Sarah + Mike: Run to Paradise

We just came back from a fabulous four day weekend south of the border in jolly old Victoria. The initial point of the trip was to do the Great Ocean Road Marathon, which wuickly became the half-marathon... which further degenerated into the 14km "Run to Paradise (and return)". Guess which song I had stuck in my head for the whole run???

Anyway Sarah and I flew down on Friday arvo with Prash and Mel, picked up the hire care and drove to Mel's parent's amazing holiday house on the beach at Anglesea. After buying enough food for the weekend (which is also apparently the same amount of food necessary to maintain the entire population of Michigan for 6 months) we crashed out for an early morning start, driving out to the Twelve Apostles (which took over 2 hours) in order to get back to Apollo Bay in time for the race at 2pm. The start was a little too early for some...

The Apostles were well worth it though. I've never been on the Great Ocean Road and Sarah had never been to Victoria at all so we were stoked. It really is breathtaking. And kinda windy.

We made it back to Apollo Bay in plenty of time to warm up for the race, Prash was fairly apprehensive because of earlier injuries - apparently after 10 minutes of running he gets awful pains in both his shins. Anyway the race was lovely, very mellow because of a pretty small field (about 350 runners - compared to the City to Surf's 63,000) and a gorgeous route from the waterfront in tiny Apollo Bay, right outside the local pub, through a gorgeous patchwork of green fields and curious cows and up a gradual incline into a lush forest (Paradise?), before turning around at 7km and coming back downhill for a 14km finish. Even though we got strong headwinds blowing across the fields and a couple of spurts of driving and freezing rain, it was still one of the most pleasant races I've ever done.

It was fantastic as always to have Sarah there cheering for me as I came back over the line in 55:38 for a place of 13th overall (and first in my age category), well under the one hour I was gunning for so I was extremely happy!

Shortly after me came Mel running easily with a big smile on her face:

And then the big surprise, Prash not long behind her, looking great and running at a decent clip looking happy as a clam! His shins were ok but his ankle was playing up quite a bit. It was an awesome effort considering he'd never ever run 14km before and hadn't really trained for the distance because of his shins.