Ellie Greenwood, Trail Running Tales: BMO Vancouver Marathon

BMO Vancouver marathon is an event of mixed experiences for me; 2008 - my first sub-3 (yay!), 2009 - my first DNF (boo!), 2012 - 2:42 for the win and a PB (yay!), 2013 - another DNF (boo!), and then this year - just a nice solid jaunt around the course with lots of friends and team mates both running and cheering. With Comrades 89km just 28 days away the aim of yesterdays race was not to race too hard, but to get a solid effort in all the same. I still need to get some solid training in this week for Comrades so if I raced too hard then the recovery time for the marathon would eat into the training time for my A race - not a good idea. I am more than happy with my 2nd place, 2:43:04 finish time yesterday, mostly for the fact that I felt great at the finish and feel great today so I know that I can still train well this week.

A training race like yesterday also has added benefits of working out a few race day details for Comrades. I am now set on the shoe and sock combination that I'll sport on June 1st in South Africa, I got good practice at grabbing bottles from a the table and remembering to look out for elite stations on a race course, and I had the added benefit of running the first approx 23km with Wayinshet Abebe Hailu (Ethiopia) which was great as we took turns sharing the pace, something which might also come in useful at Comrades. All in all I got exactly what I hoped for out of the day, and had great fun doing so with so many Vancouver Falcons team mates to chat with at the finish line and share our accomplishments together. A huge shout out to Kim Doerksen who nailed her marathon in 2:36:59 for the win, to Bryan Andrews who ran a great race and surely helped Kim to that time both on race day and in training, and to all VFACers who competed in the marathon, half and 8km. In the full marathon all 7 VFACers who raced all came in sub-3 - nice work!

Hope everyone else had a fun day, despite the rather rainy conditions!