Now I know you're probably picturing a bunch of retirees doing the lemming thing off a mountain (sicko!!!), but no, that's not it. The Canadian Death Race, known casually to those in the know as The Death Race (boy, we shortened that one down a lot, didn't we), is actually a long distance run (125km). Over mountains. Three of them. Over a period of 24 hours. With so much elevation change that during the course of the race, you can suffer from heat stroke and frostbite, in the same day.
Generally, less than 50% of the starters complete the race. Some are airlifted out straight to hospital. Others give up at one of the many Aid Stations, and are hauled down the mountain on quads. Some limp over the finish line late, thus are disqualified. Oy.To make it a little easier, they let relay teams of five run the race in "legs". As in "I'm running Leg 2 - Leg 1 is for pussies."
And yes, I know of at least one person who died running The Death Race. He is (yup, is) a friend of ours from University, works at the same company, and dropped about a hundred feet from the finish line of his relay leg a few years ago. Thankfully we have a crack staff here at our tiny little hospital in the mountains, and they were able to revive him - but his heart did fail twice in the process. He's fine now, and ran again the next year. This year he has an ankle injury that is preventing him from running his leg of the race on the work team, so another friend from University is coming up from Calgary (staying with us) to run two legs.
So, grocery shopping will be done today (Thursday), because by Friday, this town will be completely packed with uber healthy stringbeans of muscle in running shorts and toques.
5 comments:
Soooo you are not running....?
Supporting I gather, Have a great timeI think i have seen a video clip of this race.It looked pretty amazing.See you in a few weeks.
Ummmm - no. Not running. Most definately not running. Contemplating setting up lounge chairs along the side of the race path, and toasting the runners with beer. Or cosmopolitans. Or, if it's snowing (possible, always possible here), with hot chocolate with Kahlua.
Next year we should have a quilt retreat at the same time. Then those healthy husbands can run legs of the deathrace while the quilters display quilts all over town, and we can have a dye-in in honour of the death race (ooh, bad pun!)
This whole death race sounds so... Canadian! But I want to come to the retreat :-)
Wow! Now THAT'S a race!
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