St. Andrew's Race This Weekend - or Perhaps Not

My Pfitzinger training is officially under way. I did eight miles on Tuesday morning, with the middle four being at "15k to half-marathon pace", followed by ball hockey that night ... even though it doesn't count :-). Tomorrow I put in nine miles.

I'm signed up to run in the annual 5-mile race in St. Andrew's this weekend. However, there may be a bump in the road. The soccer team I coach is having team photo day on Saturday morning, with Sunday being the rain date. Right now the forecast is calling for rain on Saturday, so the Sunday race may be in jeopardy for me, as I feel obligated to be with the team for the photos. Hopefully we'll get to make it down there for the race.

Growing up in Nova Scotia, the first time I heard of St. Andrew's (New Brunswick) was when my older brother went there for a week one summer for hockey school. The lineup of hockey instructors that summer included Phil Esposito, Dale Hawerchuk, Brian Bellows and Scott Stevens - all big-time hockey names. I also heard they had a bowling alley and a golf course. It painted an image in my mind of some exotic sporting location; apparently I'm easily impressed. These days when I think of St. Andrew's I still think of the golf course - which I have yet to play - but I also think of tourism and the sea.

I'm pasting text below from a Globe and Mail piece from May 29th of this year. It's written by Christie Blatchford, a well known columnist out of Toronto, describing why St. Andrew's is one of her favourite Canadian destinations. For more of Christie, check out her Governor-General Award winning book Fifteen Days, about Canadian troops in Afghanistan. It's a book that's quite sad, but also hard to put down.

Here's her note about her favourite Canadian place -

Within three days of my first visit to St. Andrews by-the-Sea, N.B., last summer, I was putting in an offer on a beautiful blue house.

The deal fell through – I am rather grateful, given that I already own one century-old house in downtown Toronto and the last thing I needed was another one halfway across the country – but such is the nature of St. Andrews that the people who ended up buying the blue house promptly invited me to come and stay with them on my next trip.

That gives you the essence of the place. It's small enough that people know who owned what house when (and even who made offers). More important, tucked in on Passamaquoddy Bay, St. Andrews holds out the promise of a sweeter, quieter life. People talk about how lovely the town is, and it is, but what I most like about it is that it inspires even the casual visitor to behave better, to be more mannerly and to be more easily satisfied with smaller pleasures.