It wasn’t meant to happen like this. 

I mean, it’s not as though most things in life go as planned. 

But for whatever reason, I’ve had a particularly difficult time when flying to races over the past two years.

It seemed like everything conspired against me to hit like a muddy brick wall when I went to Duchesnay, and I wanted to do everything in my power to make sure I had a more pleasant experience the second time around in Quebec this year – at the National Championships for 50K. 

I flew up to Mont-Saint-Anne the Tuesday before the race. I took time off work. I switched away from a stressful job to a more peaceful one. I strategized with spreadsheets and had the details worked down to the minute. 

But after the flight on Tuesday, my body was completely out of sorts. It might have been the pre-race taper demons. Or it might have been very real ones. But I felt worse than I can ever remember feeling on a run when I went out the next day, and felt sick all the way into the race.

I’m not someone that tends to get nervous or put any pressure on myself when it comes to racing. I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, and I’ve always been keenly aware of my cieling.

I tend to enter with a queit confidence and a nothing to lose mentality. I know my general role in this sport is to be a back half of the top ten kind of guy in this type of race, and I usually race smart to get there, making my way up in the second half of the race.

But lately I’ve also gained a growing amount of confidence that my imagined cieling might not be high enough. And I’ve started to change my approach, and endeavour to race more aggressively from the start to match that belief. 

I think it’s precisely this kind of shift that’s actually created more nerves around a big race like this, putting more pressure on myself to actually prove that I’ve improved to that level, and that I’m actually there. Rather than racing to the level I know I can reach at the basement floor, I’m trying to hit my head off the cieling. 

And in preparing for this race, I knew where I wanted to be in the field through the first section of the race. Last year, I was in about 11th through the first half, working up to 7th by the end. The strategy worked in securing a top 10 finish ✅. But it didn’t work in hanging with guys that I felt like I should be hanging with. 

So this year, I wanted to hang on. I wanted to go out hard. But I really should have seen the signs throughout the week, and taken a more pedestrian approach at several stages. I should have seen the signs even from the warm-up, and not just dismissed it as pre-race nerves. 

With that segueway…

I found shade and immediately thereafter my former Waterloo teammate Steph Ryall, and we did our little drills in the same area. I was chatty with anyone I could find, from the super talented Laurence Laplante to World’s bound Carol-Ann Rolle, probably trying to quell my own nerves and the symptoms of sickness. 

I arrived to the front of the start line in dead last as per usual, zig zagging around the maze of people to station myself next to my Ontario trail bud Rob Brouillette. I didn’t see Rob first, instead bumping fists with Chris Levesque-Savard. But as soon as I saw Rob a wave of panic hit me, and I started having a small little anxiety attack as the countdown loomed closer. 

Luckily for me, everything eased up by how slow the race started in the early seconds. I somehow jolted off the line faster than anyone else as the likes of Dany and Chris took their time to get their legs going (probably just from warming up more?), and found myself with Antoine Desroches and a guy who felt bad that he didn’t speak English. 

My main goal when it came to Mestachibo, having learned from an early fall last year, was to always remain in a good position to see the trail in front of me – whether that meant leading the pack or hanging off the back of others. 

I entered Mestachibo exactly where I wanted to be, leading a pack of really strong guys until Louis Moreau ended up taking the reigns. 

We really pushed and probed as we jostled for places, but it all felt okay and sustainable. My heart-rate felt high but I put it down more to my sickness than the actual effort output of the moment. 

In hindsight, I should have kept it even easier to have any chance of surviving the sickness of the day. But I was having too much fun!

While it was utter chaos, these were my favourite miles of the entire race, as I got to spend it with loads of people I admire, and there were many fun moments of back and forth shenanigans. I would pass Louis on the stairs, he would pass me on the downhills. Sergio would fall behind on the technical stuff, then surge up on runnable uphills. 

Shortly before the first aid station, I asked Chris how to say “head” in French and didn’t feel confident enough in his answer so yelled out for water on my head in English. 

Oh. That reminds me. It was hot. Way hotter than anyone expected. We had planned for a 15 degree start, and no one really planned to cool themselves down with ice bandanas or anything of the sorts. But it was hot on the day, and I gained confidence in the fact that I was the only one of that big group that got the good old water dunk. 

It didn’t help too much though, as Chris was the first to make the move up to the guys ahead. 

I stayed with Louis and a pack of others that included Sergio Raez-Villanueva, as we hit the swaying swinging bridges. Louis led us out across the bridges and because they were hanging at a wobbly shoulder height, I momentarily tried to see what it would be like to bend down and run lower to the ground. It worked well so I shouted out for Louis to do the same as the other guys behind me followed suit. 

We probably looked so silly, and I loved it!!

We then came onto the boulders to find a pack of Clement Perrier, Elisa Morin and other friendly friends. I again felt good that I was right where I wanted to be. Clement and Elisa always feel like people who are around my speed in these things, and I was looking stronger than Louis and Sergio, who are objectively better runners. 

Feeling confident with my position, I started to slow down to lower my high heart-rate and start to save energy for the second half of the race. As I asked Robbie Simpson if he was okay on the technical rock, I lost sight of Elisa and Clement. I assumed I could work like Rihanna on the runnable stuff to catch back up. But I never did, only catching back up to Sergio. 

As I passed by Sergio, I told him that he had to go with me. “Don’t get caught in no man’s land” I told him, before proceeding to push too far ahead of him, finding MYSELF in no man’s land 🤦‍♂️.

So when I came out of Mestachibo entirely alone and saw the nearest flag, I went straight toward it. 

Turns out, I was going backwards along the course toward where we finish the race. It took me about 10 minutes of sprinting in circles and cursing myself, for me to decide to go back to the concrete where I first felt like something was off. 

At that exact moment, I saw my friend Steph Ryall coming out of the trail. 

I knew right then and there, not only had I lost 10 minutes, I had also lost 10-20 places and all the hard work I’d just done. 

And at the point that I found myself lost initially, I was just minutes away from seeing my crew (mom and Aislinn!) well inside the top ten, exactly where I wanted to be, and telling them that I felt amazing. 

And I, for whatever reason, decided to run like a man possessed, pushing my heart-rate far too high, just to catch up to Steph. 

Ironically, I then reassured her that she was going the right way, after being lost myself for a ticking time bomb of a 10-minute span, and neglected to fill up my bottle at the aid station ahead of the longest climb of the day. 

And this is where everything went sideways 🫠.

You see, at the point that I saw Steph, I thought that my race was about to be over if I didn’t push to catch back up. 

But it was actually that act of pushing to catch back up and not looking after my body, that ruined EVERYTHING.

Trying to put my mind at ease and forget about my errors, I asked Sarah Bergeron-Larouche if she was Sarah Bergeron-Larouche. She was, but she didn’t like the idea of telling me she was. 

Steph then soared up the mountain in the most impressive power hike I’ve ever seen in my entire life, as I contemplated asking her if I could have a sip of her water. 

Eventually I caught up to a hunched over Sergio. “How many people passed you?” I felt bad asking. “Quite a few,” he said through breaths, before I told him my reason for asking. 

In the next few miles, I couldn’t get over it. I wasted all my energy thinking my race was over, without actually knowing that I was still in 10th place and that Clement was only minutes ahead.

Struggling to stay in it, Sergio and I had some nice moments of chatting where I mapped out the rest of the race for him – telling him it would get better from there. 

Spoiler alert… it didn’t get better from there for either of us. 

But without any knowledge of where I was in the field, I continued to push the gas pedal like Sage the Gemini, rather than slowing down, grabbing the wall, easing off, and holding my position. 

I exited the summit the second time around just ahead of Clement, descending hundreds of meters down a steep ski slope that can do enough to damage your entire race if you’re not ready for the demand.

And having “burned all my matches” as my former coach Brett Hornig likes to say, the steep ski slope did the damage. 

As soon as I hit the bottom, my legs gave up. And for the second year in a row, Clement Perrier ran away from me in the exact same spot. For the second year in a row, leaving me all alone to battle my way through pain. 

Oh, how mentally defeating this was, knowing I had just burned every single match.

Last year, I kept running past pain from my early fall, working up from 11th to 7th. And so it was all the more discouraging to have the opposite happen right in front of my eyes, as I struggled to remember how to move my legs, and started hiking more than ever before in a race. 

After about 10 minutes of sauntering on alone, an incredibly nice Quebecer named Alec came up to me and motivated me to run again. 

I hung off the back of Alec’s kindness for a few kilometres, before Alec found a new person to push him forward – the eventual fourth place female Karol-Ann. 

And that’s when it hit me even harder. I was alone. No one to run with. And no ability in my legs to feel like I could even run at all. I didn’t contemplate dropping out and I troubleshot throughout, but I couldn’t get my mind away from “just finishing” and not caring beyond that. 

Top ten was gone, and so nothing else mattered except getting it done. So I walked, and walked, and walked. I tried to run for five or so minutes at a time, but it always caught back up to me, with a mix of cramping and just general leg doneness.

I complained to my dad (my willing crew chief) one final time before deciding I’d try to run every downhill of the final 10K, and finally I had someone to run with at the very end – my XACT teammate Maïka Lamoureux. 

I ran with Maïka for a few kilometres before having the most dramatic river crossings ever, where it looked like the river would take me away. I then took a bite of a caffeinated XACT bar with less than 1K to go, (as if that would help), just to catch up to Sergio. 

“We survived” I said to him, sort of hoping we’d have a sprint finish despite both of us having nothing left to give. But in the end it was only me sprinting, for the first time in over 25 kilometres, just to secure a meek M17.

My disappointment was immediately met by the incredibly kind Elisa Morin, who I couldn’t believe finished second overall out of everyone on the day, and Steph, who chatted with my girlfriend and I about life and running, over celebrating another third place at a National Championship. 

It’s funny how when one thing goes wrong, many things follow suit. My laptop didn’t survive the trip, so I’ve written this entire thing in my notes app. 

But the good news is that I’ve learned a lot from this experience:

• Flying to races just seems to hit me harder than driving, especially around my sleep schedule, immune system and tendency to blow up like a balloon.
• Bending down on low-hanging bridges may be the way to go.
• I’m tired of flying to races, and I’m tired of racing 50K’s that take me a week to recover from, when I could simply just do more local, shorter races, even if some of them lack prestige or competition.
• There’s nothing wrong with my old approach of racing my way up a field. Had I just deployed a similar approach to last year, I would have almost certainly fared better, even despite my misfortunes before the start.

I’ve got one more Quebec race on the list this year, but I think it’s safe to say you won’t be seeing me in the 65K of that event as planned. I’ve gotten fit and fast this year under the great guidance of Jade Belzberg, and I want to show that at one of the most competitive shorter races in all of Canada two months from now instead, so long as they let me switch to that crazy 28K.

Until then I’m sure I’ll be able to laugh about this all soon, and get back to working hard in training to make the dream happen.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!