Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The story behind the bronze...

My name, bronze medal and 8km run should not really appear in once sentence. But add inaugural, 36-45yo women and Phnom Penh and maybe it begins to make sense. With very few women here running (or even playing sport in general) beyond their teens, a 37 year old woman pounding the pavement is very rare indeed. Then add school holidays and you’ve lost half the foreigners who might compete, and there you have it - me on the podium. Ha!

Our Christian Care for Cambodia team must be an oddly active bunch because we cleaned up the entire medal count for the women’s 36-45 category – Becky Sussex coming in first, Catherine Rogers coming in second and me. Pip Miner, our running legend from Poipet, took out first place for the entire 8km women's event and Dave Painter (later interviewed by tv reporters because of his impressive run and obvious “age”) ran a great half marathon.

Each place getter took home money (I got $12.50), a great basket of fruit and foodstuffs, two coffee mugs, 5 pens, two notebooks, a bunch of brochures, and of course, the medal. While standing on the podium was a buzz, the highlight of the morning was being asked by some local girls to have their photo with me - a place getter.

Still laughing…

2 comments:

Judith said...

lol
congrats anyhow :)
I got second in a race, the same way and someone not even in the race, got third!
What was your time?

Lisa said...

That's just it Jude. I only ran 46 minutes which is four minutes over my PB in Brissie last year.

I think I'm going to inspire many others to run next time!