The picture is from lap 8 of Sunday’s Montréal Roller Marathon. Ouch, what a race.

First of all, the weather – 6 degrees at the start, and very windy. The race is around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve – on an island in the St Lawrence river. Hence little protection from the wind.

Secondly, there were only 197 participants, and more than half of those were rather professional. So apart from lap 2 I failed to find a group of skaters to work with against the wind – all the groups were just too fast for me. This basically meant that the race was like a 42km time trial in windy conditions… hence the rather poor time of 1:50, 15 minutes off my personal best from Berlin last year. Full results are here.

Anyway, lessons learnt from this race… I’ll do better next time! 🙂