Tuesday, July 01, 2008

HBC CANADA DAY RACE: VOLUNTEER REPORT

I was up at 5AM in order to get to the Old Port by 6:15AM. Made my way to the volunteer tent where I waited for quite a while and finally got my shirt and signed in at 6:35AM as a Road Marshall. There were a lot of volunteers!! When you run a race you often have only a small idea of how many people are needed for things to run smoothly!

Me and 5 other people made our way to the 2K/8K mark of the course. At 8AM sharp the race started and 660 runners made their way to us. The first runners arriving in less than 6 mins!!

Since the course was on the Canal Lachine cycling path and we had priority on it, our job was to stop cyclists from going on that path. Sounds easy, right? Well some people were pretty nasty with us! Swearing and being angry at us or just not wanting to cooperate! There was the street right behind the path... Thank god not everyone was like that and some people were really nice.

3 of my friends were running the race and they all recognized me while they were running! I was pretty impressed since all the volunteers were in red and they had no clue where I was going to be! All around a very well organised race, I only wish I was able to run it... I'll be back next year ;-)

Here's a pic of some of the Canadian Athlete who actually ran the race. I have to say some of them were pretty slow... I mean they ran the 10K slower than I would have!! Made me feel good lol
All the pics are courtesy of my friend Andre!

8 comments:

anners said...

Thanks for volunteering! As a fellow runner, I am appreciative of the volunteers! Hmm, I should really get around to doing it myself someday! ;)

yumke said...

Sounds like fun. I should get around to doing that one day. I'd love to volunteer at a water station!

TNTcoach Ken said...

It's great that you gave back by volunteering and stop talking about us slow folks. Now take care of that 'stupid' foot!

Alexandra said...

Thank you for volunteering and I made sure to say that to the volunteers along the route in Calgary.

It's neat to read a report from a volunteer's perspective! Thank you for sharing this with us.

Marcy said...

Yay for volunteering!! Wow, I can't believe peeps gave you slack for trying to redirect them. Wouldn't they like the same courtesy if they were in a race? Rude!

Ohhh about the Bloglines thing. It's how I do all my blogging. It's a site that keeps track of all the blogs I read. Tells me when someone posts something new. Saves me the hassle of having to click EVERY single blog I read from my blog roll just to see if something is new :-)

Nancy said...

Very very cool that you volunteered and fun that your friends picked you out.

Sonia said...

Volunteering is a lot of fun but I still prefer participating in the races lol

Moving on to the next race! Quebec City half... (we'll see if I'm in shape for this, I could always switch to a 5-10K!)

Runner Leana said...

Congratulations on volunteering! I love the HBC race - I ran it two years ago and volunteered last year. I was in Kelowna this year and they don't have a race there yet. They give you such fantastic tech shirts though!