Walking Whidbey Island Half Marathon

It's been almost 2 weeks since Icompleted the Whidbey Island Half Marathon but the majestic beauty of the Olympic Mountains, as they could be seen from the course, are fresh in my mind. What a beautiful day for a race - as you can see from the images I have included here.

Whidbey Island is nestled in the protective grasp of Puget Sound, cradled by the Cascade Mountains of the U.S Pacific coast to the east and the Olympic Mountains that border the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle to the southwest. It's a bucolic island of fields and water - except for the airforce base. Oak Harbour, which owes much of its existence to the base, is where I found myself for the start of the race on a brisk Sunday morning a few weeks ago.

I ended up here on Whidbey Island for several reasons but one of those was because the race has featured a walking division for several years. As so often happens, my optimism for this walking division was ill-founded. Within seconds of the horn sounding for the walking start that left 5 minutes after the running start, several partipants were running down the road. Another 15 minutes into the race and I was catching up to more who were wearing the special walking bibs but who were clearly running and taking walk breaks.

Fortunately the course was one of the most beautiful I have ever walked. Rolling and challenging hills combined with stunning views of water, green fields, and glacier-topped mountains. There wasn't much in the way of crowd support but surounded by such natural landscape beauty, it wasn't missed.

Still, in the end I would have to give the race 2 out 4 WoW happy faces for walkers. I love that there is a walking division but I think it makes sense for the organizers to go that extra mile (pun alert!) to educate all participants that walking means walking. If a person plans to run any portion of the race, registration should be in the running category. I just can't believe that this would be difficult for organziers to reinforce through education on the website and on the registration forms.

Clearly this "walking division" was created to keep walkers out of the way of runners. The assumption of the organzers being that walkers are always slower and less committed to excellence. But organizers and participants alike need to understand that to walk an event does not mean to take it easy. With all the latest research showing that people need to exercise with their heart rate at the high end of their target heart rate in order to improve key fitness indicators such as resting metabolic rate, blood pressure, resting heart rate, bone density, and more, we need to be raising expectations on walking as workout. And creating a race environment that honors this workout is a logical expectation.