My running partner completed her first fun-run today. It was a great first effort considering that it was a 10km hilly course.

She clearly got caught up in the excitement of race day as she sprinted up the hill start. I had to keep calling her back and reminding her that we were meant to be doing this together. I can understand her enthusiasm though given she’s never run with so many people before, it’s easy to be caught in the atmosphere.

To her credit, she kept a great race pace and unintentionally forced me to run faster than my usual Cliff Young shuffle speed. I though we were going to have a cracking time as when we were at the 4km mark, we had only just hit 20 minutes. That’s fast for me!

Spectators congregated on the Discovery Bay streets with the marshals and cheered us past. We also had our photo taken numerous times. She is a good looking runner so I suspect most shots were of her. She likes the attention and tends to play up to it too.

Normally on our training runs she starts dragging the chain at about the 3km mark so she broke new ground today by keeping a great pace most of the way and not pulling over for a rest stop. It means we can now push harder during training – she’s been faking it previously pretending that she needed to slow down!

We even saw Mr Shallot along the way (it was an out and back course) and he finished in an impressive time though he was hoping for faster.

As we rounded the corner toward the end, we could see quite a crowd and the finishing shute. This is the area where she normally likes to run fast so we picked up the pace again. We could then hear the crowd start to cheer and the race commentator call us in. This revved my running partner up further. After running the whole event together, she began her sprint finish ahead of me to cross a few seconds in front to the cheers of “Go dog, go dog, go”.

* Thanks to The Simpletons for the title to this post