10K Number 2 and Chinese New Year´s

Happy Chinese New Year´s to everyone! There isn´t a big Asian population here in México, so there aren´t a lot of festivities marking the holiday (outside of all the Valentine´s Day stuff).

This past week I formally signed up for acoustic guitar classes at the local Casa de la Cultura. There are community centers that every city has, and they offer things like dance classes, music classes, etc. Since it is a basic class, we have just done exercises so far with finger placements and chords. Hopefully he will teach us some songs before the class is over.

On Sunday the 14th, a group from my office and the other volunteer up here ran in the Imagen 10K with 2995 other racers. It was not quite as exciting as the previous 10K I ran (no cheering sections or bands along the route), but it was a good run. You can search for my results at this page:

http://www.asdeporte.com/evento.html?evento=2840&deporte=1&service=2

The worst part was that there was an uphill during the last kilometer...killed my plan to sprint the final leg...

10K Race in Monterrey

We two Monterrey volunteer went and ran in a 10K race this morning, in San Pedro Garza Garcia, according to local reports, the area with the highest per-capita income in México (and possibly all of Latin America). It is a very, very nice area, and all of the houses that I have seen down there would be considered luxury homes in the US. Obviously we don´t live in San Pedro.

However, all of the local races seem to take place there, as running is apparently a luxury sport. I managed a 1:01 10K, about on pace with the 8K I ran a couple of years ago (45 min). Not particularly fast, but it was a great workout, and I hope to run more in the future. The race was very well attended, well organized, and well supported. They even had bands and cheering squads set up every couple of kilometers to cheer on the racers! This group of guys on stilts wandered around afterwards with a small band, handing out balloons.



Also, since it was Halloween last weekend, it was a costume race! Most runners wore the official, red shirt seen in the pictures (one of the requirements to be in the raffle for 50 iPod Nanos), but some others got really creative. This guy ran all 10K in this bull-rider costume!