On Sunday Apr 25th, after a weekend of not much sleep, including only 4 hours of sleep Saturday night, I headed out for the St John’s Waterloo marathon.
I got there about an hour before and registered, met up with another Barrie runner while he registered. (Even though we registered for the full, they gave us half bibs – more on this to come).
It was not a nice day, rain and cool (avg. temp 45F, which on it’s own I wouldn’t have minded) and some wind.
Fortunately we had a place to wait inside.
I made one last trip to the washroom, heard them calling us to the start and headed straight there, where I couldn’t find my friend (there were only a little over 150 doing the marathon).
Race starts and we’re off. Not a bad course, only 50 meters of elevation change, several times. From about 9.5-17.5k we’re into a head wind. It wasn’t a closed course, so some traffic, including Mennonites with their horse and carts, leaving presents to dodge.
At one point we ran on a dirt road, with some soft areas near the edges, fortunately not much traffic on this road.
I passed a number of runners around 31k and was still making a bit of ground up when we turned back into the wind again for 3 or 4k around 32.5k.
At 35k we met up with the back end of the half, they had started a half hour behind us.
But the km markers were out of sinc, by 1k. I was worried that somewhere a marshal was going to redirect me into an extra k because of my half bib. Kind of screwed up my focus a little. Didn’t need to worry though, the split was a couple of hundred meters from the finish (the halfers had to do a lap around the sports complex parking lot) and I headed straight into the finish in 3:54.
My friend finished about 45 minutes later, he ran Boston 6 days before, so a good finish for him. Although he told me he faded badly at 30k. I found out that he hadn’t heard the call to the start and nobody realized he needed to be out there due to his half bib, so he started almost 9 minutes late. He didn’t say so, but I think he probably went out too fast trying to catch up.
One last item with the half bibs, initially I didn’t have an official marathon finish time. The results showed me finishing the half in 3:24 (gun and chip time identical, maybe they didn’t pick up my chip at the start). After an e-mail to the timing company it has been corrected showing my correct finishing time (gun and chip time are different, so I guess they just had to go back through their data) and placing 64/156.
A small rural race and not a lot of crowd support, but enthusiastic volunteers. Not a lot of traffic on most roads. But one road it’s pretty heavy and not a lot of paved shoulder, so a concern to some (drier conditions I would have just run further over on the gravel shoulder).
I would run this race again.
