Z Valdir's races

Back to the index Ottawa Marathon The day before My daughter recently moved to Ontario to work in a nuclear plant in Chalk River, 200 km north of Ottawa, so we had agreed that we would meet in our nation's capital during the weekend of the races to celebrate her 31st birthday. My wife and I arrived shortly after 9 am in our hotel and went to its restaurant, where our daughter was already waiting for us. We had a very nice breakfast with her, she told us stories of her new job and her new home.  After breakfast we went to the race expo to get my bib. We spent very little time at the expo, because my daughter had to go take her car to continue her trip to Montreal, where she would be attending a wedding. After she was gone we did the check-in and to our surprise we got the room right away! Yay! And it was a very good room: We left our stuff in the room and went to the Canadian Museum of History (formerly known as  Canadian Museum of Civiliza...

Back to the index Jeux FADOQ de Montreal 2019 I) Running On May 4th I participated in the 10K race organized by the YMCA. The FADOQ once more piggy-backed on this event. I told the FADOQ representative that I could not stay for the medal ceremony because I had something else happening in the afternoon that I had to attend to (I would be going to the Congrès Boréal in Sherbrooke, to meet my favourite science fiction writer Élisabeth Vonarburg). This year I decided to participate in the 10K event in order to give the 5K participants a better chance in the provincials. Last year the four first places in the provincial final of the 5K were all Montrealers (I finished second) and the fourth place finished only two seconds after the third place, so Montreal would have gotten all medals even if I was not there. Anyway, at 8:40 we all went to the start line and five minutes later the gun fired for our event. I quickly left the 50m bunny behind, I parked behin...

Back to the index Canada Running Series Scotia Bank 5K This year I decided that I would take part in the Double of the Scotia Bank Half Marathon. That means that on top of running the half marathon on Sunday, I would also run the 5K on Saturday. As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time... During the week prior to the event I started having doubts about my decision. What if I hurt myself in the 5K and messed up the main event? Oh well, too late for that... I usually don't run 5K races because that's like a training distance for me. But this time I decided to do it in order to have an official time for the distance.  What I was really hoping for was a personal record in the distance, but that was not in the cards for me, unfortunately. It rained most of the week prior to the race and the Saturday morning was no different. It was raining and it was cold, a good day to stay in bed drinking hot chocolate, not to be running around in the c...