This weekend the Bluenose Marathon was held and, as many of you are aware, a number of people from our class decided to train for this event. Our class had a good showing with representation in every distance category, and here is a list of those who participated.

5K – Mat Kiberd, John Morash, David Conrad, Kate Read, and Claire Hamilton
10K – Tiffany O’Donnell, PJ Rasmussen, Shasta Moser, and Alex Nelson
21.1K – Jon Chung, Annie Colwell, and Arpun Bajwa
42.2K – David Sibley

Training for this event turned out to be a success for many reasons. To begin, everyone who ran this weekend achieved the distance they set out to run. Also, preparing for this event helped us all to become more physically active which is an important part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It got people out training together and sharing an experience other than studying. Last, it helped promote that balance that we all need in medical school.

So I just want to say congratulations to all those who ran this weekend. Well done! The effort put forward by everyone in training for this event was well worth it. Also, a special congratulations to PJ who finished first in his event. Way to go PJ! Thank you as well to those who were able to get out and watch some of the events. Your support was certainly appreciated by those running.

As you can see from the list above, we had a good turnout for this event. If I am missing the name of anyone who ran please add your name at the end of the blog. Of course, I believe it would be even better if next year we could have even more runners from our class.

As many of know from my previous blog entries, I trained for the full marathon, which is a distance of 42.2km. A couple of weeks before the date of the marathon I started to get some significant inflammation in my right knee. Rest, ice and naproxen seemed to eliminate the pain and inflammation, but going into race day I had a lingering fear that during the marathon the pain and discomfort would return. Fortunately, I had no return of pain in the right knee, and during the entire race all my joints felt fine.

Now most Nova Scotians know that traditionally, the weather for the Bluenose marathon has always been cold, rainy, and windy. Fortunately luck was on our side this year as Sunday, race day, turned out to be a very good day for running. The sun was out and the temperature was nice and cool.

The first half of the marathon took place on the Halifax side. The route was mainly flat which allowed me to pick up the pace a little bit and finish the first 22km in 2 hours. This was important for me as I knew the second half had a lot more hills and it would be tougher to maintain a faster pace. Coming back into the split area, there was a gate to the left for the half-marathoners to finish and a gate to the right to continue the full marathon. The guy asked me if I was still going. I nodded and kept going to the right and said to myself “Here we go”.

For the second part of the marathon we crossed over the bridge to Dartmouth. This is where the hills began. Up Nantucket to School, across School to Woodland, up Woodland to MicMac Mall and then into Shubie Park. Once into the park we followed a windy trail through the woods and eventually we came out onto Waverly Road. We followed Waverly until it changed to Prince Albert Road and we continued by the Dartmouth Lakes. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing in off the lake right into our face.

Around Lake Banook (37 km), I knew I would probably start to get tired, and I was. My longest training run prior to the marathon had only taken me up to 35km. That’s when I brought out the secret weapon. Before the race I had told my family to wait for me near the canoe clubs. So as I ran by it was nice to get some encouragement to keep going.

That then brought me to what I think was the absolute hardest part of the marathon, Maple Street. It was about a kilometer long and started at about a 30-35 degree incline and half-way up the hill it increased to almost 45. As I started up the hill I could see people stopping and starting to walk up the hill. Somehow, with my legs burning I managed to keep running all the way to the top where it made a left hand turn and leveled off.

From there, it was back to the bridge to head back to Halifax and finish with a 2km stretch down Brunswick Street back to the Town Clock. My goal for the marathon was to try and finish under 4 hours and when I came off the bridge and turned onto Brunswick Street, I looked at my timer. I still had a chance to clear 4 hours. My muscles were aching and burning, and I really wanted to walk a little, but instead I just looked inside and somehow found the energy to keep pushing forward to the finish line. With the end in site I knew it was going to be close so I just put my head down and pushed my legs to go as fast as they could. When I crossed the finish line I recorded a time of 3 hours 57 minutes 55 seconds.

So that concludes my experience in training for and running a marathon. Someone has already asked me when I am going to run my next one. I can honestly say that running a marathon is something I never want to do ever again. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed training for the marathon, and by running it I proved to myself that I could push my body to do it, but now that I have done it once and achieved my goal, I really see no reason to ever do it again. Next year I could see myself cutting back to the half-marathon but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I plan, however to continue to keep running shorter distances around 10km to maintain my cardiovascular fitness.

So I’ll end here with an invitation to the other runners and those who came out to cheer us on to respond with your thoughts and experiences from the Bluenose Marathon.