INSIDE THE AGE GROUP MIND
Pierre Lavoie Comes out of Retirement
There is nothing like the birth of a first grandbaby to make you take stock of your priorities. Even for a triathlete who embraces getting older – especially when it means racing at the bottom of a new age group – the arrival of the next generation turns out to be the moment you ask yourself, “Can I really have arrived at this stage of my life?”
You wonder if you will want to be out putting in the miles on your bicycle mid-summer when you could be marvelling at your grandson’s newly acquired ability to scoot across the floor unaided.
It turns out my stepdaughter knew I’d be conflicted. The baby was still in her womb when she emailed me an article from her local community newspaper to let me know that Saint-Mathieu-deRioux, the farming village in the lower Saint-Lawrence region of Quebec where she and her partner live, will hold an inaugural triathlon in late July.
For me, the timing and the locale couldn’t be better: an excuse to make the five-hour drive from Montreal to spend time with the baby and still train and race. And what a setting. Nestled in the rolling hills below the Appalachians, it’s all maple sugar bush and pine forests, beaded with lakes and small dairy farms – their big, grey barns leaning inland from a century of being beaten by the same steady winds that propel the blades of the modern-day windmills that loom on the horizon.
The roads, asphalted and impressively smooth, wind up from the village and through the forest and are worth the climb for the spectacular view of the St. Lawrence River five km below.
“It’s really beautiful biking,” said Patrick
Dumont, who lives 50 km northeast of the village, in Rimouski. Dumont, 47, a civil engineering technician who founded Rimouski’s first triathlon club just last year, spent the summer scouting for a race venue within easy driving distance of his coastal city.
After a weekend spent biking and swimming in Saint-Mathieu, Dumont knew he’d found the place. Coincidentally, a fellow triathlete, local resident Carl Charron, had also approached the municipality and Triathlon Quebec about organizing a race – something neither has ever done before.
“I’m the ‘go for it’ type,” said Dumont. ”I’ve been to 10 or so different triathlons in my life, so I have a pretty good idea of what it takes – a lot of organization, but it’s something I knew we could pull off.”
Kind of like the way he pulled off starting a tri club from scratch last year: within months of its inception, Triathlon Rimouski had 60 members, many of them triathlon newbies.
“A lot of people had been pretty sedentary,” Dumont said. “Some didn’t know how to swim – so we started by teaching them how to swim.” By the end of the first season, about a dozen members had done their first triathlon – including a whole group of women who braved huge waves to do Ironman
70.3 Maine, at Old Orchard Beach, an eight-hour drive from Rimouski.
“I try to transmit the kind of encouragement that I got,” said Dumont. In his case, the kick in the pants came a decade ago, at
37. By then he’d been a smoker for close to 25 years. He’d played hockey and soccer in his youth, but gave up sports as an adult. Staring at 40, Dumont had taken up jogging, but still hadn’t kicked the nicotine habit. He went to a motivational talk by Pierre Lavoie, a giant in the triathlon world in Quebec, and left committed to changing his life. “Lavoie wants to get people moving. He wants people to take charge of their lives, to adopt healthy life habits,” said Dumont. “You can’t help but be inspired.”
“Lavoie wants to get people moving. He wants people to take charge of their lives, to adopt healthy life habits. You can’t help but be inspired.”
– PATRICK DUMONT
Triathletes across Canada may know of Lavoie from his days as a perpetual competitor at Kona. The 56-year-old from L’Anse-SaintJean, in Quebec’s Saguenay region, won his age group at the Ironman world championship in 1996, 2004 and 2005, when he broke the world record for 40- to 45-year-old men. Lavoie retired from triathlon in 2013, at 51. Hoping to set one last age-group record at Kona, he finished second – but he still beat the old record by more than three minutes, finishing in 9 hours and 23 minutes. Aside from his family, a whole contingent of Quebecers, including the media, travelled to Hawaii to witness that last performance. That’s because Lavoie is a household name in
Quebec. In 1999, he launched the Défi Pierre Lavoie, a 650-kilometre biking event in his home region, to raise awareness about Leigh syndrome, a rare form of congenital lactic acidosis that killed two of his four children in early childhood.
By 2005, Lavoie had raised $1.2 million for research into the disease, and while continuing to raise funds for orphan disease research, the focus of his life’s work became the promotion of physical activity in children and teens. His Grand Défi – or Big Challenge – has been wildly successful. Since 2011, 80 per cent of school-aged children in Quebec have been involved in his program, tallying their physical activity in 15-minute blocks called “energy cubes” that add up toward prizes, including an activity-filled weekend in Montreal for their whole school. “It’s a social movement now,” admits Lavoie, who in 2015 persuaded Quebec family doctors to begin routinely prescribing physical activity in lieu of medication, where appropriate. “That’s the vision that I started with.” Dumont contacted his hero to ask Lavoie if he’d come out retirement for one race – to compete in the inaugural event in SaintMathieu-de-Rioux on July 26. To Dumont’s delight, Lavoie agreed. It just so happens Lavoie’s 28-year-old son Bruno-Pierre, a strapping 6'5" hockey player, is ready to take on his father in his first triathlon. Pierre Lavoie simply can’t resist a dare: he’s bet his son he can beat him by a full three minutes.
“Bruno-Pierre is a great athlete in his own sports. And he’s a stronger cyclist than I am,” said Lavoie. “I told him, ‘You’ll be a minute ahead of me when I start to run. But on the run, I’m going to wipe you.’”
Lavoie has never been to Saint-Mathieude-Rioux, but he’s taken by Patrick Dumont’s commitment to bringing triathlon to their region.
“I like people who are committed,” said Lavoie. “I always like to encourage people who are audacious – who dare to try. That’s why I said yes.”