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Blue Water Trails Half Marathon
(Brights Grove, Ontario)
Author: Lx2run
Date: 2006-10-29
As the title indicates this was the first year this race was held and it showed in some ways. This race was a local race and it had that feel which I enjoyed. If you don’t want to deal with big crowds, chip timing and all that stuff this is the race for you. The race crowd was small and there wasn’t a lot of fan support along the way but this will grow as the race does and the weather may have had something to do with that as well. The Race Director is Ken Walker the same guy who organizes the Blue Water Tri so he did know what to do and had a small core group of volunteers to help him.
The venue was good. The race head quarters were at a school with the gym and change rooms accessible which was great because of the weather and because there was some waiting around for the awards afterwards.
The starting line was a short walk from the school, not a problem though it was a little cool waiting around there. The starting area was a fairly narrow shoot between a barricade and the curbs which was a little crowded and confusing. No timing chips were used but hey as I said it was a local event.
The RD warned us that the group that had offered to provide people to staff the road crossings didn’t have enough volunteers so “please watch out”. There were 5 such crossings with 3 manned. The most heavily used roads were manned and the others were not. This wasn’t a problem until I had to wait for 3 cars before I could cross the final road on my kick to the finish.
Most of the race was run on hard packed gravel trails with a few Ks on asphalt and maybe 1K on grass. The trails are wide enough for a few people to run beside each other while the grass is a single trail. The terrain in Sarnia is flat for the most part so this race was no different. The first part is really flat. From 13K to 14K there is some up and down and from 15K to 16K a steady uphill but as I said it’s mostly flat.
There was some food at the end, pizza, cookies and pretzels but not a lot to drink.
Overall a good race that can only get better with time
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