It was 5:30 Friday morning and I was awake. Why? Because I, along with the rest of the Xcountry running team, was leaving for Western University (London, Ontario), for our first big race of the season. We left Montreal at six AM prepared for a long eight and a half hour bus ride to London.

At nine we stopped in Kingston, where everyone loaded up on Tim Horton’s caffeine, partly because it is actually proven to improve endurance in long distance runners, more partly to wake everyone up. Upon returning to the bus, some of the real hardcores had pulled out their books to catch up on the reading they were missing while everyone else returned to the Land of Sleep.

As the coffee worked its way through people’s systems, not only did people start to wake, but the first brave souls also needed to use the onboard facilities at about 10:30. This idea stopped shortly thereafter when it was discovered that the bathroom was approximately 100 degrees and smelled pungent. While I’m sure that the rowing team would have all packed into the lavatory to use the heat to lose a few pounds before weigh in, we weren’t thrilled with the prospects of ‘holding it’ for all eight and a half hours.

We finally arrived in London around 2:30 PM, and after a brief stop at the hotel, we headed for the Western X-country course, one of the nicest courses we run all year. The skies were slightly grey and cloudy, but looked likely to emit little more than a light sprinkling, in other words nothing the team couldn’t handle. Cross country isn’t a sissy sport that stops for rain like tennis or basketweaving.

At 5pm, the women’s team, who were warming up were notified of a delay. For reasons that are still unclear, their start time was moved from 5:30pm to 6:10pm. Nevertheless, McGill’s women dealt with the adversity. The weather was overcast, but the rains had yet to threaten.

At 5:45pm the rains came. At first they came slow, then torrential downpour, followed by lightning. Lightning, by the way, is the only thing that can postpone a race. As the lightning shot through the sky, competitors huddled in the clubhouse, only a few brave souls (McGill’s mens team) remained on the course under the tallest evergreen tree we could find to wait it out (it seemed like a better idea at the time). Eventually, the thunder and lightning subsided and at 6:15 the women’s race began. Sarah Ali-Khan, Nicole Portley and Carley Moher all had excellent races, placing 2nd, 8th and 15th respectively, a strong showing for the girls, who finished 4th overall.

During the women’s race, the men started warming up in what can be classified as a light mist. As far as I am concerned, a little bit of rain or snow in a race is always a nice touch. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other ideas. The rain came down harder. With a couple of minutes to go before the gun, we took off our warm-ups, and did some short strides (sprints) to get our adrenaline flowing as we prepared for a battle in the rain. As the intensity of the rain increased, the captain of the University of Waterloo and I told each other, “whatever happens, we are finishing the race.” Famous last words. As the starter gave us his one-minute warning and told us to get behind the line, McGill’s team was pumped and ready to go, ready for a good run.

The starter began telling us, over the sound of the pounding rain, that he would say “ready, then the gun goes off” but that if we hear a siren we are to stop running because of lightning, which means the golf course is legally required to pull us off the course. As the starter raised the gun and prepared to start the race, we heard a sound over the loudspeaker. We started to run! Then almost immediately it became clear. What we had heard was the sound of the siren to signal a delay in the race.

We all quickly grabbed our warm-ups and sat inside the clubhouse, waiting for the lightning to subside. The enemy now was darkness. I heard some of the teams talking about running the course anyway, despite the lightning, and without official times, but their coaches vetoed those ideas; there was a lot of lightning. An official then said that, due to darkness, the race is going to be changed from a 10K race to a 5K race, and that the start time would be 7:15pm or the race would be cancelled. Cancelled? Do you mean to say that we traveled for 8 and a half hours for nothing? The lightning continued relentlessly. At 7:15pm the race was officially cancelled.

The post race pizza just didn’t taste the same. There is something about having pizza after a race, when you feel sick to your stomach from running that makes it taste so much better. We ate our pizza and left. We didn’t come for the pizza, we came to run. We were still hungry.