I Love You

She said 'I love you'. Well that got my attention. You see, my running partner usually tells me 'I hate you' every time we do speedwork or I make us run those long hills. She gets really quiet, sucks on her water and then it comes out (no longer out of the blue): 'I hate you'. I've become slowly inured to that kind of language over the last year. It comes at regular intervals, when the run is hard, when the run is long but this time, as we ran down the hill into the Olympic stadium, she said 'I love you for this'. Let us mention right off the bat that her husband was right there on the side line watching her finish her first 10K race. Always a boost for the ego when partners watch us run in, victorious at the finish line.
She ran a perfect race. We ran the first 5k slowly until the nasty Pie IX hill was done. I had worried that she would crack but she didn't. My running partner ran like a pro through the whole thing. On the second half, I picked up the pace so we could do a nice negative split (running faster during the second half of the race).
The weather was perfect, cold, windy, cloudy. The attendance was spectacular. 22 000 people at the starting lines.

Taking the metro with that many runners sporting their finishing medals is always a treat for me. The smiles, the giddy kids, the red faces all make the Montreal marathon a very special event. Maybe not the most beautiful scenery (Marathon des deux rives grabs that one) but certainly a very heroic one following in the same footsteps as those great runners of the 1976 Olympic Games.