Hello again!
I know you’re anxious to hear about my famous run in Ottawa last weekend! No, seriously, since last month, I’ve been telling myself that the June editorial would be easy to write, as I would be talking about the long awaited and beautiful achievement of my goal! I was so confident! Well, I have to admit a bit shamefully that I more or less want to talk about it today. I looked for other subjects, but they all seemed to lead me back to this, despite myself.
The famous race was difficult, very difficult…
To make a long story short, a minor medical glitch (nothing serious, I assure you) prevented me from training for the last 3 weeks before the said race. To my great delight, everything settled down and I arrived in Ottawa the day before. That day, an e-mail from the race organizers announced that the entire program might be modified or even cancelled due to weather conditions. The forecast was for 31 degrees, 36 with the humidex (thanks Humidex!), with the possibility of thunderstorms (there was even a tornado 25km away!), and of course 5-10 mm of rain right in our race hours. “When all the odds are in your favor! We prepared ourselves accordingly, hydrated all day long, ate as intelligently as possible, tried to get a good night’s sleep, but of course, the cherry on the sundae was that my sister, who was also running the next day, had had a nasty cold for 5 days and coughed like I’d never heard anyone cough before!
We finally get to the starting line, wait our turn for the faster rows to start, and about 10 minutes before our start, a torrent of rain (the one and only one of the day of course) comes down and floods our shoes for 20 minutes! I won’t even kid you, because of the rain, my phone freezes and doesn’t give me my race info anymore, so I’m running blind, with no idea of my speed or distances. Right! I apologise, this is clearly not as short as I wanted it to be. So I’ll stop this here and tell you that after 1/3 of my run, I already have at least 4 blisters on my feet, so I change my running style, I hurt all over, I come close to giving up 3-4 times, I cry, I walk, I resort, I seriously question why I’m doing this, I hold myself back from throwing up and ….!!! I miraculously manage to finish (and run) with some wonderful photos as a souvenir (the worst in my life!). I am angry. Proud but mostly angry.
Sometimes, when I was looking for other subjects to avoid turning the knife, I just thought of my father’s anecdote who explains in a conference that we often tend to blame our sector of activity, the economy, our territory, the weather, etc., when business is not going to our liking. He says that when he had a team of reps on the road, 2 of them traded territories. The guy making $35k would get the territory of the guy making $50k and vice versa. After about 20 months, the numbers had reversed, proving that territory was not the problem. To anyone who gives me a similar excuse, I tell them the same thing my father did; that it’s up to them to adapt to the market and change it, not the other way around.
I’ve been thinking about my race ever since (mostly because my thighs are still creaking) and I’m detailing all the possible excuses that made this race terrible (I would have had another 2 pages of Word), but the truth is that I wasn’t prepared. I can’t expect to be prepared for the worst by not training in the worst conditions. It makes sense! Even if it makes me angry!
Having said that, NO, I will not be running in the rain and at -20 anymore. At least not yet. And I’m willing to accept that the next few races may be difficult.
Are you?
