the long and the
In today’s saturated road racing market, are we getting what we pay for? It appears that sometimes, we are getting less, and sometimes we are getting more.
Opposite Melinda Campbell coming into the finish of the 2012 Oakville Half Marathon alongside author Michael Doyle
On a lonely stretch of road during a half-marathon in Oakville, Ont., last September, Melinda Campbell, a selfdescribed “competitive recreational runner” spotted a mangled raccoon. “It’s never a good sign when you see roadkill during a race,” she says. Campbell tried to ignore the sight, but she couldn’t help staring at it. “When I saw it, it almost seemed fitting, a metaphor. I had already been struggling, but my day was pretty much done from that point on.”
Campbell is a dedicated marathoner. She runs nearly every day in preparation for one marathon per season. The number one thing that motivates her is time. “I want to see how fast I can become,” says the 30-year-old policy analyst for Ontario’s Department of Health P romotion. The Oakville Half-Marathon was a cr ucial race to gauge her f it ness leading into her goal fall marathon. She wanted to break 1:30 in Oakville. Some numbers act like magical barriers for runners – the three-hour marathon, the 20-minute 5k or the 40-minute 10k – and for Campbell, 1:30 was one of those insurmountable walls that few women in her club had been able to get over. She decided that she was ready to go for it . “Sometimes everything comes together in a race – you feel fast , the paces seem effortless, and you just know you’re going to do it,” she says. “In Oakville, it was prett y much the opposite experience. I struggled with the pace from the beginning, which is never a good sign in a half-marathon.”
She managed to click off a few kilometres at a pace she felt she could sustain. Then, she noticed something odd. “I checked a split at around 15k and the marker was way off. My Garmin said I was something like 200m further along than the marker indicated. I heard other runners’ watches beep around me as mine did, and you could tell that everyone was beginning to question what was going on.”
Campbell knew gps watches can be off sometimes and figured it was just one poorly placed marker. But with each kilometre the distance discrepancy between her watch and the course continued to grow. When she crossed the finish line in 1:33:54, her watch suggested to her that she’d done some extra work. “Out of habit I always hit the stop button as I cross the line. When I looked down at my watch it said I’d ran 21.5k. My watch is seldom dead on, maybe 50m to 100m off, but that was more than just missing a tangent or two.” She wasn’t alone. The course was indeed long. “It was a nice sunny day, there was a nice post-race setup, and the prizing was generous. But for me, I was there for a reason, and timing and an accurate course are everything. I wasn’t there for the T-shirt and the finisher’s medal. I mean, they were nice enough, but I have a lot of race shirts.”