Coolsaet & DuChene with impressive wins at Scotiabank Vancouver Half-marathon
Photo credit: Reid Coolsael – www.reidcoolsaet.com
VANCOUVER, June 24th – Both Olympic-bound Reid Coolsaet of Speed River TFC and Brantford’s Krista DuChene notched impressive wins with strong performances at this morning’s Scotiabank Vancouver Half-marathon. Coolsaet’s 63:16 was only 6 seconds shy of the course record as he came down from 230 kilometre weeks of training for London 2012, to 190 this week for the race. DuChene notched another PB of 74:02 as the 35 year-old mother of 3 built on her breakthrough 2:32 marathon in Rotterdam in April, and reinforced the fact that she has moved to a new level.
Conditions were almost perfect for the 4,500+ runners from 22 countries who took off from UBC at 7:30am on the majestic course down to Stanley Park: 11 degrees, sunny with some cloud cover, and no wind. Another 2,000 took part in the accompanying 5K in the park, and together they raised an impressive $630,000 for 60 local charities in the Scotiabank Group Charity Challenge.
Continue reading race recap here.
Complete results and photos at www.vancouverhalf.com
Eric has posted a quick update on the race on his blog here. Below also is an excerpt from Reid Coolsaet’s own race report posted on his blog June 25th:
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Well that was a roller coaster of a course! The first half is mainly downhill which gave us (Eric Gillis, Kip Kangogo and myself) a 29:25 10km split. After that the race flattened out and the paced calmed down, but it probably slowed more than it should have. Maybe we were all anticipating the big hill at 18km?
After 15km I started pushing the pace which resulted in Kip falling off of Eric and I. I kept the pace honest on a nice downhill section and 500m or so later I found myself running alone. And then we hit the dreaded Burrard Street Bridge hill, which is quite the nasty stretch. I thought my lead was substantial enough to chill on the uphill. However, Kip was mounting an attack behind me. When I looked back he was much closer than I wanted so I had to pick up the pace again, which pleasantly came easier than I thought…
Continue reading on Reid’s blog here.