Steve Milton: The grand old Around the Bay Race beckons

The energy at the downtown starting line is always conspicuously electric, but on Sunday morning there should be enough emotional voltage to power an entire city block.

It's been three long years since the iron filings of the multilayered running culture could react to the magnetic pull of the historic Around the Bay Road Race. But it's so close that the 6,500 entrants can feel the excitement, and perhaps some doubt (Heartbreak Hill), surging in their calves and lungs.

I think it's really important for the running community to get back from virtual and into in-person events," says Hamilton native Ron Lariviere, who turns 72 in May and is travelling from Courtney B.C. for his 30th and, he says, final tour of the iconic 30K course.

It's my hometown race. It's the oldest in North America and if you explore the history of running in Canada, Hamilton has the biggest chunk of it."

Juliette Cameron Anderton, an 82-year-old all-round Hamilton athlete, usually enters the 30K race. She started in 1988 and has missed only two years on the long course since then, in the mid-1990s when she was in full training for Ironman competitions but still ran the 5K race.

When the 2021 live event was replaced by a month-long virtual race with runners submitting their best times, Cameron Anderton and 624 others also completed the innovative package of five separate distances (2, 5, 10, 15, 30K) called The Hammer.' But, on Sunday morning, she'll limit herself to the live 5K event and will return to the 30K next March.

There is still a large virtual component this year as capacity for the in-person race had to be reduced from the traditional 10,000 because of then-in-place health and safety restrictions. But Cameron Anderton didn't want to run the ATB alone again.

When all of a sudden you could do it on the road, everything changed," she says. Now we can race with people. Around the Bay is No 1. It's Hamilton, it's the oldest race, and it's very well-organized. It's something to be proud of."

In 2020, the race was postponed just two weeks before its scheduled start, and reset for late November. But, it was scrubbed for good in September, the first cancellation since road construction nixed the 1962 race.

That was disappointing all around, I don't have the words for it," Lariviere recalls. I was coming back to run, to visit all my friends and I had to cancel my flight the week before I was supposed to leave."

There are, and always have been, as least as many back stories and personal motivations in the Around the Bay as there are entrants.

Lariviere, for instance, was never an athlete" in his high school days at Westmount. In his 20s he was getting out of shape and started running short distances, a mile or so, before lengthening the runs over time, all the way up to the 42K marathon. He became a letter carrier for 30 years and despite walking carrying a mail bag for 5 to 15K every day still trained for distance races after his shift.

Running eventually became his main social circle, because there were about one-tenth of the runners there are today and you were with the same people at every event." In fact, he met his wife, Colleen Connolly, in the local running community.

He's run many marathons, including three Boston Marathons, but hasn't raced the classic Olympic distance since he was 65. He worked at Westdale's Running Room after retiring from the postal service and in 2018 he and Colleen moved to Vancouver Island. He may come back here for other races in the future but this is his final 30K. His best time was just over two hours, and he's hoping to finish Sunday in about three and a half hours.

It's is a nice round number, 30, to stop at," he laughs. Running a 30K now is like running a marathon when I was younger and I'd like to do smaller challenges, like 10Ks."

Cameron Anderton, on the other hand, has been heavily involved in sports since I was a little kid doing track and field in Trinidad," and was on Trinidad's national women's field hockey team before moving here in 1967. She has completed 10 Ironmen competitions, about three dozen marathons, including Boston and New York twice each, still competes in triathlons, trains six days a week, and coaches at The Finish Line, a women's triathlon club which has a lot of men members because they watched their wives doing it."

She says, there are lot more women running now" than there were in her first ATB in 1988 and a lot of them have very good times."

Lariviere says that because it's cheap and accessible to everyone running is one of the most democratic sports. I always tell people that if you're a hockey player you're never going to play with Wayne Gretzky. But I've run with (American marathon legend) Bill Rodgers. An hour behind him, yes, .... but in the same race on the same course."

Around the Bay.

Steve Milton is a Hamilton-based sports columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: smilton@thespec.com