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FLRC Newsletter - May 2003 |
| Hamilton, Ontario Around the Bay 30K Race Report — March 30, 2003 | |
It was a great weekend for local runners -- Gillian
Sharpe winning her age group at the nationals, Erik Maki running a fine
15K in the snow at Forks, and Lorrie beating the elements at the race
that I always confuse with Dinty Moore Beef Stew.
Boris Dzikovski, Terry Delaney and I traveled north to run the Around the Bay 30K in Hamilton, Ontario. We crossed the border without mishap and arrive in Niagara Falls, Ont. in time to catch the light show at the falls and dinner at a fine Cantonese vegetarian restaurant called Xin Vego (antonym: Vin Diesel). Highly recommended! Would be particularly good after a spin at the House of Dracula and the Guinness Book of World Records show or, for high rollers, a fling at the crap tables (speaking of which, you'll have to ask Boris and Terry about the effects of vegetarian Ma Bo Dofu on the GI system; I eat this stuff all the time).
After dinner we checked in at the Niagara Falls youth hostel. Kind of grim, a cockroach on my coverlet, but B & T kindly took the upper bunks, and we had a moment of levity when Boris set off the burglar alarm trying to find the bathroom.
Next morning was cold (28F?), although dry unlike south of the lake. The Hamilton event lists itself as the oldest race in North America (started 1894), and is a major affair in Canada, with 3300 entrants this year. The entire race setup is well organized and professional, featuring chip timing, a nice staging area in a (heated) convention area downtown and close to the start and finish, good volunteers, well trained in handing cups, and pretty good crowd support for a cold day. Boris and I decided to go with shorts; otherwise it is hard to describe Boris' attire, but I wore a long sleeved polypro shirt and gloves. Despite the size of the field it wasn't hard to get close to the starting line; I crossed about 4 seconds after the gun, with Terry ahead but in sight, and Boris soon out of sight.
For all of us this was a Boston training run. I wanted to run under two hours (a bit faster than marathon pace, but what the hey, it's a famous race). The race had markers at each K mark and splits every 5K - very nice for faster feedback than what you get with mile markers. 1K was 4 min., right on pace given the congestion at the start.
The 30K course runs literally around the bay - Hamilton Bay is an enclosed inlet off of Lake Ontario with a few bridged outlets to allow ore tankers in to supply the city's still thriving (well, government-protected) steel mills. The bay shore is the industrial landscape of any rust belt city, except that smoke is still coming out of the smokestacks. The race starts out going west on Hamilton's Main St., then heads south at 5K though a strip-type area toward lake Ontario. Shortly after 10K it passes under the QEW and turns northeast along the lake shore. One is never actually on the shore of lake or bay, so the course is somewhat sheltered.
Nevertheless, there was a substantial headwind until the course turned west at about 17K. Terry was running with a sizeable pack clustered around a guy wearing a pair of rabbit ears labeled "2 hours". I caught up to this pack around 5K (19:35) and joined Terry drafting behind the taller members (actually, Terry was one of the taller members, but it would have been obnoxious to draft behind him, my fellow HNACer, although he was a popular choice regardless the previous night's dinner). At 10K (39:30) the course crossed a small overpass just before reaching the lakeshore, and I took advantage of the downhill to pull ahead of the 2hr. pack. During the next 5K up Beach Boulevard I realized that we had been benefiting from the overall downhill in the course as it moved toward the lake. My kilometer splits stayed in the 4 min range, sometimes a little bit slower. 15K was 59:26. At that point another runner broke from the pack and passed me over the steel bridge crossing the Welland Canal. This provided some inspiration to pick it up a little bit. At 17K we turned out of the wind into the hills of the residential district to the west of the bay, overlooking downtown.
This section provides good Boston training: rolling hills, comparable to the Ashland-Framingham segments of Boston. I caught up with the breakaway guy, turned out to be from Toronto, and we had a conversation about war. Our 20K split was 1:19:06, an encouraging mark since overall the 17-20K section was uphill. Just before 25K, Rabbit Ears caught up with me again. 26-27K proceed though a city park through a steep downhill followed by a nasty climb, almost a kilometer, up Valley Inn Rd. to York Boulevard, a major thoroughfare back into downtown on a gradual downhill. I was able to pass a number of runners here. Just before 28K I saw somebody walking, turned to shout encouragement, and saw that it was Ron Herreid (I still shouted encouragement, though).
Ron revealed later in the beer line that he felt dizzy around 25K. The Hamilton finish is one of those perfect arrangements where you can see the chute a kilometer away. I finished in 1:58:39, comfortably under my target. Boris (1:53:09) came back to meet me in the chute, and we both met up with Terry (2:06:49).
Boris's time was good for 24th place overall, 23rd in his age group, and just one place behind the woman's winner, countrywoman Ludmilla Kortchagiuna in 1:52:50.0. This reveals a chivalrous side to Boris that we have only been able to guess at. Kortchagiuna and the gaggle of Kenyans at the top were running for pretty reasonable prize money - $2,500 (yeah, Canadian) for the men and women's winners. My time turned out to be good for 57th overall and 3rd in the 45-49 age group (309 runners), one of my better showings in a big race Terry was 141st and 12th in the age group, all in all a pretty good showing for HNAC, and one that got us safely in the beer (first one free) and food (cream of broccoli, anything warm tasted good in that weather) lines before the crowds arrived.
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