Jeux FADOQ de Montreal 2019

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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 behind a group of young runners who were all wearing t-shirts of the "Étudiants dans la course" group. But they were going a little too fast for me, so after a kilometer I disconnected from them and dialed down my pace a bit.

There was one spot at km 2 where there was mud on the path, so we had to jump over that. And as the race was a two-lap thing, we met the same problem at km 7. Not that funny, I did not sign up for a mud race...

I completed the race in 48m20s, a new personal record for the distance for me. The problem is, my Garmin was telling me that I had run only 9.83km, not 10. I guess the organizers didn't measure the distance all that well...

II) Rapid walking

On May 13th I went to the Park Jarry for the rapid walking and prediction walking events of the games.

First up was the 1 Km prediction walk. I had done two training laps, each in 12 minutes, so I predicted my time to be 11m50s. I ended up doing the official lap in less than eleven minutes, almost a minute off my mark, even worse than last year.

In the main event, the 3 Km rapid walk, we had again the same story as before: Mme. Bégin first, her husband Robert Marchand second and myself close behind.

During the race I was side by side with him, at some points I was even a tiny bit ahead, but in the end he had energy left for "the kick" and I had nothing, he beat me by three seconds or so, like last year in St. Jerome.

As I was the only one in the 50-59 age category I got a gold medal, but I would have gotten that even if I had finished last, so that doesn't count too much.