SUBMITTED BY SS SNEAKERS
With the Sneakers having finished the winter road race season on April 8, Khai Foo inaugurated the Spring racing season with his 11th-place, 13-hour, 48-minute completion of the Diez-Vista 100K on April 14.
This was quickly followed on April 16 with Lise Fraser’s completion of the Boston Marathon.
The 122nd Boston Marathon was run in the worst weather in 35 years. At race time, the temperature was +4 C or -2 with the wind chill, winds were NE 43 gusting to 65 and the course was positioned to run into that wind. Twenty-three of the elite runners financially supported to run the race dropped out before the end, and 2,300 of those who ran ended up in the course’s first-aid centres.
Fraser described the conditions after the race: “I wore four layers of clothes, three were Merino wool, a waterproof jacket and cap, and I was still chilled throughout. Soaking wet from the waist down. A lot of runners didn’t dress warmly enough, and they were literally staggering and blue, still wrapped in their flimsy plastic garbage bags, near the finish. I was completely soaked to the skin and chilled at the end, but not hypothermic. Oh, and did I mention the fierce persistent headwind?”
With 26,948 runners who started the race, it took Fraser 20 minutes from the start gun to reach the start line where her race timing started. She persevered to the finish while 1,200 runners did not, finishing in four hours, 20 minutes and 22 seconds in 93rd place of the 368 women in her age group, 8,090th woman of 12,063 women who started and 11,604 women who finished; 19,254th place overall of 26,948 who started the race and 25,746 who finished. Needless to say, it was not her personal best time for the marathon distance.
On April 21, 16 Salt Spring Sneakers turned out on Saturday morning to participate in the Driftwood’s Greening Salt Spring campaign. They “plogged” instead of jogged their way along seven kilometres of roadway, collecting litter and recyclables from both sides of the road along Upper Ganges Road (from Robinson to Central), Vesuvius Bay Road (from Central past Portlock Park), Tripp Road and Lower Ganges Road (from Central to past the Golf Club), collecting two extra-large-sized garbage bags of trash and one extra-large bag of recycling.
Meanwhile, two honorary Sneakers, Hannah and Fiona Munro, graduates of GISS working and studying in England, were completing the Fox 60-km Ultra, a large circumnavigation around Guildford, England, in a time of 10 hours and 31 minutes.
On Sunday, April 22, Sneakers coach Susan Gordon entered the 34th running of the Vancouver Sun Run 10K race, which bills itself as the largest race in North America. With 39,798 runners bearing down on her, Gordon completed the 10 kms in 42 minutes, 37 seconds in second place, two minutes behind her long-term nemesis, Lynn Kanuka, but also almost three minutes ahead of the third-place finisher. Gordon was second of 1,103 women in her age group, 84th of 20,517 women overall and 447th of 39,798 runners who started the race.
Coming up in the next few weeks, small groups of Sneakers will be running the Mount Tzouhalem 13-km and 750-metre vertical climb trail race on Saturday, May 5, and the BMO half marathon in Vancouver on May 6.