Hey fellas have you heard the news?

Dylan Wykes’ 2:10:47 for 7th place at Rotterdam today qualifies him for the Olympic Marathon! Funny enough, for me, that is the least surprising result of the four Canadians who were aiming at the Olympic standard. Rob Watson’s 2:13:35 isn’t too surprising either because I’ve known for a long time he had that sort of performance in him but it was still a 3 minute PB.  It was nice to actually see him execute well and make a big step forward in his marathon career, Good work Destroyer!  Dylan ran 2:12:57 in Toronto last fall and because I know firsthand how tough the weather was that day he was actually much closer to the standard than what appeared on paper.

It was Lanni Marchant and Krista Duchene who had the really big breakthroughs.  Lanni ran 2:31 and Krista 2:32 knocking something like 13 minutes and 7 minutes off their PB’s, respectively!  I saw Lanni training in Kenya and knew that she was stepping up her mileage significantly and Krista had a great ATB 30km so they were both poised for PB’s but I still didn’t predict such improvement by these two, congrats! (Women’s Canadian Olympic standard is 2:29:55).

We had done a bunch of running with Dylan up here in Flagstaff before he left for Rotterdam and I had a good feeling about his upcoming race.  It’s great that we’re going to have 3 men running the Olympic Marathon for Canada, something that hasn’t happened since 1996 (Peter Fonseca, Carey Nelson and Bruce Deacon).

Kelly Wiebe won the Vancouver Sun Run today in 29:12, a good result for the young up-and-comer who scared me a couple of times last year in 5000m races on the track.  Both times he made moves in the last lap which I had to dig deep in order to hold him off.  Eric finished 4th which isn’t as good as he may have wanted but seeing as it was his first race since last October’s Scotiabank marathon I think he’s doing alright.  Kip Kangogo was a close second to Wiebe and I’ll have my hands full next weekend at the Yonge St 10km vs Kangogo.

Yesterday in Flagstaff, AZ we woke up to a bunch of snow on the ground.  Boorsma and I were planning a long run in the trails but decided to change it up and drive 45 minutes down to Sedona where it was supposed to be 8C and sunny.  However Sedona didn’t clear up like it was supposed to so we ended up wasting the day waiting around for the weather to break.  It didn’t and we ended up running in a snow storm here in Flagstaff.  It was actually only coming down hard for the first 15 minutes of the run and the rest of the run was pretty good other than one nasty stretch of wind and blowing snow on an uphill.  It kept snowing last night but it’s already pretty warm today, the snow is melting fast and should be fine for the afternoon workout.  Chris Winter and I are planning to do some 3 minute intervals on the dirt roads.

Training continues to go well here.  My mileage has been relatively low (187km, 175km last two weeks) and I’m feeling pretty healthy (thanks to Ron O’Hare who was here for a few days of physio treatment).  I got a nice dose of reality on Thursday when I did 1km repeats on the track with Taylor Milne and Kyle Boorsma.  I was happy with my workout even though I felt pretty damn slow averaging 6 seconds slower per km!