Défi 2012: personal best!

Personal best!
This year I finished the Défi in 8h48m, shaving off five minutes from my previous best time. And considering the wet pavement that we had in the morning plus the wet leaves all day long, that’s quite an achievement!

A different kind of report
For this year I’ll do something quite different for this report. Instead of doing a blow-by-blow of every phase, I’ll just make some general comments in a more relaxed fashion. I’ll try to follow the order of the phases, but it won’t be a 100%. So here it goes...

Are quads even allowed?
For the first time ever I saw someone at the start line on quads. I thought those things had disappeared during the 80’s... :-) And I also thought they were more for exhibitions, not for long distance runs.

C'est parti!
In the action:

The safety pins are not optional
I didn't have the time to put on the safety pins on my number tags. The front one fell off before I had gone through half of phase 1, the back one soon after. For next year I have to find the time to put them on, I just have to.

Splashing water all over the place
This year I bought a CamelBak to be more independent in terms of food and drink. I tried it during the summer and I even used it in two foot races (half marathons) that I did in Mt. Tremblant and in Montreal. So I was quite used to it.

Right before leaving home to go to the Verdun Auditorium I filled my Camelbak with 1.8 litres of electrolytes that I had just prepared. I also put power bars, chocolate bars, gels and other stuff in it that I would need during the race.

By the middle of phase 1, when I wanted to drink a little bit of the electrolytes, I pulled the tube of the Camelbak a little too hard and the little faucet that controls the flow of the liquid got ripped off, so that now I had liquid coming through the hole. This would annoy me for the rest of the day. Every time I would flex my knees to lower my centre of gravity, liquid would come flowing through that hole. I must have wasted at least half a litre of the electrolytes! Argh!

We’re following the leader, wherever she may go
During the second half of phase 1, I got together with three other skaters, two men and a girl. They were going at a stronger pace than I usually go, but I decided to follow them for as long as I could. We went together for quite a few kilometers.

We would rotate the leading skater in a very informal way. At one moment, close to the end of phase 1, the girl was in front and I was in second, just a few meters behind her. With the very wet pavement and all that, she eventually fell down. I had a split second to avoid a nasty collision with her, the two other skaters who were a bit behind were able to slow down and help her up.

Huffing and puffing
Past the midpoint of phase 2 we have to face the famous Senneville hill. Usually I stop right before it to eat and drink, but not this year, I just continued on and up. It was hard... I was huffing and puffing all the way up. But I eventually did it and got rewarded with a nice downhill right after.

Skater 39 and his friend on bicycle (who had been part of the group of four I mentioned earlier) had stopped at the top of the hill to rest a bit, they encouraged me saying the worst was over and wished me good luck for the rest of the day.

Dreams of gold
I got to the end of phase 2 by 8h50, my first personal best of the day (four years ago I got there at 9h10). So, fifty kilometers in 2h50, I did some mental calculations and saw that if I could keep the rhythm, I would do the Défi in 7h20. Even allowing for some slowing down at the end, I thought I had a good shot at a gold medal. Yeah! Keep dreaming...

Four-legged encounters
At the beginning of phase 3, at the Pierrefonds Boulevard, there was a small white dog walking right in the middle of the bike path. As I approached him, I tried to look for his owner, but he was nowhere to be seen. Odd...

As the dog heard my wheels on the pavement, he started running, but still right in the middle of the bike path! When I finally passed him, I had to skate with my legs wide open not to hit the little fella. When he saw me he got scared and tried to bite me, but fortunately couldn’t reach me. Phew!

Later on, in phase 4 or maybe even 5, a white mouse crossed right in front of me, I missed it by just a few centimeters. I could see it was well kept, it wasn’t a street mouse, it probably had fled its cage...

At least twice during the day I scared cats (one black, one white). They were thinking of crossing the bike path but when they saw/heard me, they ran away in the other direction.

And don’t get me started on the squirrels! Boy, so many squirrels!

Cramps
Right in the middle of the Pierrefonds Boulevard, I got the first signs of cramps, so I had to go easier on my body. The cramps didn't fully develop, so I didn't have to stop, but they continued with me for the rest of the day: every time I tried to push harder, they would show up their ugly head and I would have to stop pushing. My pace got slower.


Trainspotting
During most of the Pierrefonds boulevard I was with another skater (I forget his number now...). Close to the end of the boulevard I opened some distance from him, he was some 50 m behind me.

Right after the boulevard, when we get back to Gouin, there is a train crossing area. When I got to that point I heard the warning bells indicating that the train would soon pass. Soon after I got through, the barrier came down. The other skater, instead of stopping to wait for the train, decided to circumvent the barrier and go through anyway! Stupid crazy stuff! Fortunately he went through unharmed, but that was a totally unnecessary risk on his part.

First stop of the day
At the midpoint of phase 3 I sat down at a bus stop to eat some biscuits and rest a little bit. During the less than ten minutes that I stayed there, at least half a dozen skaters passed by.

Salut Lynne! Salut Crystel! 
Past the midpoint of phase 3, on Gouin, we got to a construction crew, they had blocked off some 200 m of the road for their work. As Gouin is really narrow on that point, they had people stationed on each end and they would let cars flow in one direction only at a time.

Skater 44 and myself had to stop there and wait for the flow to go eastward again. The woman handling the cars at our end told us to greet the two other women at the other end with “Salut Lynne, salut Crystel”. Kind of weird... :-)

And by the way, when are we going to finish rebuilding this city? Every single year we have tons of construction crews out on the day of the Défi. This is not funny!

I’m dreaming of a dry Défi, just like the ones I used to know
Wet leaves everywhere! And in the parks of phase 3 it was even worse, they would just pile up. If they were dry, we could go through them just making a lot of noise, but as they got wet from a full day of rain on Friday, they lumped together, creating veritable barriers to our skates. In some places I had to walk sideways, it was totally impossible to advance by skating.

How is that golden dream coming along?
I got to the end of phase 3 at 10h55. If we consider the total average (79 km in a little less than five hours), I could still hang on to my dream of a gold medal, I would need exactly three more hours, which is what I had. But if we consider just my performance in phase 3, I would miss the gold by half an hour. And I wasn’t getting any more rested along the way... At this point I was already giving up on gold and just going for a personal best.

The sun is shining
The weather got better, the sun had been shining for a while and now parts of the pavement were even dry, it was possible to skate normally again during phase 4. Unfortunately, I couldn't benefit much from it because my feet were already hurting bad, I couldn't push much.

Big pause of the day
Phase 4 was quite uneventful. Gouin is still awful (if the guys in Senneville were able to fix their “moonscape” of some years back, why can’t we have a half decent bike path on Gouin?), nothing new there.

I stopped at the end of phase 4 for another ten minutes to rest. It was already 12h15 when I got there, so there was no way in hell I would make it before 2 pm, so no gold for me this year. Therefore, I was no longer in any kind of hurry. I got two new water bottles from the helpful volunteer there, we chatted a bit for a while, I ate the rest of my biscuits and left just as skater 39 had arrived. He was accompanied by a friend on a bicycle, we had been crossing each other all day long.

Some new stuff on the last phase
This year there was some new paths to follow on phase 5, it was a good change. We avoided at least one other park, which I’m sure would be full of leaves, so that’s definitely a plus. I hope we keep this new way for the upcoming years.

ET phone home
It was a little before 1:30 pm when I got to a public phone on Notre Dame and called home to tell my wife that I should be at the Verdun Auditorium in one hour or a bit more. She was quite pleased that I was so close to the end. After giving up two years in a row, nobody in the house (even myself) believed I could finish the Défi ever again...

Construction crew ahead
Heavy construction going on in at least two different places on Notre Dame. But at least this time I got something out of it. Right after Pie-IX, as the two ways of traffic had been jammed together on one side of the street, I had the other half all to myself for two or three blocks. It’s not always that you can skate directly on Notre Dame! :-)

A heart as dry as the pavement
Every year when I get to Wellington street I’m usually overwhelmed with emotions. Not this year though. I don’t know why, but when I got there, the only thing in my mind was just to finish this damn thing and be done with it. No joy, no crying, just the will to see it through. Weird...

Grand reception
When I showed up in the distance, people at the back of the Verdun Auditorium started making a lot of noise, clapping, whistling, shouting. What a grand reception!

My wife and daughter were there, they took some pictures of my arrival. Mr. Fortier was there as well, of course, he filmed me too. He told me my time had been 8h48m. Yay, personal best!

Shake, shake, shake
We talked with Mr. Fortier for a few minutes and then we drove home. In the car, I started feeling weird, my fingers and lips started “vibrating”, as if there was electricity on them. Weirdest stuff.


I thought I would faint, but eventually I got through. The only thing very different this year was the electrolytes, I’m guessing I got a bad reaction from drinking so much of the stuff and keeping it all in my body for such a prolonged time. For next year I’ll have to do some testing to see if it is really the electrolytes. I don’t want to feel like that again at the end of a Défi...