25th Anniversary Royal LePage Snow to Surf Stories
For our 25th Anniversary, we are running a series of articles in the local newspapers highlighting past experiences.
Top Multi-Sport Relay in Google
Some Weird Awards (and Favorites) over the Years
The 12-Step Program for Chronic Snow to Surfers
Top Multi-Sport Relay in Google
Punch ‘multi-sport relay’ into a Google search and ‘Royal LePage Snow to Surf Relay’ tops the list! Do the same with ‘snow to surf’ and you get the same result! Punch in ‘Royal le Page’ and the same result comes up in ninth spot ahead of 1,499,991 results for the same search phrase.
The race gets an astounding number of ‘hits’ and even if the event did nothing more than hold its own on the net it would still be a great tool for bringing the Comox Valley forward in the minds of folks who enjoy endurance activities.
The Snow to Surf – as it’s popularly abbreviated- is unique in that it goes from the winter conditions at the summit of the Mount Washington Alpine Resort to Comox Marina Park. It marks the transition from winter activities like alpine and Nordic skiing to three season activities like running, biking, kayaking and canoeing.
Although we all know that all of these sports can be and are practiced year-round by their most ardent devotees, nothing points to the recreational values, the health values and the constantly growing fitness ethos in this area like the Royal LePage Snow to Surf Relay! Nowhere will you find in one event the mix of Olympians, National Champions, local legends and just plain enthusiasts as you will in the Snow to Surf!
Lest you think that this is pure hyperbole just chat with racers at the pre-race mixer, or at the transition points or the post –race beer garden to get a sense of just what the race means to them as individuals and to the community. For many, the event has marked a major turning point in their lives; instrumental in moving them from a casual, sedentary approach to fitness and health to one of serious life-long participation.
My affection for the event stems from the fun I’ve had as a committee member and director of a couple of the legs and the pleasure I enjoyed as member of the ‘Tooth Fairies’ team. It’s not too strong a statement when I say, “ The Snow to Surf saved my life!” I’d spent a couple of years on the Race Committee. Wink Richardson roped me into helping out with the Canoeing section in the first edition of the race back in ’82.
I enjoyed canoeing because it was one of the few sports I could do while sitting down drinking beer and smoking and if you think that needs three hands you never saw me in action! But after a couple of years the split between my admiration and promotion of fitness activity and my non-existent practice of same became a nagging concern that resulted in a switch – in my late forties- to regular activity and competition.
The ten years of this activity came to my rescue and spared me the drastic effects of a ‘lifestyle-induced ‘heart attack. So, I like many others, owe the Snow to Surf a debt of gratitude. This underlying emotion accounts for the majority of racers who return yearly to test themselves against some portion of the 62-plus kilometer course.
You’d think that being part of a team would take some of the pressure off but often the opposite is the case. What do you do when your Mountain Biker arrives at the Road cycle transition with a broken chain and his hard-tail bike over his shoulder having been passed in the Bevan woods by six other riders? You jump on your road bike, dig deep, pick up your cadence rate and hope to bring your team back into contention.
Break down the word ‘competition’ into its Latin roots and you’ll see that instead of meaning’ win at any cost’, it means to ‘to seek or strive’ ( petitio- I ask) and (com –with others). In this sense the Snow to Surf represents competition at its best- adherents from seven sporting disciplines striving with and against each other for the betterment of all!
Of course there is a limit to what can be achieved in the pursuit of the spirit of the game. One aspiring Alpine skier, knowing that the big challenge for him would be the uphill, on foot section leading from the top of the then Yellow Chair to the top of the Blue chair. Film footage of this section looks like the retreat of Napoleons army from Moscow. Our racer, a shops teacher at one of the local middle schools, practiced for this section by going out daily to the sand hills which bordered the road to Cumberland and in a perfect example of palinoia at its best, did an extraordinary number of hill ‘repeats’ in his Salomon boots. His lungs could have stood in for a blacksmith’s bellows. His calves and thighs looked like they were chiseled by Praxiteles from Corinthian marble. He was not only ready he was also totally psyched by the thought that he would be able to reach the summit of Mount Washington in a position to give his team of fellow pedagogues an insurmountable lead. And he did! He bestrode the snowy slope like a Norse God pursued by the Valkyries and hit the top of the hill well ahead of the competition.
If the Alpine section had consisted merely of the uphill pedestrian section our boy would have taken home a finely crafted Snow to Surf beer mug at that point. However the point of the uphill section is to spread the racers out so that there is some separation during the downhill phase.
Our racer clicked into his bindings and pointed the tips of his skis down Linton’s Loop only to discover that the uphill had turned his legs into limp pasta. He’d managed to create maximum oxygen indebtedness in the uphill. Blood was coursing through his circulatory system but his corpuscles weren’t delivering the goods.
The alpine angels were smiling that day and in the several seconds it took the loose-legged racer to hit the first gentle turn his muscles recovered their tone and he was able to reach the Nordic transition zone in first place.
It would be nice to be able to report that the rest of his team had trained to the same degree as our hero and had gone on to win the coveted Realty World Trophy as national multi-sport relay champions but, sadly that was not the case and the team as a whole finished out of the medals. In this spirit of reminiscence, any reader who has a particular race anecdote or highlight can share it by email to atkinson@island.net.
Some Weird Awards (and Favorites) over the Years
So far we’ve focused our laser gaze on the competitive side of the Royal LePage Snow to Surf Relay. But as one mentally and physically exhausted racer said to me after a restorative visit to the Beer Garden in Comox Marina Park,” I’d rather give my Granny a bath than do that again!”
No worries. He was back for more the next year.
There is however more to the weekend than the race itself. The race committee has always looked for ways to enhance the event, with mostly positive results but sometimes the ’let’s turn this into an opera,’ approach hasn’t always worked. But unless you push the envelope a little howya gonna know where the limits lie? From year two on the pre-race package pick-up and get-together has been a hit! This lets racers assemble at one point, get their T-shirts, course directions and rules. It gives them a chance to clarify any questions about equipment, get the ‘gen’ on last –minute course alterations, tender and accept challenges and get to know each other.
The trick for the Race Committee was to find a Comox Valley venue that could accommodate five hundred or so folks and 19Wing CFB Comox came to the rescue with the use of Glacier Gardens, the arena on the base with a handy concession stand. The entries quickly grew and the venue had to be shifted. Again the military reached out and the Base Commander approved the use of Number 4 hanger. A long term solution was needed because a thousand or so weirdly costumed celebrants didn’t mesh with the defense needs of this great country.
So after some negotiation with the Regional District the Snow to Surf was able to hold the pre-race portion of the weekend at the Comox Valley Sports Center on Headquarters Road. A conflict with the bookings for the local figure-skating club meant that a temporary plywood floor had to be constructed, installed and removed after the package pick-up in order to accommodate the skaters. This task was taken in hand by members of the Mount Washington Ski Club who also handled the refreshment end of things for the weekend.
The Sports Center gave the event a reasonable break on the rent of the facility particularly when one of the publicity people for the race ventured, in print, the thought that if a suitable venue couldn’t be found in the Comox Valley, the folks at Strathcona Gardens in Campbell River would be pleased to host the event at no charge and that a simple re-routing of the racers to River City could be arranged with a left turn at the Duncan Bay Main and Strathcona Parkway intersection.
Cooler heads, including that of Mayor Ron Weber, prevailed. One weird year the pre-race party turned into something of a moveable feast with package pick-up areas at Comox Rec, Cumberland Recreational Institute and Courtenay’s Lewis Center. That was the year the committee invited representatives from Kelowna and Whistler to visit our event with the idea that a multi-sport race series might be instituted.
Through the good offices of the Comox Recreation Commission the pre-race action found a long-term home at the Comox Recreation facility where the hall was set up with tables for teams, a deejay played pop requests and a big screen TV showed clips from previous race videos. The high light of the evening action was the presentation of prizes for Snow to Surf Parade entries- a part of the weekend that will get its own article.
For the last few years and the foreseeable future the pre-race festivities happen at the Mount Washington Alpine Resort where the facilities offer the perfect party format and easy access to up hill accommodation for the many out-of –town racers that crowd into the Comox Valley each spring.
Costume prizes aren’t the only awards given out over the course of the weekend. Each race category has a trophy and the names of the winning teams are attached after each race. The trophies reside in a permanent home in the Comox Rec Center along with some neat memorabilia. After 25 years it’s tough to decide on prizes for the top three teams in each category as well as for the top Military team.
The Royal LePage Snow to Surf Relay. Year one saw the winners get a basic individual trophy surmounted by a beer can. Each year since the Race Committee has gone out of it’s way to find an award that would be unique, representative of the Valley and the event and crafted by a local artist or artisan. Beer mugs have been a recurring theme Other pottery items have been received with pleasure by category winners although a recipient of a small elegant dish was heard to say,” Oh good! An ash tray.”
One the whole the awards have gotten great reactions from the winners. I can only think of two occasions when the response was less than enthusiastic. One year the races were presented with wire figurines representing each of the sports. These little ghouls found their way to many a yard sale where they frightened small children. Several years later the Committee commissioned a large water-colour painting of the Running Leg of the Snow to Surf and had off-set prints made as awards. The idea was that this would lead to a series of paintings depicting each leg of the race and solve the ‘What do we give them this year?’ problem. (Hey, it’s not done ‘til it’s overdone, right?) These were a colossal failure!
We’ve seen wooden trays, sand blasted glass representations of Mount Washington, sushi plates, stainless steel and glass mugs. As I write I’m looking at a faux-stained glass Special Award that depicts a semi-abstract landscape view of the Comox Valley form the Comox Valley Molson Canadian Snow to Surf Race of 1988. Taken as a whole the awards at race end are a highlight of the weekend and the awards with the greatest degree of acceptance are the Gold, Silver, and Bronze chocolate medals that get wolfed down immediately in a quest to replenish race-depleted glycogen.
The 12-Step Program for Chronic Snow To Surfers
One of the really neat things about the Royal LePage Snow to Surf Relay is the fact that the directors of the race have amassed a wealth of knowledge over the past twenty-five years. Each Leg Chairperson knows the responsibilities, staffing needs and problems that are likely to arise and has a group of volunteers that are familiar with the course and the needs of the participants. This has meant that the mechanics of putting the event on are well established and contingencies have been foreseen and thoroughly planned for.
This leaves the committee in it’s meetings from September to race day free to focus attention on truly critical items; choice of T-shirt design, selection of an outer garment that will identify race officials at the transition points and the venue for a post-race debriefing.
T-shirts are a bear! Long or short sleeves? Cotton or technical fabric? Hire an artist or have a design competition? These are imponderables calling for Solomonic deliberation. Probably the least successful design, at least in the eyes of former Race Chairperson, Dave McQuade was a long-sleeved white shirt produced in the Molson’s Canadian era. This shirt was covered with a thousand or so small figures engaged in each portion of the race. McQuade called it “the where’s (expletive deleted) Waldo shirt?” One of the more successful early shirts was a bright orange X’s and O’s creation that was cobbled together at the last minute by the committee from a bunch of designs sent in by students at local elementary schools.
Some of the best shirts in the early years duplicated race posters designed by Neil Havers and were models of restraint and probity. In any case, picking colours, styles, designs and making sure that sponsors get their due on backs and sleeves used to take up much more time that any other details of the event.
This whole situation was resolved when Kathy Campbell was appointed T-shirt Tsarina with sole ‘imprimatur’ power over the race-day garment. This allowed the committee to move on to the next critical issue, that of deciding how to attire the race officials so that they stood out from the crowds.
These deliberations, over the years, saw committee members dressed in a variety of outfits all of which seemed to do the job. The first was a yellow K-way anorak that cleverly folded up into its own fanny pack. This was emblazoned with the logo of the sponsoring beer company. The committee dressed itself in Coors Light sweat shirts one year and another in powder blue sweats from the Radical Shirt Company which depicted competitors as stick figures. The designers of this prêt-a-porter item were former competitors who once did the whole race dressed as science nerds complete with lab coats, coke bottle glasses and pencil protectors.
From the writers point of view the least successful race official outfits were shiny nylon two piece suits from a short-lived local athletic clothing company calling itself Game Point. These outfits anticipated gangsta rap by a decade and a half.My theory is that although measurements were taken, individual pieces were distributed at random and sewn together indiscriminately by enforced labour. Female committee members either wallowed about in their hooded tops or had their arm movements so restricted that signals to competitors took place at waist level. Male race official hobbled about in several stages of testicular strangulation.
None of these outfits were ever worn after race day and even the indigent of the community refused to be seen in them.
My personal favourite outfit was the outback Aussie coat/ Filson hat ensemble. It was great on rainy days leading up to the race but caused several members of the Awards presentation to be overcome with heat prostration and forced them to retire to the beer garden to counteract the effects.
It must be pointed out that clothing decisions have been far from unanimous and, over the years several committee members, Comox Council member Patty Fletcher among them, have protested against extravagance arguing that public service should be its own reward. The other school of thought is that a few ‘perks’ go a little way toward promoting continuity. There are other committee ‘perks’ but a blood oath taken by candlight over crossed ski poles and administered by a sinister figure in hooded Gore-Tex® prevents me from revealing them.
While comparison-shopping for denture adhesive the other day I ran into Pat Bridge, a member of the “High Strung Sherpas.” This team along with the still-competing, and still winning, “Gold Dust”, the “Steamy Log Dogs” and “Mucous Morrison and the Abdominal Snow Slugs” were hot competitors in the Mixed Open and later the Mixed Master categories. Pat recalled the first start of the first race with Bob Brown flying downhill in his Silver racing suit and catching mammoth air in a pack of slower skiers. Her husband Ron was skiing next to a Mount Washington Ski Patroller at that point and heard him say into his radio,” it’s a total disaster up here!” It wasn’t, of course but no one, patrollers , skiers, volunteers had ever witnessed a spectacle of this magnitude!
Pat said that they all learned from the first few races and her recollection, having competed in five different legs of the event, was that, to her way of thinking, the alpine leg, although the shortest was the toughest. She, like others mentioned in previous articles in this series, reached the top to find that she had no control over her legs as a result of the tough uphill. “We learned,” she said,” that the way to attack the uphill was to run twelve steps down into the gully just below the start line then twelve steps up the slope before settling into a steady pace that would let you make up to the top without placing yourself in harms way!” I call it the Snow to Surf Twelve Step Program and recommend it to alpinistas!
