News

Video: Birth of a Running City

January 2, 2012
By Alex Hutchinson

It was an awkward moment. Dave Scott-Thomas, the man behind the stopwatch for the University of Guelph’s running teams, had just pulled into his driveway after picking his kids up from school when a passing pedestrian stopped to ask how the teams were doing. Scott-Thomas chatted with the man for a few minutes, sharing the latest results from the university runners and the affiliated Speed River Track and Field Club - desperately trying to figure out who the man was.

“This is sort of embarrassing,” Scott-Thomas finally confessed, “but I don’t remember where we met. Was it at a road race or something?”

“No, we’ve never met,” the man replied. “I don’t even run. But I keep hearing that you guys are doing awesome.”

Long-distance runners in Canada don’t get stopped on the street very often - and that goes double for coaches. But for Scott-Thomas, the encounter wasn’t that unusual. Over the past few years, something has been brewing in Guelph, Ont., and it has reached the point that the general public is starting to notice. Last April, the National Post sent a reporter out to Guelph to join Scott-Thomas’s crew for a workout, floating the idea that the assembled athletes might be “the strongest group of Canadian distance runners in history.” A few months later, the CBC sent a crew to document the preparations of Speed River distance aces Reid Coolsaet, Eric Gillis and Rob Watson for the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. And in September, the Globe and Mail ran its own story on the phenomenon, billing Guelph as “Canada’s fastest city.”

The attention was well-earned. Coolsaet and Gillis both came through with Olympic qualifying times in Toronto. More than 30 of their teammates have already represented Canada in international competition, and several of them are good bets to qualify for London this summer, including Alex Genest, who already has the Olympic qualifying time in the 3,000-metre steeplechase, and Taylor Milne, who ran the 1500m at the 2008 Olympics. The University of Guelph men’s and women’s cross-country teams, meanwhile, entered the fall gunning for their sixth and seventh consecutive national titles, respectively.

Still, a conveniently named river and a handful of rail-thin, whippet-fast running stars aren’t enough, on their own, to earn “fastest city” status for the whole community. After all, no one thinks of Burlington as “Trampoline Town” just because several national-team trampolinists happen to train there. “We’re trying to build something that’s bigger than just elite athletes running very fast,” says Chris Moulton, a coach and administrator who splits his time between the university and Speed River teams. “It’s kind of like an iceberg. The elites are the part that people outside of Guelph see, but there’s a much bigger community - the other 90 per cent - behind them.”

Speed River Elites Connect with Broader Community

Ever since the explosion of mass participation that followed the first jogging boom in the 1970s, running has struggled with the odd disconnect between its sky-high participation numbers and the vanishingly small popularity of its stars. While reliable Canadian numbers are hard to find, nearly 50 million Americans went for a run at least once last year, with 18 million of those averaging at least two runs per week, according to Running USA. That suggests that well over a million Canadians run on a regular basis. The problem is that few of these casual runners see any connection between what they do and what Reid Coolsaet and his teammates do.

Events like Guelph’s Thanksgiving Day Races, first held in 1894, are helping to bridge that gap. The races range from a 100m dash for kids five and under to a 10K with a $1,000 prize that draws the fastest runners. All the races are held around a one-mile loop in Exhibition Park, and they are organized in rapid-fire succession so that entire families can come to cheer each other on in different events, says organizer John Marsden. With 200 entrants in the kids’ 100m, it bodes well a future generation: “We’re breaking them in early,” he says.

Marsden also coaches the Guelph Victors, an informal running group devoted to the shared goal of improving. The city is already well-served with groups aimed at beginning runners, offering advice and support from staff at The Running Works and the local Running Room. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in addition to Speed River, there’s the long-established Guelph Track and Field Club, under the direction of Albert Tschirhart, whose notable products include Olympic finalist Carmen Douma-Hussar, and Rich Tremain, a teacher at Guelph CVI. Tremain won gold and silver medals in the 1500m and 800m races at last summer’s World Masters Athletics Championships in Sacramento, California, as well setting an impressive over-40 national 1500m record of 3:54.80.

The Victors represent an important middle group in the Guelph running ecosystem, Marsden says. Their Tuesday night track workouts draw 120 people each week, and numbers continue to grow. These are ordinary recreational runners, not track stars, Marsden emphasizes. “It’s just a huge group of people who are interested in getting faster.”

To bring these various components together, runners of all stripes gather for a Guelph Runners’ Brunch on the third Sunday of each month at a local pub. The $10 buffet offers a perfect post-long-run refuelling session. Anywhere from 60 to 100 people gather to mix and chat. Once the waffles and hashbrowns have been wolfed down, a speaker or two will share some stories and answer questions. It might be Coolsaet and Watson describing their experiences at the world championships, or a member of the Victors describing his trip to run the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley, or a local high school runner. The key is interaction between all the various subgroups present: “A lot of runners are introverts,” Marsden notes, “but Dave will tell his guys that they have to talk to at least three people they don’t know.”

Steady Rise for Olympic Hopefuls

As Coolsaet and Gillis basked in the warm glow of hard-earned accomplishment after running their Olympic qualifying times in October, reporters peppered them with questions about the secret of their success. Two broad themes kept recurring as they patiently answered the same questions over and over: patience, and meticulous attention to detail from a massive support network.

Neither Coolsaet nor Gillis were stars coming out high school, and even after university both would have been considered extreme longshots to ever come within shouting distance of the Olympics. For Coolsaet, who started as a freshman at Guelph in 1998, just a year after Scott-Thomas’s arrival, the breakthrough can’t exactly be pinpointed but came somewhere between 1998 and 2005. He improved his 5000m best from a modest 15:56 to a world-class 13:23.30 thanks to seven consecutive years of moderate improvements - a highly unusual PB streak, as any runner will attest - rather than any big leaps. His progress since then has been less linear thanks to occasional injuries, but remains steady. The windy 2:10:55 he ran in Toronto represents, once again, a modest step forward from his 2:11:23 in 2010 - and hints that there’s still more to come.

Many of Scott-Thomas’s early successes were carved from similarly unpromising raw material. His first national championship with the Gryphons men’s cross-country team, in 1999, was unprecedented because it was accomplished without a single All-Canadian (a title bestowed on the top 14 individual finishers). Instead, his top five runners ran as a pack and all finished the 10K race within seven seconds of each another, between 18th and 25th place. These days, Scott-Thomas is able to attract some of the country’s top high-school and post-collegiate talent, but the principle remains the same: modest progress compounded year after year, rather than pushing runners to train at a higher level than they’re ready for in pursuit of quick gains.

Still, training at an elite level requires a certain amount of time spent on the edge. The club now gets supports from a variety of companies including New Balance, PowerBar, CEP Compression and Timex. And to keep his runners healthy, Scott-Thomas has mobilized an impressive crew of volunteers, including a physiotherapist (his wife Brenda, conveniently), a sports doctor, a couple of massage therapists, a sports psychologist, and an exercise physiologist. Again, the support of the larger running community has been crucial in providing this support: “There are runners everywhere,” Moulton says. “Whatever skill set you’re looking for, there’s a runner who has it.” The most recent example: after reading an article about the Speed River team, a local risk management expert called and volunteered to perform a risk audit of the club’s operations.

All this adds up to a elite distance running juggernaut - but does it really make Guelph the “Running Capital of Canada,” as its mayor claimed in 2010? Runners in, say, Victoria might beg to differ: despite a smaller population, its two biggest running events of the year - the Times-Colonist 10K and the Victoria Marathon - draw an impressive 13,000 and 11,000 participants respectively. And the island city has a long history of supporting elite athletes, along with a powerful university program and well-organized clubs like the Prairie Inn Harriers that bring together recreational and competitive runners. The similarities are no coincidence: Scott-Thomas arrived in Guelph in 1997 after a stint at the National Coaching Institute in Victoria, and he consciously tried to emulate the successful model he saw there.

In a way, that’s the real Guelph miracle. Starting from scratch with essentially no funding, without the benefits of the idyllic (by Canadian standards) West Coast climate or the facilities left behind by a major event like the Commonwealth Games, Scott-Thomas has been able to replicate Victoria’s magic. The various jigsaw pieces of the running community, from casual joggers to obsessive Olympians to the toddlers who sprinted their first 100m at Exhibition Park last Thanksgiving, have been pieced together into a coherent whole. The question, then, isn’t “Who has more/faster/better-looking runners, Victoria or Guelph?” It’s “If Guelph can do it, why not us?”

Alex Hutchinson is a senior editor at Canadian Running.