Fire leads to record-breaking weekend for Laura Batterink

Laura Batterink was planning to race the Montreal Rock ‘n’ Roll half-marathon on Sunday but couldn’t get to the race in time. Instead, she drove three hours to a less-known race in Moline, Ill., where she broke the course record.

Batterink, a postdoctoral trainee at Northwestern University, lives outside Chicago and was supposed to fly to Montreal on Saturday but her flight was cancelled due to a fire in a main air traffic control tower which snared traffic around the O’Hare airport and across North America this weekend. The details of the fire itself are interesting and still unfolding, but what it meant for Batterink was that she wouldn’t make it to Montreal in time for the Sunday morning race.

Fit and hoping for a race, the Toronto native went scrambling to find an alternative option. A three-hour drive away, the Quad Cities Marathon was being held. She called the elite coordinator a day before the race, long after registration had closed, asking for a bib number for the half-marathon. The next morning, Batterink lined up for a less-competitive race than she would have seen in Montreal and smashed the course record and her own personal best in the Quad Cities half-marathon.

“It was kind of stressful on Saturday. I had to spend six hours in the airport. We were in the plane about to take off and then they turned the flight around and I had to spend three hours driving there, so Saturday wasn’t very fun,” says Batterink. “I guess it wasn’t the ideal pre-race day, but going into the race I just tried to focus on the race and not worry about the fact that my plans had changed”

She ran 1:14:23, finishing nearly four minutes ahead of the closest woman and besting the previous course record by nearly two minutes. Her time would have placed her second in the Montreal race and ranks her fifth in Canada over that distance this year.

Batterink will have another opportunity to race at home later this fall when she competes in the Canadian cross-country championships, her first cross-country race ever.