Montreal in 2014

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I left home at 8 am and went to the Longueil metro station, where the marathon would start. Arriving there, there was an enormous crowd on the move to the start line. Unfortunately here in Montreal the organizers start the two races (the marathon and the half marathon) at the same time and at the same place. The marathon attracted 4,900 people while the half marathon had more than 16,000 registrations! So the Jacques Cartier bridge was a sea of people everywhere!!

I was in the third “wave” (corrals 21 to 28) which was supposed to start at 9h05 am. I got there twenty minutes before that and walked up the bridge. I passed by my corral, but everybody was just moving on, there were no more corrals as such, it was everybody together.

A young woman started a conversation with me in English, she wanted to know if she was in the right place. She was part of corral 23. I told her that now everybody was combined together, they wouldn’t be checking the corrals anymore. She told me that this was her first marathon, she had run a half in April but she had trained 38 km a few weeks back, so she should be ok.

At 9h30 we finally got to the starting line and one minute later we were running. I wasn’t really forcing my pace, but I did the first kilometer in less than five minutes, which was way faster than the average that I need to complete the marathon in less than five hours. I had calculated that I would get an average of 7’10’’ per kilometer to get a sub-5, so I eased up on the rhythm. But even then, by km 10 I had already gotten ten minutes of buffer time. I did the first 10K in 1h02m, which was very good.

The sun came out in force and my pace started to suffer. The next 10K I was only able to keep up with the average. I completed the half marathon in 2h19m, which was a pretty decent result.

One of the bad things about the marathon in Montreal is that the organizers make you pass close to the finish line on km 21 and then again on km 32. Pretty bad psychologically.

After the half way point my performance really started to suffer. By km 30 I had lost the ten minutes that I had as a buffer, which meant that I would have to do the rest of the race at average. Tired as I was, I knew that was impossible, so my sub-5 would escape me once more… :-(

My wife and I had agreed that we would meet at km 37, she would take some pictures of me, but the web site for the event went bad for a while and she couldn’t get a confirmation of when I had passed by the timer on km 32. When the site finally came back online, it was too late, she arrived there after I had gone through.

The last five kilometers were pure hell, I had to walk two full kilometers, I had nothing more to give.

I crossed the finish line with a time of 5h17m37s, which makes it my third best (out of five) times.

I have decided that I will not run another marathon here in Montreal. In other cities it’s always nice, even if the run is going bad, at least I’m seeing a different city, there is always something to discover. Here in Montreal, I did not feel it that way, I don’t want to repeat this experience.

After the run I got the free beer that comes with the registration. I don’t know if it was a bad beer or if my mouth was all weird due to the superhuman effort that I went through, but it tasted pretty bad… I have to try it again under normal conditions to see what was the problem.

At home I took a long bath in the bathtub:

and told my wife all about my adventures during the day. We drank champagne to celebrate my finishing one more marathon.

Here are my splits:

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