Elite runners expected to post fast times in Edmonton 10K
Two-time Olympian Coolsaet among favourites in field for inaugural race
Reid Coolsaet is feeling strong coming off his ninth-place finish at the Boston Marathon in April, which is not good news for the rest of the field at the inaugural Edmonton 10K on Sunday.
Coolsaet, 39, is one of the favourites to win the Canadian Running Series event, which will conclude at the Alberta Legislative grounds. The Hamilton, Ont., product won the Toronto Waterfront 10K in June with a time of 30 minutes, 13 seconds.
“After Boston, I took a little recovery time and started building back up and it was going well, my workouts were kind of clicking along, nothing too specific,” Coolsaet said. “Then after the last Canadian Running Series Lululemon race in Toronto, my workouts have really clicked. So I’ve started to get on the track once a week and I’ve started doing much faster-paced stuff then I had been in the previous six weeks.”
Coolsaet ran a 14:40, five-kilometre race last week, which is a good indicator of the speed he is bringing to the Edmonton event. The race will feature 5,000 runners and offers a $2,000 top prize to each the men’s and women’s winner. It will start on 106 St. between 96 and 97 Ave. at 7:30 a.m., work its way through the Legislative grounds, loop around the Windsor Park neighbourhood and down Saskatchewan Drive before crossing the High Level Bridge on its way back to the Legislature.
“The course looks like it’s flat, which is nice. We can run fast,” Coolsaet said. “Edmonton is a little bit higher in elevation than I’m used to, so that might slow it down a little bit more than I’m used to, but I don’t expect it will slow us down too much. And there is good competition with Evan Esselink, he’s the Canadian 10K road champ, and Trevor Hofbauer, who has also had some good results in the last couple of years. Those guys will be tough to beat.”
While the Edmonton 10K is a shorter race, Coolsaet anticipates some strategy to come into play involved against elite runners, the likes of Esselink and Hofbauer.
“If those guys were to go out really fast, faster than I think is sustainable, then I definitely would just run my own pace,” Coolsaet said. “I also don’t trust my final kick so much that I would want a slow pace. So if those guys were running slower than I wanted, then I would push the pace to go faster. Within a small window, I’ll either run a tactical race or run my own race.”
Coolsaet is a two-time Olympian. He ran 2:14:58 in Rio in 2016, finishing 23rd and 2:16:29 in a 27th-place finish in London in 2012. After Edmonton, Coolsaet will begin training for the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct. 21.
On the women’s side, Dayna Pidhoresky is among the favourites coming off her win at the Vancouver Half Marathon four weeks ago. Pidhoresky, 31, won the Victoria 10K in April and finished fourth at the Toronto Waterfront 10K in June.
The Windsor, Ont., native, who now calls Vancouver home, represented Canada in the women’s marathon at the 2017 IAAF World Championship in London, England.
“Instead doing a spring marathon, I’ve sort of focused on some of the shorter races just to get some speed in the legs,” Pidhoresky said. “I did two marathons last year, and sometimes that slows you down a little bit. This year has been pretty good, I’ve definitely wanted to run a little faster in some of the half marathons that I targeted, but consistency-wise, I’m really pleased.”
Pidhoresky started the year winning the Stevenson Icebreaker 8K in Richmond, B.C., in a time of 28:34. She won a 30K in Hamilton in March and the One American Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis, Ind., in May.
Pidhoresky has been an elite runner for the better part of the past decade, manly at half-marathon distances or shorter. She completed her first marathon in October 2016, finishing as the third-fastest Canadian at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, which also served as the national championship.
The performance in Toronto earned Pidhoresky a spot on the national team for the world championships the following August, where she struggled, finishing 70th in a time of two hours, 56 minutes 15 seconds. Pidhoresky ran 2:40:38 in Toronto. She had run 2:36:08 and was the top Canadian in Ottawa two months before Worlds.
“The Worlds was sort of a disaster for me, but my goal was really just to get there,” Pidhoresky said. “So I sort of had to sacrifice a good performance there, because it was so close to the Ottawa marathon that I did. So this year, I wanted to like racing again because after Worlds I felt completely defeated. So I trained really hard in the winter and had a great base going into the spring and I’ve been trying to target some personal best in the 10K, which I’ve been able to get.”