The Toronto Half-Marathon is a beautiful race. It’s definitely my favourite. Yonge Street is lined with shops and city people up early walking their dogs or themselves, drinking coffee or tea, cheering us on by number or our names printed on our bibs. Fabulous. The only real hill is “Hog’s Hollow” at Yonge and York Mills. It’s a doozie. Thankfully it’s at only 3k so that makes it easy, relatively speaking. For me the race was much easier than Scotiabank. Darlene had a little more trouble – again she’s warm about racing, I’m hot (think freak). The race was wonderful. We were picked up again, by John and Amy, my racing crew, went to Harvey’s for the bad stuff and home. Laying on the air mattress in front of the TV I had visions of 42.2km. I get really excited about goals. I’m beginning to think I’m goal oriented. We toyed with the idea of doing the Angus Glen Half 3 weeks later but Darlene shook some sense into me and the idea left.
We have stores here in Canada called The Running Room. This is where we went to get our shoes and winter running gear. We also went there to get running advice from Henri the manager and her assistant Glennis. We also went there to visit and laugh. Glennis once commented that D and I are like a movie, all she needed was popcorn. Apparently we’re entertaining. We told Henri we planned to do the Ottawa Marathon the following May. She suggested we run our usual 10k’s until the end of January when we’d start the 18 week training program according to John Stanton’s book “Running: Start to Finish”.
All my tests with Dr. S were coming up clear so the last week of January 2006, we started our training. I have to say that winter running is not my idea of a good time. Once we’ve warmed up and sweat is flowing and our technical clothes (dry wear) are working taking it away from our bodies it’s not too bad. At the start of a winter run we’re freezing (and D is cranky)! All we wear is a thin pair of dry wear pants, kinda like a Speedo only a little thicker and covering more skin; double layer nylon splash pants; generally 2 dry wear long sleeved shirts (both fairly thin), sometimes a dry wear t-shirt too if it’s really cold; a running jacket; dry wear balaclava, head band and dry wear gloves or mitts. Of course we wear our runners and dry wear winter socks. It seems like a lot but that jacket is almost as thin as a wind breaker and it really doesn’t keep us “warm”. The only thing keeping us warm is our muscles which heat up and make us sweat. However,…..when we first get out there in minus 15 degrees Celsius (that’s Canadian measurement eh?) WE’RE FREEZING!!! Sorry to shout but I gotta say that running in the freezing is not for the feint at heart. It’s for freaks like us! 
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