Supporting at CanLake 50 in 2013
My brother and I had talked about running the CanLake 50km ultramarathon about 9 months ago, but fter my marathon in May I decided that I just didn’t want to invest the time in training that such an event would require and so I pulled out. He continued training and ran the race last weekend, and I couldn’t be more proud.
A few months ago he asked me to crew for him, and maybe pace him during the race. I hesitated for a while but eventually decided that I’d do it. My main concern was that the race was being held on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so when my family opted to have Thanksgiving dinner on Monday instead of Sunday I felt I could go.
And I’m glad I did.
Being a ‘handler’ at CanLake is pretty easy since the race is all roads, and the roads are not closed for the event so I basically drove from aid station to aid station and then waited for him to come into view. Main responsibility was minimizing or eliminating the time he spent in the aid stations. As such, I would meet him a few hundred yards before the station, grab his water bottles, and run ahead and have them filled for him by the time he got there.
I also made sure he had food (and was eating it) and disposed of any wrappers etc.
8 miles from the finish I started running with him as his ‘pacer’. At this point he had already run the dreaded Bare Hill but was now faced with several more long, gradual hills. I ran with him for the next 6 miles until he got his second wind and decided he could get under his target finishing time if he pushed it.
Embarrassingly I was unable to keep up with his new pace, so I told him to go for it and I dropped back because the last thing I wanted was to hold him back. I figured I had done my job by helping him through the wall and up those long, demoralizing hills, but I still feel terrible that I wasn’t able to run the last 2 miles with him.
He finished in 5th place with a time of 4:32.
As a handler, here are the things I’d bring next time
- A good camera, and maybe binoculars
- A spray bottle or something to cool the runner down
- Spare set of bottles from the runner to pre-fill and swap
- Chair
- Band-aids
- More food and water for myself
Overall I really enjoyed being his crew. I got to experience the race without
all the pain of running it, and I got to meet a lot of long-suffering supportive husbands and wives of runners.
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