Bowling, Drinking and Running

Yes, that is the order we did it in too. It's not highly recommended - we'll it isn't recommended unless you can space the running part out a few days! This weekend was Dennis' birthday so we had big plans to go to the horse races! I have never been to a horse track before so I was all excited about the experience. Well, apparently there has been a serious outbreak of the equine flu here - bringing the entire equestrian industry to a standstill. No races, no shows, no transporting horses in anyway. They are saying that it will not only affect The Carnival which is kind of like our Kentucky Derby in the States but possibly the Olympic hopefulls for 2008 in China. Pretty serious! So, needless to say, we needed a sudden back up plan for Dennis' birthday. What did we do instead??? Bowling!!

Now, it seems bowling is not that big here because just about everyone except for me had not been bowling in 10+ years.. if ever! On top of that - we lucked out with a cosmic bowling night. We started at Bel & Rich's place for drinks and apps. After much champagne - we headed out to the bowling alley for some serious competition! We had a blast! The girls dominated the 3 game series - showing the guys how it was done! Of course, we ended up closing the place down and headed back to Bel & Rich's for some late night celebrating and much needed pizza. At this point - the furthest thing from Bel and I's mind was the 13k race we had to run the next morning...at 8am. It was a long night.

And then suddenly it was morning! Where did that come from? Ouch... we awoke - half drunk - very tired. Should we forget the race? Roll over and go back to bed??? No, becuase we are dumb. We dragged ourselves out of bed, put our numbers on and headed off to the race. We started on beach - sun shining, waves crashed, head pounding... We managed to actually run quite a bit of the race. More than I expected actually! There were some spectacular views as we ran along the coast. I wish I had brought my camera on this one! At least you can see our course on the left. We finished the 13k's (little over 8 miles) in 1 hour and 49 minutes. That put me at 1023rd place out of out of 1593 at 7.15 km/hr. I love that they posted all these stats! Yeah - we definitely walked the hills. Funnily enough - this race is called Pub2Pub. We ended The Arms - a great pub overlooking a picturesque harbour - but the last thing we wanted was a drink! We ended up heading home after a scrumptious pub breakfast to sleep off the damage we did the night before! The rest of Sunday was spent snoozing on the couch - much needed and I felt, well-deserved!