From Half-Marathon to Capture the Flag

Last weekend I joined Farhang for the Toronto half-Marathon. Now, the last time I was on practice was in June, and my longest was 10km, and that was all making me a bit nervous. Stayed the night before the race at Farhang's, who cooked a tasty pasta for everybody. The weather was just perfect. We started around Finch & Yonge, headed down Yonge St. and turned east just before Bloor St., where we headed South by in a trail by Bay View and finally entered downtown through Lakeshore Blvd. Headed North at University Ave. and turned the whole way around the Queens Park to the finish line.

I had quite a bit of problem getting started, something like I drank too much water in the morning. So after 7km, I let Farhang go and backed up for a while at a Second Cup! I started again and made it straight to the finish line. After the lengthy stop I had, I aimed for 2:15, and unbelievably my gun time was 2:15:00.2! Chip time a few seconds shorter... Not a good time, I know, but then again, I was not even sure I can finish it, so, I'm happy with it. Official results here.

This past Friday night, with Hossein and Oktie, we took part in the last Capture the Flag game of the year, in the entire University of Toronto downtown campus. Around 500 people showed up. Map. We were in Team Danger (red), and my flat was in fact in the our zone, were my office was in the other zone.

The game started around 9PM. First we were defending, were each of us tagged a bunch of yellow guys. Around 10:30 Hossein and I left base to go for their flag. After jumping over a couple (public) fences and passing through four or five buildings (all needed key to access at that time of the day), we finally found their flag, just behind the Robarts library. We were still planning with this other red guy we found there when whistles were blown and everybody started leaving the game. So we all gathered in Queens Park. The game was ended prematurely since it was after 11PM, nobody scored yet, a (small) accident happened and police was called in. Very joyful though.

On Saturday night, Ehsan was around, so spent the night playing cards with Amir and Hossein, just like we all used to do back in undergrad. We played poker and blackjack though.

On a side note, Pouria finally wrote us back from Kabul. He's writing a weblog of his experience there.

¶ 1:57 AM