream in serious numbers. I counted at least a dozen at one point, which more further up. I feel kind of bad for them. They stop eating, struggle upstream, spawn then die. That’s got to be the suckiest reproductive cycle out there.
The first half of the run went fairly well. I could tell I was slightly off my best pace so I stepped up a bit for the second half and was duly rewarded by setting a new personal record of 4:31/km, beating my previous best by two seconds. Woo!
I got a closer look at the new signs put up on Monday:
It’s interesting that Metro Vancouver specifies fear as one of the reasons to keep dogs leashed. Implicit in this is ‘if your dog is not leashed, you can’t control it and it will go over and terrorize that little kid, whether by design or accident’. Of course, about 100 m after jogging by one of these signs I pass a man with a large German Shepherd mix off-leash. The sign obviously doesn’t apply to his well-behaved canine! Sadly, the fine for an off-leash dog is only $50 so it acts as little incentive to get people to comply. If I was King of All Metro Vancouver Parks, I’d make the fine at least $250 and do a two week enforcement blitz multiple (and variable) times a year. I am 100% confident the fines issued would more than pay for the expenditure of the enforcement.
Back to the run to wrap up. My left foot (the cranky one) felt a bit crankier than normal to start but fortunately it settled down quickly and didn’t have a big effect. What I did notice was that despite my record pace, I only broke my 10K mark, coming in at 45:20. The reason for this is that my first half was good but not great while the second half I was unusually strong for the last two km. Definitely different but ending strong is no bad thing.
| Date | Average Pace |
| October 17 | 4:31 (11K) |
| October 15 | 4:36 (11K) |
| October 12 | 4:38 (11K) |
| October 10 | 4:37 (11K) |
| October 8 | 4:53 (11K) |
| October 2 | 4:33 (9K) |
