Post-Run

Gotta post a follow-up to the Cheetah run... it wasn't easy, and felt good to cross that finish line. Of course, the first serious rain we'd had in two months had to start that morning, so it was cold and wet, and the course was pretty steep - first downhill, then back up. So we walked a bit on the uphill part, but I'm happy with how we did. It wasn't a very serious run (all the "professional" runners seemed to be on the 8k run), but we seemed to do better than people that looked to be in better shape than us. It wasn't a race per-se, but we came in pretty solidly in the middle (140/141 of 293).

It was fun to get out and see other crazy Portlanders (are we Portlanders yet?) running in the cold and rain. There was a lot of info on Cheetahs, and the woman (Dr. Laurie Marker) who runs the Cheetah Conservation Fund was there. A couple of interesting things I've learned about Cheetahs lately:
a) Cheetahs are all basically clones of each other. At some point in the past, the Cheetah population got so small there were only a few breeding pairs left, so they lost almost all genetic diversity when the populaton expanded again.
b) There's only about 12,000 of them left. They get around so fast though that it appears there are many more of them than there actually are, so the local farmers trap them and kill them to protect their livestock without giving it much thought. There are efforts underway to get the farmers to raise and bond herding dogs to the livestock herds for protection, which is apparently amazingly effective at deterring cheetahs, making the herds not such a source of easy kills. The same technique is used by Rocky Mountain farmers in the US to protect against wolves.

So all in all, it was a good first run. I think we're going to need to do small runs like this fairly frequently to keep motivation up. There's another one coming up at the Zoo in November, we'll have to try and arrange child care for that.