If you don’t know Patrick, he is an exceptional ENDURrunner.

Not only does his 11:14:19 Ultimate in 2014 at age 51 rank as the 15th fastest of all time, but all faster times are by men 32 or younger. However, since his life has been turned upside down the last few years, he has looked to some constants – including his daughters and the ENDURrun – for strength.

Here are Patrick Kelly’s thoughts during ENDURrun 2017, on the past, present and future.

It’s 2012, I’ve just been handed some pretty crushing defeats, and I’m sitting in my dorm room thinking about where to go next. I thought I was in good shape but I wasn’t in the same league as the boys who were hammering me Stage after Stage. It was time for a new plan.

This is when the idea of sub 2:50 at 50 started to take on a whole new meaning. I started to develop a plan that would get me to a sub 2:50 marathon early the next spring. Skip ahead two years to 2014: what a spectacular year. It started with a sub 2:45 in Boston, followed by a second place finish to Matt Leduc at the ENDURrun, then a 3rd in The County Marathon, and I finished off the year with the first place finish at the MEC marathon in the Gatineau Hills.

Skip ahead two more years, to 2016. It’s March and I’m starting to experience some strange medical issues. Then on July 5 I have a stroke in my sleep, it wakes me and my life as I knew it took a turn sideways.

I don’t take kindly to being held back, so on August 7, 2016, I toe the line for the first Stage of the 2016 ENDURrun with both my daughters, Hunter and Taylor. I am not able to run as hard as I would like because I am still waiting for testing and results for my medical mystery, which is still unfolding today. Watching Hunter and Taylor battle through the week could not have made me more proud.

Now it is 2017: Taylor is handcuffed by a concussion. Hunter takes the year off, and I am learning how my body is going to react to higher levels of stress. Personally, the ENDURrun has been a rebirth of my competitive racing in 2012 followed by a new chapter in my running career 2017.

The only thing I can say is watch out, in 2018, Hunter and I are back! We are relentless!

Thank you for sharing this, Patrick.

It’s fair to say that Wilf Goron has had a pretty rough two-year stretch.

Take a second to check out our all-time results, and enter the name “Wilf” into the search box. This alone tells quite a story. At first you can see that Wilf has run seven consecutive ENDURrun Ultimates, which is a record he shares with Jodi Kalman and Vicki Zandbergen. That alone is astonishing. But if you dig deeper into the times, you can see something even more amazing – Wilf’s rebound from his 2016 Ultimate time.

Rewind to February, when we announced that we would be strictly enforcing the time limits going forward. This sent some shockwaves through the community as the ENDURrun had been allowing times to exceed the cutoffs without penalty. Part of the solution was a compromise, where some limits were raised. To those affected, this was a big deal. Wilf would have been one of those individuals – except that he didn’t even know!

Back to that results page we showed you, and you can see Wilf’s progression over the years. A variety of injuries contributed to a lack of training that resulted in two years (2015 and 2016) that are substantially slower than his previous results. The newly interpreted rules meant that Wilf could not repeat these times, but Wilf had more intrinsic motivations to improve. Wilf got to work, as he had a phenomenally successful year training on a 3.6 mile loop 3-4 times per day. This week, he felt stronger every day, and by the time he became aware of the new limits and enforcement, the damage was already done. He able to knock well over four hours off his most recent Ultimate time (he doubled his goal of two hours)! We are currently researching this particular record, but this might be it. Wilf showed a year-to-year improvement that is unheard of.

Congratulations, Wilf. He’s already signed up for next year, so the streak will continue!

As I write this, Sonja is running a marathon – a generally crazy way to cap a 118km week of racing.

But she knows exactly what she’s in to, after all, she finished ENDURrun with her husband Kela, way back in 2008. Since then, Sonja Bissegger has kept ENDURrun in the back of her mind as she has grown her family, finished multiple Ironman triathlons, and finished her PhD. So when the opportunity came up to return in 2017 – with an 11 month old – she jumped at the chance. In her first year with her daughter Maëlle, she finds running easier than either swimming or running, so she signed up in January to return to a community that she remembers fondly.

Sonja, a Kitchener native, is the type of runner that truly loves training, even more than the race goals. She uses races as motivation for the training, and especially for ENDURrun, likes how the week is essentially a training week. This won’t be an annual tradition for the family, but Sonja expects to return the event in a few years, and possibly even another Ultimate with Kela once their daughter is older! Sonja and Kela currently live in Kingston, where she works for a cutting edge biomedical startup which builds a bioreactor device that allows doctors graft healthy knee tissue from an unhealthy sample.

We look forward to hosting your family again in a future year!

We’re running out of time on these mini-profiles. Our goal was to share as many stories as possible, and this mission will continue beyond ENDURrun week as best as we can. 

Denis Allen’s primary annual goal is to stay healthy.

On the verge of his fourth Ultimate finish, never has his worldview been so simple. Running and personal health are two sides of the same coin, and Denis knows he’s successful if everything clicks for his main event – the ENDURrun Ultimate.

More than anything else, the camaraderie and community has helped to establish the event as an annual highlight – a “fitness vacation” – and Denis uses the event to set big, concrete personal goals. When he signed up in January 2017, it set in motion a larger plan. Seven months later, he has seen great success, and has lost about three-quarters of the way to his ideal race weight. Stage 7 will determine whether or not this year is his slowest ENDURrun, but even as injuries have gradually grinded him down over the years, he’s on the bounce-back and his outlook is rightly positive.

He credits Run Waterloo in general with helping to nurture his love of the sport. Denis has already committed to be back next year, and he has big plans to compete with his 2011 self (his fastest Ultimate). But for this fall, his eyes are squarely focused another longtime goal: the sub-20 5k. He has had varying degrees of success over the years, but his current PB – 20:21 from the 2010 Laurier Loop – has to go. If he can’t do it on his own, he is determined to get help, which will probably include joining Health + Performance!

These ambitious goals will make ENDURrun 2018 his best, ever, and we are super excited for it!

Unfortunately for Taylor Kelly, the answer to that question is clear: this is still too early.

When Taylor completed the 2016 ENDURrun, she signed up right away for 2017. But training didn’t go as planned this year, and when she sustained a concussion at the end of July, it all but ended her chances of completing the Ultimate. She is glad she gave it a try, but had no expectations about finishing the first Stage, let alone the entire week. (36 of the 380 ENDURrun Ultimate attempts – 9.5% – have ended in a DNF.) I informed Taylor that she now owns the lucky record for fewest kilometres run for the ENDURrun Ultimate: 3. She laughed, and noted that since her concussion, she is eager to start training for 2018, as soon as her doctor clears her to resume activity.

Lucky for us, her schedule as a teacher allowed her to still embrace the full week, even as she was forced to withdraw from the competition. More than previous years, this has allowed Taylor to embrace spectating and volunteering, and even though she would rather be running, she enjoys this new role very much. The rest of the volunteers do too!

ENDURrun is a family tradition for the Kellys; father Patrick and sister Hunter. Between the three, they have six Ultimate finishes and counting. So as Taylor plans her wedding for August 2018, ENDURrun will be a factor in date selection (Patrick is serious about this), even if it means that Taylor won’t be able to participate. Hunter as signed up, Patrick will today (!!), and Taylor is as motivated as ever to get healthy and back in the field. All the best for the upcoming year, Taylor!

Quietly, Nick But is putting together an incredible run at ENDURrun 2017.

Rob‘s Stage wins are appropriately grabbing the headlines this year, but Nick‘s performances this week are nothing short of awesome. After 5 Stages, Nick is cumulatively 20th all-time and he has a firm grip on the 2017 male Rookie award. We already knew that Nick is talented and well-trained, but how is our youngest 2017 competitor pulling this off?

If you’re looking for ENDURrun advice, recovery is no secret. He is quick to credit his coach, Sean Delanghe/Health + Performance, and some Ultimate mentors and teammates including Dave, Vicki, and Val as valuable resources. He has certainly felt soreness, but has developed and followed a strict routine including nutrition, rest, compression socks, but never any massage. So far, Nick has been pleasantly surprised by how much he recovers each day. He has also found the carefully designed ENDURrun week to be helpful, by balancing terrains and rest (the whole rest day was especially helpful), and he’s glad to now put the mountain Stages behind him. And at 23 years old, being in the 3rd percentile of all ever ENDURrunners by age, certainly doesn’t hurt!

Nick was swept up in ENDURrun hype in August 2016 when he became one of the first signups for ENDURrun 2017. It’s not hard to see why, as he was around for much of the week, captaining a Relay team, and running a spectacular 2:57 marathon. He admits that he wasn’t looking for motivation through signing up, but over the course of the year – through winter and injuries – having ENDURrun on the calendar has kept his training strong and focused. It wasn’t easy, but he never regretted it, and it’s showing why, now. He is already looking towards the Ultimate for 2018, but as he is graduating from the University of Guelph next April, he is wisely taking some extra time this year before deciding whether he will actually sign up. After an extended period without A races, Nick is excited to finally have the flexibility in his schedule to add some fast ones, including Fall 5 KM Classic or Road 2 Hope half marathon this fall. We know his fitness has come a long way and we’re looking forward to seeing his speed post-ENDURrun!