I had a really fun night last night.

A bit of back story: earlier this year, I signed up for Canadian Running Magazine’s Marathon Quest — a 16-week training program put on by the magazine and sponsored by Brooks. For $100, participants get their entrance into the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon, a 16-week training program, a Brooks Canadian Running Marathon Quest t-shirt, race-day perks, e-mails with training advice from Canadian Running staff and group runs. Not too shabby.

Last night was the first group run of the quest — a 5k easy run through Toronto’s High Park — with some of the staff from the magazine (including Couch to Kenyan blogger Rebecca Gardiner and Editor-in-Chief Michal Kapral)  as well as elite runners Tara-Quinn and Andrew Smith. For those of you not familiar with the Smiths, they’re Canada’s fastest distance running couple. Tara holds the Canadian women’s half-marathon record (1:12:08), which she set last year in Montreal, and was the Canadian Marathon Champion in 2008 with a time of 2:33:57 in Ottawa. Andrew set his marathon PB in Houston last year with a time of 2:16:14 and a half-marathon PB of 1:05:14.

Ya, they’re fast.

They’re also part of the Brooks Canada Marathon Project, which allows selected athletes the opportunity to train and live without concern for financial support, training for the World Championships or Olympic games within two to six years. Both Tara and Andrew are hoping to represent Canada in the 2012 summer games.

All this is to say, that the night really got me excited again. Excited that I’m running again and even more excited that I’m training. I’ve been pretty nervous about training and possibly re-injuring myself, but I had an opportunity to ask both Tara and Andrew about coming back into training after injury and received some great advice. They were both very nice and incredibly gracious with all our questions.

The evening even had some sponsorship. InfinIt Nutrition provided onsite refreshments with their InfinIt Run sports drink, and provided samples of their products for each of the runners to take home and try. What’s neat about InfinIt is that you can customize your sports drink to your needs with their online slider (which adjusts flavour, electrolytes, amino acids, etc.). I’ll have to post a review after I try them out:

Last, but not least, is that hat. Yup – Canadian Running swag. Our group was a sea of bobbing blue hats through High Park last night as we were each given one of these:

I know, pretty sexy.