The only marathon in St. Albert history is no longer the marquee race at the Leading Edge RunWild. It has been cancelled.
The financial and volunteer requirements needed to meet the City of St. Albert’s new event guideline policy has resulted in the non-profit organization eliminating the marathon from its May 3 competition.
“The city has changed some of their requirements due to some incidents on St. Albert roadways in the past year or two. They have put in some guideline changes to ensure safety of all participants and for all events that take place in St. Albert and these changes have affected our event. It was going to be too costly and a bit onus on our volunteers to meet the guidelines,” said race director Anita Cassidy “For us to put on the five events it was just a bit too much for us as a non-profit organization so we decided to put on a half-marathon, the 10 K, five K and the kids (MaraFun), which cuts down on our volunteer needs, it cuts down on our event time and it’s not as costly and not as time intensive for our volunteers.”
Kelly McConnell, the city’s community recreation branch manger, said the changes to the event guideline policy were spearheaded by the planning and engineering department in September.
“It’s all about making sure it’s safe for the participants as well as those people that are operating the event,” McConnell said. “After the evaluation of a number of events the year previous they said we need to step this up. They were simply seeing too many situations where (event groups) may have had a plan and maybe it wasn’t executed properly or you didn’t have qualified people controlling intersections. They said we need to have a better way of doing this because St. Albert is a city of 60,000 people and it has big city traffic. They saw too many issues so our approach is just to ensure all safety issues are addressed.
“It’s going to be a change, but again it’s hard to trump safety and it’s all about safety. In our world of liability and what-not we just felt that with some of the events we need to ensure that it’s absolutely done properly.”
McConnell noted the RunWild utilizes several roadways and some route crossings at busy intersections.
“Obviously the risk is much higher when you’re going in those areas,” he said.
The new standard for events in St. Albert includes mandatory training for flag persons.
“Any flag person who is coming into contact with a car would have to have this special training, which is a day course and costly to our non-profit group, where our focus is raising money for our two charities, the Zebra Child Protection Centre and the St. Albert 50-plus Club,” Cassidy said. “We’re a fun community based event trying to raise money for our charities so we decided to focus our energies on the events that bring in the most participation.”
Last year 79 runners completed the marathon, compared to 272 finishers for the half-marathon, 341 for the 10 kilometres and 450 for the five km, plus 577 registered youths from six- to 12 years old for the 1.6 km grand finale.
The fourth annual RunWild featured a record 1,980 registered runners and walkers in five events.
“We have over 400 volunteers every year and many, many hours of prep work, starting in September of each year,” said Cassidy, who estimated 250 to 300 volunteers are still needed for this year’s RunWild without the marathon. “Our goal is always to raise funds for charities while putting on a great event, but unfortunately there won’t be a marathon this year. We were excited to be able to put on St. Albert’s first marathon for the first four years but for a non-profit group it does take a lot of volunteer hours.”
Marc Meunier, the three-time RunWild champion, is bummed out the marathon was cancelled but understands why the decision was made.
“The marathon is a tough event to organize logistically when you look at what goes into it with volunteers and shutting down roads so I know from the RunWild perspective it’s very difficult to run,” said last year’s winner in two hours, 47 minutes and 26 seconds.
“The marathon didn’t gain a lot of traction. We all know it’s a long distance and it’s a tough race and they just weren’t getting the numbers they thought they would and I think that had a lot to do with it too,” added the Paul Kane High School athletic director. “If you look at a half-marathon, I know that’s gained a lot of momentum for them and it seems to be the distance that really appeals to people now. It’s a little bit more manageable in terms of the training, especially when you’re looking at a marathon in May. That means a ton of winter training so realistically you have to be starting in January and going all the way through the winter months of training and sometimes that’s really tough to do with our winters and I think sometimes that takes away from people signing up.”
Meunier, 42, had no safety concerns about the marathon route
“It was great. They always did a very good job with that route. There were always lots of volunteers out there and lots of police patrolling the intersections. I never felt that was any issue at all. I thought they had done a very good job and they had some big consistency with that route. There were a few years where they had floods and they had to re-route but other than that they really stuck to their plan and did a good job so hats off to RunWild.”
Meunier is now the pre-race favourite for the RunWild half-marathon as he prepares for a California marathon in late May.
“There are people probably in the same situation if they’re running marathons in June or July. The RunWild is a good tune-up, whether you are doing the half or 10 K,” said Meunier, who has completed 18 marathons, more than 10 half-marathons and a bunch of Ironman races during his decorated career. “Even without the marathon it’s still going to be a big event. They’re going to get a lot of people out.”
