Z Valdir's races

Back to the index Here I am, ready for another race: I couldn't train much during the past winter and that showed today, I could not even do a sub-2 half marathon, which for me is a defeat. My final time was 2h09m49s.

Back to the index Last time I did this race in 2016 I said I would not do it again because the double loop we have to do is no fun, but the pandemic hit, I have been almost two years without a race, so when this opportunity knocked, I took it. Today I fared much better than my last time there, I did a sub-2, which is always nice. But I wasn't all that happy with my finishing time. I did this race in 1h57m51s. I have done better times than this during my training sessions... I had to stop to walk five times in the last seven kilometers. A half marathon should not be this hard. I don't understand what went wrong today. Maybe I did too much tapering. I usually don't taper much for races, but this time, because it had been so long since my last race, I did a full week of taper. Maybe taper and me don't mix well... At the end of my race one of the volunteers asked me if I was ok, so I think I looked bad after crossing the line... :-)

Back to the index Petit Train du Nord For my last marathon of the year I chose a small event that happens to the north of Montreal, it's the Marathon du Petit Train du Nord . Even though it is a small event (or maybe because of that) it is somewhat hard to get into it, it fills up very quickly. They opened the registration around Christmas time last year and when I went to register four days later, the half marathon was already full and the full marathon was filling up fast. So I registered right away and waited ten months for the event. Unfortunately, on the Thursday prior to the race I got a nasty cold that followed me for the next few days and affected my result in the race. Even though the event happened close to Montreal my wife decided to join me for the weekend there, so we rented a room in the sponsor hotel. We arrived at our hotel Friday night and I went right away to get my bib: The event i s   so small that there is no expo for this m arathon, ...

          Jeux FADOQ Provincial Finals This year the finals of the Jeux FADOQ happened in Trois-Rivières. My two events (10K race and 3K racewalking) happened on a September 19th, a Thursday. When  I finished work on the day before I took a bus from downtown Montreal to go to Trois-Rivières. The trip was excruciating, the bus took almost one hour just to get out of Montreal. There was traffic and construction, so the pace of the bus was maddeningly slow. And the bus stopped at the Laval terminal before getting on the road. And then it stopped at some halfway point for at least fifteen minutes to handle cargo. What a waste of time! The whole trip took almost three hours! Three hours to travel 140 Km!! Not funny... Anyway, I got to my hotel, took a shower, ate my dinner in the room and went to sleep around 10:30 pm. I woke up before 3 am, tried to sleep a bit more and by 5:30 am I was on. I got ready, went down to the restaurant ...

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...