My jaunt to Montréal was, like most trips back then, planned around an athletic event I was participating in, in this case a Spartan Super obstacle race. I would have to pay full price for this, but I also signed up to work as a volunteer the next day in order to get a free race later.
I felt like I was long overdue for a trip to anywhere in Canada, so I had to take this chance to go there. Up until this point, except for an hour or so riding in the back seat of my parents' minivan in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit, which we were visiting) when I was nine, I hadn't done any kind of traveling in Canada. It didn't seem right that I had seen so much of Europe, on the other side of an ocean, but had barely caught a glimpse of this massive country that bordered my own.
To keep my trips affordable I always try to pay as little as possible for airfare, and so I found the cheapest way to Montréal was to spend some of my huge reserve of Southwest points on a round-trip to Washington, DC, and then pay less then $200 for another round trip from there to Montréal and back. Of course, it could be argued that my rental car canceled out the savings from the airfare, but I would've needed to rent a car no matter what happened.
July 29, 2016
And so the trip started super early on a Friday morning and lasted most of the day. I flew from San Antonio to Houston-Hobby to Baltimore (BWI) on Southwest, and then BWI to Philadelphia to Montréal on American. It was mostly uneventful except for the slightly memorable stop in Philly. This was the summer of 2016, and you may remember that this was in the middle of an ultra-contentious presidential election. The Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia had just wrapped, and I often saw delegates, carrying around their state-name signs with their luggage, walking around the terminals. And then there were gift shops capitalizing on the election, selling stuff like this:
By the time I landed in Montréal it was dark out, and I was getting tired. But I still had a bit of a drive ahead of me. I spent about an hour, probably more, on the road in my rented Nissan Altima. Most of it on Autoroute 10 heading east from Montreal, then south on a rural route winding through various small towns to the U.S. border.
That's right, I flew all the way to Canada just to drive back into the States, because that's where I was staying the night: the Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont.
July 30, 2016
Saturday was the day of the Spartan Super, my ostensible reason for journeying to Québec. I had a good pancake breakfast in Jay Peak's restaurant and then drove back north over the border to another ski resort, Owl's Head.
This was at the starting line. I tried running up that hill and didn't get too far before I slowed down.
The race was a lot tougher than I expected! All the way up until we started, I thought I would just breeze through it like I usually do; by then I had two Spartan Trifectas under my belt plus that year's Sprint in Austin. A Trifecta would be a Sprint (between three and five miles), Super (between eight and ten), and Beast (at least 13) done in one year; the last two Supers I'd done were the 2014 Austin Super in 4:10:38 and the 2015 Asheville Super in 5:41:28. But none of those were staged on ski mountains. This race was only 9 km (which equates, roughly, to 5.6 miles) but took me all of 7:14:23 to complete, because almost all of it was routed straight up or straight down the mountain. I couldn't run up the mountain because it was so steep, and I couldn't run down for the same reason. I didn't catch any signs while I was running but I suspect at least one of these slopes I was ascending and descending may have been a black diamond. I wound up walking the whole way. Also, curiously, there was no mud, which struck me as rather strange for a Spartan Race, but not something I really could complain about.
At the end, I had hoped to get some of the poutine they were dishing out for dinner, but one of the volunteers told me that it wasn't very good and was a "disgrace to Québec" so I skipped it. I'm not sure what I ended up having for dinner, it may have just been a sandwich I got at a Vermont convenience store. All that was left at that point was just to go back to my room at Jay Peak and pass out.
July 31, 2016
The first half of this day was taken up by volunteering at the Spartan Beast being staged back at Owl's Head, after which it was another drive back to Montréal. After breakfast at Jay Peak, I checked out of my room there and headed back north.
After the grueling Super I had been through yesterday--my legs were absolutely aching from having trudged up and down those black-diamond ski slopes--I couldn't imagine how anyone could do a Beast there. But, plenty of people did. The first two hours of my shift were spent at the Ammo Box Carry; that's where every runner must fill a metal military-issue box, meant for storing bullets, with rocks, then carry it down a path and then back to the starting point. After a couple hours or so telling runners what to do (along with another volunteer), I got taken to another spot on the race where I would be manning a water station along with a few others. This one was next to one of the wall-climbing obstacles.
It was through volunteering that I first got to know some Quebecers. At least, some Montréal-area Quebecers. I can't speak for the whole province but it seems like everyone in this part is perfectly bilingual. The people I met at the water stop seemed to be college-age, and it was really (to me) mind-blowing how they could just flip back-and-forth between French and English in the space of a minute. And when they spoke English, it was without any kind of foreign accent. The only person I met with a bit of an accent was the person I was volunteering with at the Ammo Box Carry.
Another thing I learned: apparently in Canada, "wasted" does not mean "drunk," but rather "extremely tired." The other volunteer at the Ammo Box Carry said I looked wasted after the race the day before.
Eventually my shift was over, someone drove me in a golf cart to the "festival" area where the starting line is. I claimed my free race credit, which I would use the next year, got back in the car and headed north.
My first stop was a little village called Knowlton, which I had driven through Friday night and seen a pub there I wanted to hit up. The pub was called simply Knowlton Pub and I had a nice pint of Alexander Keith Amber Ale.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Back on Autoroute 10, this time heading east, turned in my rental car at Montréal Airport, rode a shuttle to my hotel, day over. Only two things stand out as worthy of note: I stopped at my first Tim Hortons in Canada off of exit 55 from Autoroute 10, and I listened to a lot of local radio and heard a lot of French-language Québec music.
Other articles in this series...
