Shelley Doucet and the race she calls “the hardest thing” she’s ever done

Photo: Joe Viger courtesy of Shelley Doucet.

Photo: Joe Viger courtesy of Shelley Doucet.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Quispamsis, N.B.’s Shelley Doucet of the Mount Washington Road Race.

The Canadian finished third overall at last Saturday’s mountain road race up the highest peak in the northeastern United States. A week out from the race, Doucet wasn’t even planning on running the New Hampshire road race, which climbs 1,417m over 12.2K at an average grade of 12 per cent. Doucet finished in 1:16:36, five minutes back of women’s champion Shannon Payne.

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Not only was Doucet not 100 per cent committed to the event that follows the Mount Washington Auto Road from the base of the the mountain to the summit a few days ahead of time, she also raced the preceding weekend at a trail race in New Brunswick, the Rompin Rockwood 25K. There, Doucet broke the course record, previously held by a man, by nearly 10 minutes.

Doucet put in her name in February for the race’s lottery as not everyone who registers can compete on race day. However, her passport was in Ottawa in the days leading up to the Mount Washington Road Race as she was getting the proper documentation to travel to the Ivory Coast in July. (She will be running for Team New Brunswick – Canada in Abidjan.)

When her passport reached her home in New Brunswick a few days earlier than expected, Doucet and her husband, Evan, along with the kids, decided to make it a family trip. “It seemed like a good opportunity and I didn’t want to pass it up,” she says.

Besides the first few hundred metres, the race is relentlessly uphill. “In my mind, I’m thinking as soon as I turn the corner that there would be a break,” she recalls. That would not be the case. Prior to the race, Doucet had not done any significant hill training, the exception being running the 2017 Boston Marathon in April.

The current associate professor and Jarislowsky Chair in Interprofessional Patient-Centred Care at the University of New Brunswick – Saint John notes that it was the first race she’s ever been in a race where runners were breathing heavily within the first two minutes. “The race was harder on the lungs than on the legs I found, it was hard to breathe and you feel the effort quite a bit,” she says. “There’s nowhere to get a breather [like the downhills of other races].”

Without a concrete idea of proper pacing, Doucet sprinkled in walking breaks every five minutes or so. (From the start, she gauged where the other top women were to get a better idea of pacing.) The alternating run-walk strategy helped Doucet maintain 6:16 per kilometre pace throughout, including over the final 50m, which climbs at a staggering 22 per cent.

After the race, competitors car pool to return to the base of the mountain. Interestingly, riding in the same car as Doucet was Boston Marathon race director Dave McGillivray. She says that she felt considerably better after the race compared to other events, citing that there were no downhill sections for the legs to take a pounding.

To cap off the trip, Doucet and family visited nearby Story Land, a family amusement park in New Hampshire. “This picture at Story Land sums up our amazing experience in New Hampshire last weekend,” she captioned the below photo. “I am quite sure my facial expression was the exact same [as] when I looked up to see Mountain Washington before the race!”

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