One Foot In Front Of The Other

After settling in at our hotel and a fun evening at the rooftop lounge, it was now time to get serious and focus on the event that brought us to Montreal – a Sisterhood 5k walk. The tiaras are unpacked, we found a good restaurant for carbo loading before the walk and spent some time brushing up on our high school French. All we need now is for race day to arrive. But first….

Preparation Is The Key

Big Sis chose our hotel, in part because it was close to the metro, with the thought that we could take it on race day. But being unfamiliar with Montreal, we decided it best to do a test run. After consulting the concierge Big Sis and I were off to the metro. Despite there being little English, we found our way to our stop and purchased tickets – so far so good!

But, we were almost stopped in our tracks when we couldn’t figure out where to put our tickets to get through the turnstile and onto the train. Fortunately a nice lady who didn’t speak English saw our puzzled looks and pantomimed for us what to do. Crisis averted! All went well for the metro ride itself until we got off and proceeded to go in circles trying to find where the race venue was. Thankfully a nice bus driver who was on a break rescued us and pointed us in the right direction.

Feeling reasonably confident, we then thought we could tackle riding the metro to pick up our race packages. However, after Google maps told us we would have to walk, take the metro, walk, take a bus and walk some more, taking over and hour in total, we opted to take a cab.

Our cabbie spoke little English (are you picking up a theme here?) and so we were concerned that he may not know where we wanted to go. Our concern was heightened when he used Google for directions and proceeded to take us down side streets and back alleys. After 40 minutes and $40, the cabbie announced we were at our destination. We found the store where we were to pick up our race packages, but had no clue where we were or if we were still actually in Montreal. After this harrowing experience, it was fortunate package pick up was uneventful. And the question of whether our initial cabbie knew where he was taking us was answered with a resounding “yes” when the cabbie who drove us home took a completely different route that was longer and ended up costing much more.

Once home we tried on our race shirts and were happy to find that the style and color were quite complementary. We attached our race bibs and organized what we would wear for the race. Sadly, we decided that our tiaras would be a no-go part of our outfits. This was because race day was going to be hot and sunny and, being the health conscious sisters that we are, we decided wearing hats instead of tiaras was the responsible thing to do. This was disappointing but we consoled ourselves with the thought that there would be other opportunities for wearing our tiaras.

Its Go Time!

Having been raised by a man who lived by the philosophy that being five minutes early is on time, we arrived at the race venue with plenty of time to spare. As we walked around waiting for the race to start we reminded ourselves of our Sisterhood guidelines to not finish last and to make sure to pass some people during the race. Our goal was to finish in under one hour.

As we were lining up to start the race, it became clear that this was not your usual 5k race. You see, normally we 5k walkers are few and far between and are at the back of the pack, last to start the race. But as we waited for the 5k runners to go ahead of us, we realized that most participants were walking the 5k and many seemed equipped for a leisurely walk rather than a race. Clearly we were going to have to adjust our race strategy if we were to meet our goal.

As always happens, it was quite congested at the beginning of the race and then gradually started to spread out. We soon adopted a “bob and weave” approach, which involved walking at our pace then going off the path and around slower walkers and then finding a spot where we could get back on the path. This allowed us to keep up our pace, but also resulted in us walking further than 5km when all was said and done. At least that’s what we told ourselves when we saw our finish time was 1:06.😂

The race course was through beautiful Parc Maissoneuvre. Thankfully it was quite flat and had several shady areas as it was hot and with humidity that we were not accustomed to. Also along the course were many enthusiastic race marshalls who yelled what we think was encouragement at every turn. They all spoke in French, so for all we know they could have been telling us to hurry up because they were hot and wanted to go home. I know I was hot and wanted to go home…

After we crossed the finish line we were surprised to find that we received a bracelet instead of a medal for finishing. Big Sis took to this right away, making a fashion statement by wearing it as an ankle bracelet. The other big reward for finishing was a swag bag full of personal care products. And when I say full, I mean full. So many products that, sadly, we had to leave some of them behind as we were concerned they might put our suitcases over the airline weight limit. But we did have fun trading and bartering the products amongst ourselves just like we did with Halloween candy as kid

With the race now in the history books, it was time to turn our attention to the other important reason we came to Montreal – visiting our brother Randy. Read all about this part of our adventure in our blog post next Monday entitled “All’s Well That Ends Well.”