March 11th St-John’s to Conception Bay south
What a day! It was our official departure today. So, a lot of emotions for Cours pour ta vie, excitement, nervousness and stress. We were both warned and surprised this morning when we looked outside from the window of the hotel room. Yes, we paid ourselves a little luxury before we left to get a good start. We were told that there would be a storm today. I half believed it, because it was sunny the day before. Finally it was raining, it was snowing, there was even a bit of hail. The sidewalks had no trace of snow the day before, were now covered by a fine white layer. Phew! In my head, I thought: “This is perhaps our first day, but it may still be difficult. Running in the rain in summer is ok, however in winter it’s not fun. “We finished picking up our belongings and dressing ourselves out to run, because we wanted to run the first kilometers together, of course. Jean-Christophe and I are two runners, but two very different runners, especially on the dress code. I do not like running with a coat, because in my opinion it keeps a little too much heat. We sweat and if we have the misfortune to slow down the pace, we get cold. I prefer to go with more layers and adjust. We would have liked to carry a small rock from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean but we didn’t find a safe access to the water. The winds were too strong to get close it. We symbolically started from the Atlantic Ocean around 9:15. No one at the start, but we were still motivated.
My first kilometers have been well although, I took the wrong street which lengthened me a little. It had to happen. But a few more or less kilometers won’t make a big difference. I finished my 15 km and then Jean-Christophe started his first kilometers. The sun is out and the temperature is better but, around its fifth kilometer, the winds begin to blow a little louder. So loud that he had to run behind the vehicle to cut the wind a bit. Without the RV, he was running on the spot, that was funny at first, but he had to work harder for nothing. On the seventeenth kilometer, when we were waiting at the top of a hill to not slow down the traffic, we saw a trailer of an 18-wheeler truck turning on the side because the winds were very strong. Then we decided to stop the run for the day because it was becoming too dangerous for the runner and our RV. The road was long and stressful to get back to St. John’s. The gales of winds greatly destabilized the driving of the motorized. We finally arrive in the city safe and sound
Christopher Gagné