Garry and Joan; Travels for the less(or more) adventurous!: Canadian Death Race

On to our second trip in 2016. Western Canada. Joani's youngest son Matthew and his girlfriend/soon to be fiancé/now wife were going to a small town called Grande cache to run a race. I'll let my original email tell the rest of the story.

Hello All

This is a minor vacation blog. As you all know, Joani and I were in China in April and next year if everything plays out right we will do a jaunt through central Europe. (Starting in the Netherlands with two Van Gogh museums and then driving our rental car wherever the muse takes us.) But this email is about where we are now. We are currently traveling through 2 western Canada provinces. Alberta and B.C. .

Joani’s son, Matthew is running another of his crazy races. A 125 kilometer race in Grand Cache Alberta, aptly named the death race.

Mindy, Matthew's girlfriend is only doing the near death marathon. Also well named as this marathon is 42 kilometers over mountain trails in crazy conditions. When they informed Joani and me that they were running these races, my first thought was, "are you serious?" Joani's was. " Can we help?" So as you can imagine Joani and I decided to be their support crew.

Both races started at 8 am and allowed up to 24 hours to finish, but Matthew wanted to do his in much less time, which was fine by me. Didn’t really want to be out on a checkpoint at 2 o’clock in the morning, in the pouring rain waiting for Matthew to show up.

So Race day came and went and everything went as well as can be expected when you consider the circumstances! ( Did I mention Death Race and near Death Marathon?)

I am going to try to send a couple of more emails with photos of scenery and wildlife out here but since our first reason for coming was the race I'll keep the contents of this email on the races.

Firstly I'll tell you that they both won their respective races.

Mindy was first female in what had to be a grueling 42 kilometres of hills, trails, water and mountains, while Matthew, also won his race, an insane 125 kilometres in the same type of conditions. It only took him a mere 13 hours. He was soooo lucky I didn't decide to enter??????? I might have finished in 13 days!!!!

So just a touch more about their accomplishments and then I will attach some photos and let you nod off to sleep, if you haven't already.

Neither Matthew nor Mindy consider themselves trail runners. Although they are both terrific athletes and runners, they usually run road races while this race is mostly run by trail racers. A completely different breed with different training techniques and strengths. Mindy not only won the women's division for the marathon but finished 3rd in the overall standings. So whupped a bunch of men in the process.

Matthew accomplished something that had never been done before. The race is broken up into 5 segments and most of the people running it, run in teams of 5. One person starts and runs the first segment and passes his timing chip onto the next team member. This happens 4 times so that at every checkpoint a fresh runner starts for each team. Matthew won the race! I don't mean he won the race for the solo runners...... I mean he WON...... the race. He beat all the solo runners as well as all the teams that were allowed to put out a fresh runner at 4 different checkpoints on this 125 kilometre course. An unbelievable feat!

https://www.canadiandeathrace.com/results_photos

I have attached a link to the race results for any of you that might want to check out the numbers, and for any of you romantics out there I will tell you that after Matthew crossed the finish line of what must have been one of the most grueling 13 hours of his life, the first thing he did was get down on his knee and propose marriage to Mindy.