THE LONG GAME
Rachel Cliff is trying to stay patient with her Olympic dream on hold
Leave it to a couple of curious onlookers to bring Olympic distance running hopeful Rachel Cliff to a proverbial halt.
“We were training right around here earlier today,” Cliff explained from a spot on a park bench at Jericho Beach one afternoon last week. “My coach mapped it out and we did a bunch of miles. At the end, this couple came over and said, ‘You’re obviously training for something. What are you training for?’
“I was like, ‘Hmmm ... that’s a really good question.’ ”
Such is life for competitors of Cliff’s calibre these days.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the 2020 Summer Olympics were slated to start just over three weeks from today, on July 22 in Tokyo.
Vancouver’s Cliff, 32, was a candidate to be there. She had set a Canadian mark in the marathon with her 2:26.56 effort in Nagoya, Japan, in March, 2019. Kelowna’s Malindi Elmore had bettered that with a 2:24.50 in Houston on Jan. 19, but Cliff was going to take a run at that at a Tokyo marathon in March.
If she wasn’t certain on her spot in the marathon mix, she could have also tried her hand at other distance events at the Canadian Olympic trials, which would have been contested this past weekend in Montreal.
Instead, Cliff pulled out of the Tokyo marathon due to COVID-19 concerns and the Canadian Olympic Committee announced in March that it wouldn’t be sending a team if the summer Olympics started on schedule. Australia and Great Britain did the same, and days later the Olympics were postponed. They’ll now run July 23-Aug. 8, 2021, but still under the Tokyo 2020 banner.
Cliff, like so many of the rest of us, is trying to figure out just where things are headed for her and what’s next. She believes she could be race ready in a short order if required, but athletics is in a holding pattern similar to other sports.
She’s listed as a competitor for the Canadian 10-kilometre championships on Canada Day but that’s a virtual event, with registered runners given a 12-hour window that day to complete a course of their own choosing. That can’t be like running in a pack with other elite athletes.
“There’s the obvious that this sucks because you had put your life on hold for this year and you were dialed in for it, but I think there’s also the fact that a lot of people are trying to look at this pandemic as an opportunity and that’s how I see it,” explained Cliff, who’s been a frequent Vancouver Sun Run participant. “It’s an opportunity to experiment in training and see what else I respond to. It’s not what I have chosen, but there are silver linings in everything.
“But is it all weird? Yeah, it’s really weird.”
She might be better equipped to deal with this than most athletes. She has had her competitive world turned upside down before.
Cliff had run the Olympic qualifying time in the 5,000 metres ahead of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and Athletics Canada had an open spot to send her but opted against naming her to the team.
She found out the same night that her husband Chris Winter learned that Athletics Canada was sending him to Rio in the 3,000-metre steeplechase.
She went to Rio to cheer Winter on. She couldn’t stomach watching the 5,000 metres, though.
“It’s tough to know — did you get through something because you’re strong or did it make you stronger?” explained Cliff, whose husband has retired from competing but remains entrenched in the sport as the track and field technical manager for B.C. Athletics. “There’s definitely some skills that I learned from going through that, and I think one of the big ones is knowing when not to engage in certain thoughts.
“It’s about acknowledging that something will bother you but you don’t let yourself go down that path. I could do the pity party about what happened in 2016 and now a global pandemic in 2020, but I’m aware that I don’t need to go there.
“That’s been very important for me in this pandemic. Of course, we’ll actually see whether it’s worked a year from now. You can mark me then, I guess.”
Olympic standards will carry over to next year. Seasonal rankings will also play into who’s going to represent Canada at Tokyo 2020 and, as Cliff says, “a lot of that will depend on how things unfold over the next few months, with what races are available.”
She says she just recently got the OK to start training as part of a group again.
“It’s just amazing how much harder you can push and how much more excited you get for the workouts,” explained Cliff, whose sponsors include On, a Swiss running shoes and clothing company. “Training in the pandemic, when we were all on lockdown, you weren’t doing that. I had a few good workouts where I could say, ‘I’m still fit, I’m still talented.’ I just didn’t feel like I could get that little extra piece out of me.”