Z Valdir's races

Back to the index Edmonton  Marathon Last year, when we were prep aring our 2019 trip, our constraint was that we could only travel in July/August, due to my wife's work schedule. I tried to find a suitable marathon in Europe, but could find none that appealed to me. Too m any tr ail events  and other things th at did not interest me. So, I tried to find marathons here in Canada during that period. The Edmonton marathon would happen on August 18th, right at the end of our "window of opportunity ", so we took that. We have been living in Canada for more than 25 years and had never visited anywhere to the west of Toronto, so this was our chance to get to know more of our country of adoption. We planned a twelve-day vacation that started in Calgary, passed by the Canadian badlands (to see the dinosaurs) and ended in Edmonton. We had a blast, we went to many museums, did walking tours of the cities and even visited the parliament of Alberta. On Saturday,...

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...

Back to the index Quebec City Marathon 2019 The day before the race This year my wife couldn't go with me to the Quebec City marathon, she had something else happening that same weekend in Montreal, so on Saturday, October 13th, at 8 am I took a bus to go from Montreal to Quebec. The trip seemed long, I wrote my diary, read my book, did crosswords and when I looked at the watch, only one hour had passed. Phhh... Anyway, I arrived safe and sound in Quebec shortly after 11 am and walked to my hotel. It was a long walk, more than half an hour.  At the hotel I did all the check-in bureaucracy but could not take the room yet, of course, it would only be available at 4 pm. I left my heavy bag there and went to the Convention Centre to get my bib. Getting the bib and t-shirt was straightforward. The t-shit is long-sleeved. Nice touch, considering that on race day the temperature would be in the single digits. I walked to the Café du Monde to have my lunch. This is our ...

          Jeux FADOQ Provincial Finals The provincial finals of the FADOQ games happened in the city of St. Jerome, a small city 60 km to the north of Montreal. The athletic events (running and march) happened in the St. Jerome Polyvalent School. On a gravel track, not the best surface for speed. Arriving there I noticed a problem with the organization: we were around one hundred participants, and there was one, one port-a-potty. The day would be long... 5K run The day started with the prediction march, team event. The running h appened right after that. The 5K and the 10K were run at the same time on the 400m track. There was no chip available to calculate our time, they had volunteers checking how many laps each athlete did. The 10K people would do 25 laps, we of the 5K would do 12.5 laps. Because of that we started at opposing sides of the track. Alain Vincent, who had won in Montreal in May, started at an impossible pace, I didn...

Back to the index Ottawa Marathon First the 10K This year the Ottawa Race Weekend was a family affair for us, as we had three members competing in two events. My daughter was scheduled to run the half marathon, but she got injured two months before the event, so she decided to scale down to the 10K. And she said she would walk it, instead of run it, again because of her injury. My wife, upon hearing that, decided to join her for the 10K walk. So, on Saturday evening, my wife and my daughter were at the start line (together with other seven thousand people!). They had a blast, walked most of the way, did short stretches of running and even some dancing... :-) Then the marathon The following day was my turn to get to the start line, this time for the full marathon. My daughter went with me to the back of the "corrals" and even accompanied me in my warm-up exercises, we jogged together for ten minutes or so. Then  she went to the start line to see the e...