IT’S A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT
Race Weekend will descend on Ottawa in seven days, but for the city’s biggest event it’s been a year-long labour of love, writes Wayne Scanlan.
Phil Ashcroft was one of the lonely souls wearing a cloth running bib, a number scrawled on it by hand.
About 150 runners, nearly all in tank tops and short shorts, hit the start line for the 1975 Ottawa marathon, wide-eyed and nervous.
Dr. Don Johnson, a colleague of Ashcroft’s at the Carleton Sports Medicine Clinic, grabbed a megaphone and advised runners to drink plenty of fluids.
Temperatures were in the mid70s and hardly any of the racers had experienced a 26-mile race.
“It was pretty lonely out on the Parkway that day,” Ashcroft told the Citizen many years later.
“There were few runners — and few spectators.”
Ashcroft died earlier this month, age 87, with 45 marathons to his credit, none more thrilling than his first, Ottawa’s first.
From the humblest of origins, singular and male-dominated, Ottawa’s marathon has blossomed into a massive, inclusive race weekend that amounts to an annual logistical miracle.
When else are 45,000 runners and 200,000 spectators involved in a series of races for all ages, a spectacle spanning two days in two provinces and two cities, including the nation’s capital?
“You’re basically shutting down a G7 capital for a weekend,” says Annie Boucher, spokeswoman for the race weekend.
The 43rd Ottawa races (May 27 to 28) have their roots in the 1975 race, but today’s multi-layered, digital event is a sort of distant cousin, twice removed, to the old National Capital Marathon.
Roughly 45,000 people will take part in one of the weekend’s running events, from the Kids’ “Marathon” up to the traditional 42.195-kilometre marathon and distances in between. Getting these people to the start line — so they can reach the finish line without incident — is a monstrous undertaking.
A task as simple as picking up a runner’s bib and T-shirt becomes daunting when as many as 60,000 people (with families and friends) are being whisked through the Health and Fitness Expo at the Shaw Centre. As Expo lead volunteer Kent Woodhall explained, “It’s like putting three cities the size of Brockville through that building in 17 hours.”
The entire weekend is a grand jigsaw puzzle, with race-hardened, veteran volunteers affixing most of the pieces, metal barriers included. They equip runners, herd crowds, keep the peace, manage courses, bandage “owwies,” cool the overheated and expect the unexpected, all the while maintaining a Gold Label standard for the marathon and 10K races. (“Gold Label” means the International Association of Athletics Federations deems it one of the leading races around the world.)
Here’s a look at the dynamics involved, with a tip of the cap to the 2,500 volunteers — especially the small core of lead operators — who make it possible to pull off Ottawa’s biggest annual event and one of its most significant tourist draws.
The Director
John Halvorsen once owned this race. Now, he manages it. A stylish, blazing-fast 10,000-metre runner in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Norwegian-born Halvorsen has long had his stamp on Ottawa road races.
“I remember the year we saw John win the 10K (in record time, 1988), that still puts a lump in my throat,” says longtime race organizer Joe DuVall, one of several key staffers on the Run Ottawa organizational team, along with president Halvorsen, Jim Robertson, Al Macartney, Dave Morrow and Sue Marsh.
Halvorsen, 50, a former Nortel programmer with a degree as a mechanical engineer (graduating cum laude), is prepared for everything — including a comparison between John H the runner and John H the race director: “More hair, less body,” he says of his former self.
There isn’t much doubt which was more fun — running a 10K on race weekend or organizing the blessed event.
“Running,” Halvorsen says, laughing. “You have the one thing you’re doing. This here (being director), there’s just so many moving parts and dependencies on others. The running was fun.
“It’s interesting, though, the stress on race day is very similar. When you’re there as an athlete, you have a lot of pressure and you put that pressure on yourself to perform. You don’t want things to go badly. Now, it’s sort of the same thing; it’s show time. That feeling is pretty similar.”
Typical of an athlete, Halvorsen once griped about how the Ottawa races could be so much better.
Do something about it, said his pal and former runner, Manny Rodrigues, the man who recruits the elite runners for the marathon and 10K. Get involved.
Halvorsen did, around 1999. He’s been up to his ears ever since.
Like any good race, the planning begins with a sure but steady pace. Months ahead of race weekend, Halvorsen runs through a mental checklist: OK, we have a course, we have a permit, race medals and T-shirts have been ordered, city police in Ottawa and Gatineau are aware of race dates, times and road closures. Some 700 elite water bottles have been ordered (they fill their own bottles and have them at water stations to avoid possible doping problems).
It’s the days and weeks ahead of the races that bring unease.
“All of the big pieces are done, but this time of year is tough, you wake up in the morning and you think, ‘Geez, did we do that?’” Halvorsen says, his cellphone ringing endlessly during a midmorning interview.
“There are so many emails. Did I respond to that guy about this?”
While the Ottawa races serve both the masses and running professionals, Halvorsen knows his priority: Security for all.
“For a large event, it’s different,” he says. “For a smaller event it’s, ‘Did everything go well?’ But for this event it’s safety.” It’s especially true after the events in Boston in 2013, when two homemade bombs detonated near the finish line. It’s a shadow that lingers.
The Recruiter
In the months before race weekend, Rodrigues is the one under the gun. If he doesn’t deliver enough elite athletes to the 10K (which also serves as the national 10K championships) and for the marathon, Run Ottawa would lose its prestigious Gold Label status for each. Only one other event in the world (Lisbon) has two Gold Label races on one weekend.
Rodrigues spends months lining up talent understanding that at any moment, possibly the last moment, a runner may pull up lame or have a travel visa issue. Working with a set budget (in the mid six-figures range), Rodrigues can’t just throw extra money at his problems. He needs a Plan B. Appearance fees are always the first thing to go if the race weekend has a financial hiccup. This event pays its own bills, even the police tab. The city of Ottawa provides zero funding.
“It pisses us off a little bit, to be perfectly honest,” Halvorsen says.
Rodrigues knows they can’t cut back on “core expenses of safety or the course. Where they can cut back has got to do with media promotion and the elites.”
So Rodrigues builds in an insurance policy. Needing a minimum of five bona fide Gold Label runners (meeting established IAFF standards) for each of the 10K and marathon, he makes sure he has extras for each event to counter the inevitable withdrawals.
Experience has taught him that as many as 25 per cent of his elite recruits will pull out in the days before the race due to injury or a visa problem. Travel visas in Kenya take four weeks to process. In Ethiopia, it’s four to six weeks.
There are two categories of “elites,” Pro A and Pro B runners. Pro A runners hail from the international field. Pro B competitors are mostly Canadians, good athletes, but not at the top in their categories. Pro A runners potentially receive travel costs, accommodation, appearance fees, prize and bonus money. For race weekend, Rodrigues will have 160 to 180 elites, about half Pro A and half Pro B.
Until this year, Ottawa paid international appearance fees in U.S. dollars. This year, in a move to address potentially explosive currency costs, the fees and prize money is in Canadian dollars, adjusted to accommodate the dollar difference from several months ago (which has since swung further south).
Nevertheless, Rodrigues is pleased to report a strong field for this year’s event.
Not the stars who can command the bigger bucks ($50,000 to $100,000) from Boston or New York, but very capable runners from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.
Ottawa can be a great fit under certain circumstances. For example, one elite Kenyan, Eliud Kiptanui, had a difficult day in Rotterdam last month, dropped out of the race and is looking to make amends in a good spring event such as Ottawa. Rodrigues heard from Kiptanui’s agent, and worked out a deal. Runners get more money when races pursue them, less when they have to reach out.
A software engineer, Rodrigues does most of his recruiting via email, off-hours. Those email terms form the basis of a contract.
In the days before the race, Rodrigues will dispatch a band of volunteers with vans to meet the runners at the airport and deliver them to their hotel.
It’s a far cry from his first year, 2001, when Rodrigues ran around himself to meet and greet.
These days, he places faith in his volunteers and hopes not to receive a last minute phone call about a no-show.
The Expo
It sounds simple enough. Set up an event hall for sponsors and retailers, where runners can also drop by to pick up their race kits.
In reality, the Shaw Centre is a madhouse in the days leading up to race weekend. After the months that Expo manager Jim Robinson has invested in lining up the 100 or so vendors from throughout North America, there are mere days to set it all up. To make things more challenging, there is usually a large convention, unrelated to the Race Weekend, in the venue on the Thursday and Friday. Twenty per cent of the vendor booths are given to local charities. Among its other attributes, the races raise close to $1 million each year for charitable causes.
The “race” to set up the Expo starts Tuesday around noon. Sixty-five hours later, their work will be done and the weekend over. Miller time.
“We’re kind of drained before we even open the doors on Thursday,” says Kent Woodhall, who co-ordinates the small army of volunteers on site.
“If you’ve ever seen ants working in that long stream (at an ant hill), that’s exactly what happens here,” Woodhall says. “It has to work perfectly because all those people have to enter the building, go to one floor for their race kit, up two levels to get their shirt. And then find their way to the exit.”
As big as it is, the Shaw Centre is not equipped to process flowthrough of this magnitude. An inside secret: organizers use an emergency fire door to facilitate efficiency. At peak times on Saturday, nearly 3,000 people per hour or 48 per minute are running through the building. Locals are encouraged to pick up their kits before the weekend, when tourists jam the place. Baby strollers are a menace as space is at a premium.
Picking up a race kit has become a numbers game, like voting in a federal election. Runners are in the “system,” having registered online at runottawa.ca. At the Expo, participants should have their bib numbers handy, then report to the corresponding kiosk. In busy periods, there are two lines of runners and four volunteers per kiosk.
Any more and they would be tripping over each other trying to locate the appropriate bibs.
Race kit guru Tom McGee likes to plant a few volunteers in the lines to make sure there’s a reasonable flow.
The 2016 weekend was an example of flirting with disaster. The heat and humidity were such that the marathon was at risk of being cancelled while runners waited in limbo, expecting a refund. In the end, a decision was made Saturday to hold the Sunday race, but at an earlier start time. The announcement ignited a stampede to the Expo to pick up kits.
By 1 p.m., some 8,000 had arrived at the Shaw Centre, many in a line that flowed out of the building a full kilometre down the road to Colonel By Drive. In oppressive heat.
Even for a volunteer trained to react to sudden issues, it provided an adrenalin surge.
Handing out nearly 50,000 T-shirts represents another minor miracle. So eager to please is the Run Ottawa group, they set up a T-shirt return desk on Sunday mornings for those not happy with their sizing.
Away from the competition, the Expo provides everything from sneaker sales to bandage administration. Let’s just say that stuff happens, including injuries and missing persons, in a crowd this big.
“We repatriate lost children, we’ve never lost a child,” Woodhall says with pride.
“We always reunite people with their credit cards, car keys, wallets. It’s incredible when you put 60,000 people through a building how much they can lose.”
The Courses
The courses are set. Some 550 race barriers are in place, traffic has been rerouted — and of course now is the time for a family to inevitably realize its wedding is inside the race zone, or a school group needing to get to its recital. This is when course co-ordinator Glendon Pye uses the guile honed from his years on the job.
In advance, he works with police crews, traffic control companies and sign dispensers, but it’s when the race starts that his fun begins.
His biggest challenge: “People needing to get into places that are difficult to get into on the day of the event.”
It helps if course volunteers are nocturnal. A few years ago, Pye, second-in-command Ken Trischuk and their helpers were sprawled across the 618-metre length of the Macdonald-Cartier bridge at 3 and 4 a.m., installing metre-wide strips of carpet runners so that wheelchair racers wouldn’t trip on the bridge’s expansion joints.
The course jockeys do their best work at this hour, because latenight revellers have been known to mess with signs posted in the light of day. One year, some drunks tore down the kilometre markers on Booth Street and chucked them into the Ottawa River. Adjusting on the fly, volunteers stood there while racers ran past, bellowing: “This is the 19-kilometre point!!”
Course management is taken for granted — until a group of elite runners veer off course, as happened several years ago.
Halvorsen’s role when the fur flies and the races are going? “Not to do anything,” he says. Everything is in place, duties are delegated. Halvorsen oversees it all, like a nervous father, and hopes a year of planning pays off.
The Start Lines
Dick Murray is the chief of the start area, and that comes with its quirks. For example, the 10K race lines up on Elgin and runs south, while the 5K goes the opposite direction on Elgin. Crews have about an hour to reroute the start between races, all while dealing with spectators and racers trying to get through the area. Adding to the fun, a police vehicle might show up with a prisoner who needs to see a magistrate in the courthouse on Elgin.
The Carleton Ravens football team pitches in after the race “kickoff.” About 15 players help other volunteers move the barricades in a timely fashion, reconfiguring the Elgin and Laurier intersection.
A 15-year veteran of the start area, Murray will raise and drop his arm to signal the race start. A dignitary sounds the air horn. The race is on. And then the one after that.
The Doc is in
Jon Hooper knows where the bodies are buried. In his day job, Hooper is an Intensive Care Unit doctor and anesthesiologist at the Civic Campus of The Ottawa Hospital. On race weekend, Hooper is the medical director. He’s seen the event evolve from a few medical tents at the finish area to the establishment of a temporary, sophisticated hospital at the Cartier Square Drill Hall.
Dr. John Trickett and nurse Adam Lamoureux are responsible for long-term planning of the medical realm of race weekend. Five clinical managers at The Ottawa Hospital and two clinical directors are involved in organizing and setting up the temporary race hospital (which eases the burden at the Civic emergency ward).
Lamoureux is also medical coordinator at the event and is in touch with medical workers on the course from his post at the race command centre.
Nothing is more important than the care of runners in the race. Heat and humidity are the enemy, as the last weekend in May so often boils over after a cool spring.
Organizers use fancy gadgets to measure weather indexes and even lightning detection.
Some 200 medical workers are involved in the races, either at the Drill Hall hospital or in one of the 14 aid stations along the course — doctors, nurses, but also ski patrollers and others with first aid credentials (note: they always need more volunteers).
Medical staff live in fear of not reaching stricken runners in time.
“You never feel like you have enough people, and it’s impossible to cover it all,” Hooper says of monitoring runners on a 42-kilometre course. “You always worry about someone going down in between aid stations and it takes five minutes to reach them.”
If he could, Hooper would have a first aid person at each kilometre of the course.
Volunteers use bikes and golf carts, if necessary, to weave through the crowds of people and runners. First aid workers are advised not to panic if someone collapses. Hooper says a fallen runner can “look like death” but often comes around quickly with first aid.
Because emergency medical services are instructed to take patients to hospital, it helps to have the Drill Hall designated as a hospital. There, patients needing simple care — think, a Band-Aid for a blister — will be treated and released. More serious cases are checked in for care in the back of the hospital.
Roughly 200 will need treatment on the Sunday, during or after the half-marathon and marathon.
Surprisingly, there were fewer cases during last year’s marathon, despite the heat, as runners apparently heeded medical advice and took precautions. In the shorter races, there were two to three times more heat-related health issues than normal, likely due to runners winging those events without proper training.
Every medical worker has a walkie talkie and/or cellphone to report any issue on the course.
This year, for the first time, an emergency number is included on every racing bib.
Sometimes, the most vigilant care can’t save a runner. Over the past 25 years, the race has had four fatalities, says Hooper, about what other marathons experience for the numbers involved (one death per 100,000 runners).
All four fatalities involved heart issues, two were clearly cardiac arrest. News outlets go into overdrive when a runner dies in a community marathon, but the reality is there are typically more fatalities at local rinks each year from sudden death in old-timers hockey.
“Running and doing exercise improves your health and decreases your short-term mortality,” Hooper says. “But your risk goes up while doing it on that given day.”
Oddly, an experienced runner with no heart history once collapsed and died in the first kilometre of the race. While a critical-care nurse attended him quickly, it took about 20 minutes to get an ambulance through the crowds of runners and spectators at the front of the course. He may not have survived anyway, but the medical team is endlessly seeking better ways to reach those in need.
“He could’ve been raking leaves that day and the same thing could have happened,” Hooper says. “I don’t know if that makes it an easier pill to swallow.”
The strength of Race Weekend, as ever, is its people, devoted volunteers and staff. They take to heart the words of Ottawa police sergeant Pat Frost, who so often reminds his officers on the course: “There are no second chances to making this thing work. You make it right or it doesn’t happen.”
Phil Ashcroft, now running heavenly marathons, would agree.