Juno Beach [jatp]

at the beach [jatp]

La Rochambelle, 15000⁺ women in pink! [38:53, 118th & 8th V2…]

As essentially every year in the past decade, I have run the 10K in Caen for Courants de la Liberté, with 5000⁺ runners, on once again a new route, still completely intra muros in the city of Caen, and mostly flat, with highlights Guillaume’s medieval castle and Men Abbey,  the gothic St. Pierre church,  and a few other churches. It went reasonably well if not great (although I ran the first 5K’s in 19:02) as I ended up at a mediocre position (8th) in my category, which is not surprising with some runners now 9 years younger than I! (The runner next to me is the first V3.) Weather was much better than last year, if still too hot. I however primarily want to congratulate my mom and my mother in-law for walking the 6⁻ km Rochambelle the previous evening  in great cheer despite the rain and the crowd. I could not spot them on the picture above…

 

La Rochambelle, 25000⁺ coureuses! [39:29, 24⁰, 164th & 7th V2…]

As almost every year in the last decade, I have run the 10K in Caen for Courants de la Liberté, with 5000⁺ runners, on a new route completely in the city of Caen, partly downhill..! It did not go well (although I started in 3:44 on the first three k’s) as I ended up at a poor position (8th) in my category, which is not surprising with some runners now 8 years younger than I! (The runner next to me is the second V3.) And a fairly hot weather, especially for a Norman early morning…. Several runners fainted on the race or upon arrival and the faces of most runners showed the strain. But I first and primarily want to congratulate my mom for walking the 6⁻ km the previous evening despite serious health issues in the previous months, as well as my mother in-law who walked with her.

Somme graves

As mentioned in a previous post, we ended up spending Easter break in the Somme, close to the part of the Western Front that opposed German and Franco-British armies  between 1914 and 1918, with horrendous human losses: the first day alone of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 saw around 60,000 British casualties! For a final gain of less than 10 kilometres… And a total number of dead close to a million. Unsurprisingly, the area is speckled with war cemeteries and memorials. Including an Australian National Memorial which commemorates the 16,000 Australian dead during World War I, including 11,000 with unmarked graves.  As for the cemeteries near the D-day beaches, I am always deeply moved when visiting war cemeteries, uncomprehending the waste of innumerable live of young men by military stratèges unable to adapt to new forms of warfare and throwing waves of foot soldiers against impregnable machine gun nests.

When running this weekend in the quiet and green Somme countryside, surprising a young deer which fled across the immense plain, with only a few bare thickets here and there, I was also wondering at how hellish was the place a hundred years ago, at how unworldly it should have looked to the entrenched soldiers, and whether or not any of this region had kept anything in common with the pre-war era, since entire villages were more than flattened, as shown by the picture of Guillemont below…

La Rochambelle 2015 [10K – 38:28 – 73th & 4th V4]

Another year attending La Rochambelle, the massive women-only race or walk against breast cancer in Caen, Normandy! With the fantastic vision of 20,000 runners in the same pink tee-shirt swarming down-town Caen and the arrival stadium. Which made it quite hard to spot my three relatives in the race! I also ran my fourth iteration of the 10k the next day, from the British War Cemetery of Cambes-en-Plaine to the Memorial for Peace in Caen. The conditions were not as optimal as last year, especially in terms of wind, and I lost one minute on my total time, as well as one position, the third V2 remaining tantalisingly a dozen meters in front of me till the end of the race. A mix of too light trainings, travel fatigue and psychological conviction I was going to end up fourth! Here are my split times, with a very fast start that showed up in the second half near 4mn/km, when the third V2 passed me.

Caen, June 1944-2014