So after a less than desirable result at Pick your Poison 50k on Saturday, I was looking for my next good race Sunday.
Sunday I ran the Waterloo St. John’s Marathon.
(disclaimer, when I originally schedule Waterloo, Pick your Poison was supposed to be on May 7th)
Got there an hour and 20 minutes early and met up with one of my friends, doing her first marathon. Spent most of the pre-race time talking with her, as well as met up with another friend.
8am and we’re off. Early on I realized this was not going to be my day either. Quads would not come loose.
St John’s is a small marathon, only about 130 running it. Some people don’t like it as they don’t close the roads, with the exception of one short stretch at the beginning. You end up running alongside some major roads too, with a lot of truck traffic. For the most part there is only a 2ft wide paved shoulder to run on along these roads, otherwise there is the usual gravel portion. That has a nasty camber so I try to avoid that. The secondary roads aren’t as bad for traffic, although you may run into a lot of horse and buggy traffic from the Mennonite communities. There’s also one stretch of gravel road from 17 to 22.5k. This can be pretty soft when wet, but the rain held off until I was through it. At about 24k you get to run through an old covered bridge, watch your footing, the horse and buggy traffic has left some surprises.
I also enjoyed the pipers playing you through some of the tougher sections.
I managed to maintain a steady pace, until about 28k. The first 28k were overcast and a little cool, but not too bad. At 28k we turned into a head wind, the rain started and we started hitting the rolling hills. The rain stopped with about 6k to go, but the head wind never really let up. Some sadist of a race director put in a last couple of hills in the last two kilometres too.
Finish time 4:20. Okay with the results after a tough race the day before.
My friend finished her first not long after.
Post race food was decent, with amongst other things, bagels already cut for you and volunteers ready to spread jams, etc on them for you.
Post race massage and I called it a day.
