Race Report: CRS Half-Marathon (Montreal) – Part 2

Last Saturday, I realized that travelling overnight with the boys to a race works for 5K and 10K’s, but for longer ones, it’s an entirely different story.

By Saturday at noon, the temperatures had dropped significantly, it was wet and raining, and nobody wanted to go back outside. That left us stuck in the hotel room, resulting in two boys who had perfected the phrase “I’m bored”.

Neither one of them was interested in watching television. Skipper had homework so he busied himself with that while Little Ironman practised his superhero moves jumping from one bed to another.

By 4:00, we moved outside our four walls and wandered through the halls at the hotel. There was a beautiful grand piano sitting in the lobby but Skipper wasn’t allowed to play it. The pool was calling the boys but I didn’t want to go in because supporting LI in the water takes a lot of quad muscle; I knew that I’d pay for it the next day.

All I could think about on Saturday afternoon was how hard a day like that would be on the weekend of a marathon. Hubby and I have spoken about taking the boys to watch me run the 26.2 in the fall, wherever that may be, but after this weekend, it is clear that that would be the wrong thing to do. This now means that I may have to rethink about running a fall marathon that is close to home.

By 4:30, Daddy returned from his adventure through downtown Montreal and took LI swimming. Me? I headed out – into the pouring rain – for a bit of retail therapy. I was panicking about not having the right bottoms to wear for the race and wanted to try to find something else as a back-up. In the end, I decided to stick with what I had; it was tried and true. But I did pick up an orange headband to cover my ears; you do remember that I’m the Number 1 Devil, don’t you?

Dinner that night was the next challenge. Being lactose-intolerant, I have to stay away from dairy and it seemed that everything had butter, cheese, or milk. The night before I had a burger (no bun) and a baked potato. Since that sat well, I had exactly the same thing on Saturday – boring but stable.

Before the boys fell asleep, we decided that I would go to Parc Jean Drapeau on my own. It was too cold and windy, and I worried that they would be miserable. Instead, they could swim in the pee-warm hotel pool and go out for pancakes.

At midnight, I checked The Weather Network one last time. It wasn’t suppose to rain while we were running, but the temperatures were still the same: 6-6-6.

“Hey!” I said to my husband. “Why don’t you take the boys to the Basilica in the morning?” After all, they were there on Friday night and said they wanted to go back to hear the choir.

“That’s a great idea.”

“Good. You can pray for me. I’m going to need all of the help I can get.”

Tomorrow: Part 3 (Final)