The mass appeal of marathoning

On Sunday, Eric Gillis, Reid Coolsaet and Dylan Wykes will be competing for Canada in the Olympic Marathon. It'll be a must-watch event not just to cheer on our first athletes to compete for Canada since 2000 in the event, but to see what actually unfolds on the streets of London (lots of turns) and if any dark horses emerge.

As I wrote earlier, I interviewed Dylan Wykes a few weeks ago. Here's a good portion of a story I wrote for HuffPost Canada today previewing the marathon and the sport of running.

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DYLAN WYKES’ ROAD to London began with a fall, at the start line with 7,000 runners behind him, his knees scraped and bloodied by the slip. Some two hours and 10 minutes later, he put the finishing touches on a searing performance in Rotterdam, the second fastest ever marathon time by a Canadian and a ticket to the Olympics.

Wykes, a Kingston, Ont. native now based in Vancouver, knows he has no logical chance to medal while representing Canada among a deeply talented field that is dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians.

On Sunday morning, the event will get its big showcase. In these Games, perhaps more than any in the past, the marathon hits a cross road with a sport that’s experiencing a boom. Rightly so, as the marathon was an event created for the Olympics and the 26.2-mile route was forged on the streets of London more than a century ago. The Olympic marathon has historically closed the Games as one of the final events, with the winner entering a packed stadium to take their victory lap.

“It’s the biggest stage,” Wykes told HuffPost Canada as he was training at altitude in Switzerland before the Olympics. For Wykes, a top 25 performance is a goal, and a top 10 finish a dream. “There are guys who have run 2:04, there are guys who are six minutes faster [than his personal best].”
In the 16 years since Canada last sent a man to run the Olympic marathon, the sport has gone through a massive change, as a surge of popularity ushers in the next generation of runners.

A SPORT FINDS ITS LEGS

Since 1908, when Olympic organizers decided to add two kilometres to race course so that royalty could view the finish, the 42.2-kilometre marathon has become the modern everyperson’s Everest, the bucket list item that thousands upon thousands of men and women have now crossed off.
The word marathon has been synonymous with epic times, seeped into public consciousness, and applied to sedentary affairs like the airing of TV reruns, extended tennis matches or similarly drawn-out affairs, even as the marathon records continue to get faster.

In big-city marathons, where professional marathoners earn their money, the elites are joined by runners of all stripes, sizes and speeds. The biggest of them all bring in more than 45,000 runners. The most recent running boom, has seen women take on the sport (and racing) in massive, greying numbers. Last year, almost 14 million people participated in a road race in the United States, with 55 per cent of those finishers were women. Canada has experienced a similar boom, particularly in the half marathon.

Read the rest over at The Huffington Post Canada, Canada Olympic Marathon: Running Booms As Dylan Wykes, Eric Gillis And Reid Coolsaet To Compete Sunday

The Marathon begins Sunday at 11 a.m. London time or 6 a.m. ET.

Vegetarian and gluten free for running?

I like to think runners have habits that die hard. Take our nutrition. The runner in the midst of marathon training may alternate between hunger and and occasional bad-food binging.

When I'm prepping for a long distance race, I can easily plan three days of meals ahead, where simplicity is the goal and pasta, bagels and bananas (and also water and sodium) are the staple of my diet.

I recently interviewed Canadian Olympian marathoner Dylan Wykes on how he trains and fuels for performance. You may not know this, but Wykes is a vegetarian and has debated on whether he should go back to eating meat as an elite athlete.

See the interview with him here at Huffington Post Canada. He runs through some of the favourite foods he fuels with, including almond butter, quinoa and lentils.

What didn't make the piece I wrote was how he eats pre race (or what he'll be eating in a few days). Like others, he focuses on carb intake, probably rice or pasta, plua "a few vegetables." Wykes doesn't really concentrate on protein.

A typical day would look like

• Breakfast: Toast, almond butter and banana
• Post workout: Rice, pasta or quinoa
• Lunch: Quinoa and bean salad
• Dinner: Fake meat at times (ground or tofu) with pasta.

Many people I know are also trying to go gluten free and I've been toying with carb substitutes that are gluten free, which is hard when I can easily have all three meals with bread or pasta products. This past weekend, I made a quinoa salad with lentils, and R. surprisingly liked it, even while admitting that she hated the grainy texture of quinoa. By the next meal, we were having white rice and home made ma po tofo. I really can't imagine eliminating gluten as a way to get my carbs in.

The pause

This summer marks the seventh straight that I've been prepping for fall marathons. Looking at the training graphs for the past few months, and activity on this blog, you'd think I've taken a hiatus.

Not so, but logging less than 50 miles in June (I took two weeks off to go to Asia) and 128 miles in July do not equal one of those monster months I've been accustomed to in years gone by.

I know the work that goes into that fall marathon, 300 miles once I piled into an August three years ago. The training schedule, once ingrained into your calendar, puts a sense of purpose into each day. Didn't get in the 7 mile tempo run? Your day would be ruined.

Looking at my daily schedule now, my runs take a priority -- I still schedule after-work commitments so I can 'get my run in', and look to build up the mileage by the time I reach Friday evening. Every weekend still has that purpose with the buildup to that long run on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

But the program, it's freeflowing, all in the head, my body's on a sort of autopilot built to train up to the endurance event.

The dividends are still there -- after a sweat soaked run, I still feel as spent as I'd experienced hundreds of times by now. Feeling that my body was pushed, that I was able to connect to my physical self.

But I don't measure progress in pace times now -- at least not this year. This year, other priorities manifest, and I no longer view marathon training as work. Work would take the love out of it, I guess, so in that vein, I view my training as a way of life.

Running my 20th marathon this spring was almost a more poignant moment in a way than qualifying for and running the Boston Marathon. After finishing No. 20, instead of what next, I took a longer view. I no longer thought about the next marathon but about how long I would run, period.

Do I get the itch to run? I still do, every day.

This morning, having not attempted a long run in a few weeks, I put in seven kilometres on Rock Creek Park before ducking back inside to view the finish of the women's marathon. Having cooled off, I weighed between staying in the comfortable apartment or heading back outside into the DC heatwave. Mind made, I refilled the bottles, stepped outside, regained the satellite signal, embraced the heat and hit the unpause button.

13.1 miles in 2:02

No need to apologize, Paula Findlay

Guts are a key ingredient in the makeup of any athlete who meddles in endurance sports. Just stand at the final 400 metres of any marathon, major or small, and you'll see it on the salt-stained faces of finishers.

We like to celebrate during these Games those athletes who medal, those who stand on podiums and rack up medals. In defeat, in agony, however, you see the true display of sportsmanship and what it takes to push the body beyond limits.

Paula Findlay finished last in her Olympic debut today, and told the nation that she was "sorry." For any athlete who have felt the Wall, felt the race wasn't their day, that must be just a fraction of what she was going through. On her sport's biggest day, she must of felt the weight of her own expectations, let alone her nation's.

"I'm really sorry to everybody to Canada."

It was fellow Canadian triathlete Simon Whitfield who for me succinctly summed up what race day meant for his sport -- or any sport where preparation is the key. A few weeks after he ran that thrilling silver medal win in Beijing in 2008, he wrote:

"I felt like all I had to do was express my fitness, I wasn't hoping for miracles, simply expressing fitness earned through hard work," he wrote on a blog at the time.


Fitness is earned through hard work, and race day is an expression of all the preparation. These athletes don't go praying for a breakthrough performance, and even after the race Findlay said "I guess my fitness is not quite up there."

It wasn't Paula's day. And it could have been a day, where she would just have to stand off the course, and walk away from the race.

But she didn't.

One of the most unforgettable moments I'll always associate with the Olympics is the finish of Derek Redmond, a British runner who at the 1992 Games injured himself in the midst of competition. In severe pain and sadness, he hobbling to the finish, in front of tens of thousands.




Making it to the finish, forcing yourself to face the line, the cameras, when you don't have an ounce of energy left in you. That's guts and that's heart.

No need to apologize Paula. No need.

Canadian Marathoners Put A Stamp On London 2012?

It's been 12 years since Canada sent a marathoner to the Olympics. In less than three weeks, three of our compatriots will be toeing the start line.

I dug out a stamp collection, above, from the 1976 Olympics the other day. It was in Montreal where Canada's fastest marathoner in history, Jerome Drayton, finished sixth. His fastest time (2:10:09) was logged a year earlier and he won the Boston Marathon a year later. He was in that respect our greatest modern marathoner.

Anyways, the stamp made me think about the opportunity our three guys have to make some history, but more importantly, representing a nation that clearly has embraced running in our personal lives has something to be said.

I spoke to Dylan Wykes last week for a series of articles I'm writing for the Huffington Post Canada (look for them soon).

Couple things I learned:

• He's training in Switzerland at altitude - just ran a 1:03:33 in Hamburg.
• He does, like every runner I know, a reasonable and a dream goal. I'll share what they are in one of the articles
• He's a vegetarian (wow!)
• And yes, elite marathoners are human too: After the 30K mark, "it's a different beast, and there's always the element of the  unknown."

Oh yeah, where have I been in the last month. Maybe I should write a post on that, but the short version is a vacation from running for three weeks, and I'm ramping back up -- two marathons this fall.