Vainqueur (French translation to English)
Noun: (1) winner (2) victor
A National Championship weekend is deserving of a race recap so that I can hold onto these memories for myself- these will be core female 40s memories. I wrote this for myself but am open to sharing for anyone who wants to come along the ride that was this simply amazing women’s sports weekend.
I competed at USATF Masters Indoor Championships in 2022 in NYC then I chose to sit out last year, in 2023. When it was announced that Montreal’s Les Vainqueurs Plus Club would host Canadian Masters Indoor National Championships, I waited for the inaugural PWHL (women’s pro) hockey schedule to be released. When there was a Montreal home game on the same weekend, my daughter and I dove in with the motto of “life is short: take the trip.” At 11 years old, she was old enough for her first mother-daughter big away weekend. It would include two track events, the 1500 and the 3k, a Montreal Canadiens vs Washington Capitals game and the headliner PWHL Montreal vs Minnesota Sunday afternoon. Let’s go.
The week before race weekend, I saw my chiropractor Liam for a final fix up. The last race he supported me though was Toronto Marathon (October 2023). This A goal was the 1500m. The 3k would be a bonus race because it was on day 2 and logistically possible- like how about grab an extra experience. Liam states the obvious: these events, marathon vs 1500m are very different. He wants to know what I like about the 1500 compared to the road. It was a well timed question, it made me consider the answer myself.
First of all, the indoor track season fits much better in Hockey Coach Erin (daughter) and Hockey Mom (son) life with its greater focus on intense reps and less on time consuming mileage. What I landed on for Liam is: I love that there are 2 components of success. The first is getting fit, which I think is the easy (ok, easier) part. The second part is executing- can you actually pull it off? Can you actually be that fierce? Can you be fearless, can you stay focused, can you keep saying yes to what is really intense race pain for 7.5 laps of the track? Per my Coach Lee: it burns from 300m in. And there is another 1200m. Per my queen training pal Colleen: “it’s if you were like: ok I am going to start this race at a sprint… and then just try to keep sprinting more until it’s over.” A sustained sprint.
I listened to a podcast with USA miler Jenny Simpson in this training cycle and she said it best, “the 1500m is an explosive experience.”
And so, the 1500 is a big challenge. I love the Masters’ Indoor Nationals. At home, I compete with the university and high school girls, which is an experience that I enjoy but I really enjoy lining up with my own competitors of fully grown women. {How do you get to compete at Masters’ Nationals? You need an Athletics Canada competitive number through your provincial athletics governing body, our is Athletics NS.}
I ran one tune up race this season, a 1500 as part of Athletics NS’s Indoor Open in January. In a field of high school and university women, I ran a season opening 5:06:xx, 4 seconds off my PB and finished mid-field. I did a few things well. I tucked in with the fast university girls to begin. I let go of the numbers being shouted at me and just ran. I can’t pay attention to the numbers. If I’m trying to count, do math, decipher what the splits mean: it pulls too much mental focus and detracts from my ability to hammer. I need all of my focus firmly dialed into running each lap at “sustained sprint” pace. I did that well enough at the start. I also made some mistakes. When the girls started picking it up with 500 to go, I didn’t do anything. I just kept the pace I was at. I didn’t consciously decide to let them go. They just got away from me. Coach Lee afterwards: “you didn’t respond. You gotta respond and hammer the last 2 laps.” This is the point of the season opener- make some mistakes so you can work on your weaknesses. I vow to respond in Montreal.
So fast forward to race weekend in Montreal.
The 1500 was the first event after the lunch track break, 1:45pm. My daughter and I arrived 2 hours early because: new city, new venue. It’s an amazing pro venue, built for the 1976 Olympics. We choose her spot in the stands, where she will camp out. She choses opposite of the finish line. We had a great time watching a woman pole vault and to a new Canadian age group record.
When it’s time, I have an excellent warm up. All the things click. My 1:45pm race time was tricky, I basically have 2 breakfasts. My daughter is ready to watch. We’re good!
But when I arrived at the 1500m line, 5 minutes to do, it’s empty. No officials are present. They should be checking us in and giving hip numbers. There’s some confusion. A few minutes later, beyond when we were supposed to start, a competitor says they delayed the start until 2pm.
2pm comes. They say there is a timing issue. At this point, it’s 2:05pm and I did my warm up run starting at 12:50pm. A while ago. I can’t control any of this and can’t spend any time thinking about its impact. The choices were: warm up again/keeping warming up vs wait it out. I felt good about my initial warm up and I didn’t want to start burning into my “fierce reserve.” I had also eaten my last meal at 9:30am. So long ago. I kept moving but don’t do any more strides. I meet some of the women in my field. Kind, badass women. A few were asking about goal times. When I say sub5- they say, “you gotta meet Liz” who I know is the one woman in the field with a faster seed time than me.
I meet Liz. She says, “ok, let’s work together and that’s my coach there, he’s gonna call splits from the 1500 start (halfway around the track because 7.5 lap race). I like this and have a little smile to myself for Christy, Meaghan and I’s NYC experience.
Officials are finally ready for a 2:20pm start. I line up happy and ready to attack. It’s a waterfall start, Liz is up at the top line, I am way on the end, competitor 9.
I had few prepared words in my head. I forget the first already….. the other 2 were: Respond and Thunder. Respond as in respond when the runner ahead of me makes a move to pull away. Thunder as in “hammer the pace hard” but using my daughter’s hockey team name Thunder instead of my club’s usual Hammer.
I don’t have much play by play of what went down. Usually you finish at 1500 and it’s like: “what even just happened?”
I get off the line well and fall in step behind Liz where I want to be. We are perfect, 19s at 100m at the start line clock. Her coach yells 39s at 200. We are 58 or 59 at 300. Maybe 1:18 at 400 .I know I told myself that these are good numbers, let’s go with them, take the risk, but no more numbers beyond 400m.
Now there are numbers in both English and French being called from both sides of the track and from both track officials and people’s coaches. I was committed to leaving the numbers alone and just running as hard as I can until the bell and then hard for one more lap. It’s a storm of bilingual numbers. I let them slide off me like raindrops.
It seems like Liz and I are lapping other runners more quickly than I thought we would. I follow her out into lane 2 around these women. I do hear the announcer in French, announcing Liz leading and Erin Poirier of NS close behind in second.
I know I want to pass Liz.
I don’t even know when I passed her. My daughter thinks during lap 3. I was on her, we lapped a woman and I just went for it in the straightaway: “Now, Erin, now! And do it with authority, make it count.” I work as hard as I can to make it count and put some distance between us.
I hear “3:18” shouted by Liz’s coach. It’s for me, though I have no idea what it means and I don’t try to figure it out.
I have a distance runner’s thought- one more lap till the bell.
I don’t look at the clock as planned at the bell, I don’t like seeing the number because if I’m behind my goal, that knowledge can sabotage my final lap. I don’t want Unknown Location Liz to pass me and take my lead and this motivates my closing. I have no idea where she is. Some while back someone said “Go Liz” but I have no thought about what that could mean. Is she on my heels? Back father? I can’t look. Just THUNDER HOME.
There are two women who I need to lap in the final 60m. I step into lane 2 and finish in lane 2. This thought floats through my THUNDER resolve about lane 2- if you’ve ever watched a pro track race on tv, the second place runner will often step into lane 2 to try to beat the winner to the line and the commentator says something like, “stepping into lane 2, the lane of wild dreams.” So I have this floating thought about me stepping into the lane of wild dreams but it’s my own wild dream, in real time, of me winning at Nationals.
I remember to lean at the line.
I win.
I actually pull it off. At Masters Nationals.
I haven’t held onto my racing leads in my most recent races. At Fredericton 5km in 2023, I outright led most of the mixed gender road race, only to be beat to line in the last 100m by the first place man. At this January track tune up race, I passed maybe 4 university girls only to have 3 of them overtake me. But not today. I held onto it. I actually pulled it off and took the win.
I am thrilled afterwards. I run over to where my daughter is and she’s yelling, “Mommy, you won!! You won!”
She takes a pic of me from the stands. We share a special moment from track to stands- glowing with smiles together.
I do cooldown with lovely Heather from Toronto. I don’t know what my final time is yet. I saw a 5:02 on the clock and I hope I leaned in enough to keep that. I’m gushing nonstop about how I coach my daughter’s hockey team and I missed their last regular season game today and got all these messages from my 11 and 12 year old players and now get to tell them that Coach Erin WON. I feel this deeply. Sure enough, when I get back to my phone, there are hockey texts.
My final time, confirmed via text from Christy is 5:03.35.
In my postmortem of the event, the analysis, when I try to figure out what actually happened…. this is what I have. I knew of this second athlete Liz, she’s been faster than me, she’s already run a 4:59 this season. Her name is in the meet records book. My execution was good for a win. The 3:18 split that Liz’s coach gave me was my 1km split. Did I respond? I was leading so there was no one to respond to but I know that I ran hard to keep my unknown lead. The second last lap is a hard spot for me- to hammer that 6th lap even though it’s not the bell- the distance runner wants to maintain and wait a damn second before the final hammer. I lost 5 seconds over the last 500m. I didn’t actually like the banked track- it was significantly banked and I felt like I could feel the ups on the first few laps.
My daughter and I leave the track and we head to Chinatown for a wander and then to her first NHL game at Centre Bell where we have big fun and she gets an unsolicited lesson in every single French swear word ever.
I had a pretty sleepless night that night, a mix of so much race adrenalin, wild NHL game, I have a hot spot on my left adductor or quad, I’m not really sure which. I’m thinking about my race time too and it burns me that I couldn’t pull off a PB at Nationals, on a banked track. I have also the 3km on Sunday- not as a performance race but as a second race: have the experience. But now my experience is a midnight cycle of “why wasn’t I faster and am I actually going to race tomorrow/do my legs still work/do I even want to/why couldn’t I run a PB today.” It’s a midnight toilet drain spiral without the fresh mental strength to choose the way I look at my winning track race. For many of us, we always want more. It’s a skill to stay here and feel the experience for what it is and relish what deserves to be relished.
In the light of track day 2, my legs work fine.
My daughter says, “Mommy, you have to run today. Its why we came!” My husband via text: “You need to race. Not many opportunities like this come along.”
I’ve also regained some mental composure and some data. My 5:02 PB is a 5:02.91 from 2022. This was a 5:03.35. So 0.44 off my PB. Looking at the field, all of the female masters’ athletes were together in one heat. I lapped 7 women over 1500m plus lapped 2 of them twice. So how much stepping into lane 2 and back into lane 1 is that, in seconds, over 1500m? I split through 1km in 3:18 so I lost 5 seconds over the last 500m. Someone else smart in track math can estimate that….
The clock doesn’t lie. She tells you what you ran. A race can be more than the clock too; it’s also the execution. The execution here was a win. Coach Lee has nice things to say and he leans into this being a solo finish: “you would have been able to stay on it had there been bodies around the last 450m.” I can flush the midnight toilet on that because the bottom line here is that I took my daughter to a National Championships to see me race and I won the event.
I do return to the track for a day two 3000m, for the experience. I know that I don’t have day one fierceness and that I have a tired body and that’s ok. As we line up, one of the women in the heat says, “you look so relaxed!” I tell her that I am, this one is just for fun.
It’s type-A kinda fun, the kind that is more fun when it’s over. It’s better than type A fun, when I return to my daughter, she exclaims, “Mommy, you did so good!!! Did you run a PB!!” This is all I need for this race. I did not PB but I did run exactly hard enough to place second, both second overall and second in F40-44 and I add a silver medal to the weekend.
Finally, my daughter and I add a final golden experience to the weekend and that is the PWHL Montreal vs Minnesota game at sold out Place Bell in Laval. We had chosen seats one row behind the bench and immediately next to the tunnel on the day ticket sales opened. When I took my daughter to her first pro lacrosse game at age 7, she loved it and asked “when can we go to the professional women’s lacrosse game?” It was crushing to explain: never. I was her mother, grown from a sports obsessed childhood and only having male sport leagues to watch….
At this PWHL game, I sat through O’Canada, my 11 year old fierce athlete daughter next to me, with these phenom pro women on the ice, finally it’s women; me with tears streaming down my face and a gold medal in my backpack.
