An Olds firefighter who ran the Calgary Marathon in full firefighter gear says he is considering doing the same thing again – in two years.
“If you'd asked me on the day I would have said, ‘hell no.' But since I've had some time to gnaw on it I am considering trying it again,” he said during an interview with the Albertan.
D'arcy began training for this year's event in January. He said next time he plans to train for at least 18 months ahead of time.
In the meantime, having recovered from this year's event, Noel D'arcy is now training for another marathon. This one, a 100-mile (or 160 kilometre) race, takes place July 9 in the Crowsnest Pass.
Then, next year, he plans to run in the Calgary Marathon's 150-kilometre race – a special distance to celebrate 2017, Canada's 150th birthday.
He doesn't plan to run in full firefighter gear for either of those two events.
A marathon is 26.2 miles or 42.1 kilometres. On May 29 in the Calgary Marathon, D'arcy attempted to set the world record for running a marathon in full firefighter gear. That meant running in gear weighing close to 50 pounds, including hat, jacket and clunky boots.
He finished the marathon in five hours, 25 minutes and three seconds, well off the world record of three hours, 41 minutes and 10 seconds.
D'arcy says the boots and the heat of the day combined to slow him down.
The boots chafed his feet so much he says he “pretty much” lost a toenail on his right foot and when interviewed, appeared to be losing two toenails on the left foot, due to the fact his feet swelled as he ran.
“Those boots absolutely killed me. I was going well for about maybe 15 K. I was on pace. I just started to cramp like crazy. First my left calf, then my right calf, then my quads cramped. Then my knees started to give in,” D'arcy said.
“So I had to turn to the guy running with me; the guy who was pacing me, and I said, ‘we've got to re-evaluate things here pretty quick, because if I keep going the way I'm going, I'm going to end up going up and not finishing.' So I had to slow it down.”
D'arcy said the boots are simply not designed for running marathons.
“Boots come up to here,” he said pointing well up his leg toward his knee. “And they're solid; there's no movement.
“You're really standing up straight and you've no choice but to stand up straight. You can't relax. You can't relax your calves, you can't relax your ankles. You've got to stand the way the boots will let you stand; or in my case, run the way they would let me run.”
He says heat was another factor.
“It was about 20 degrees that day. It was forecasted to be 15 or 16 degrees. I think at the peak it was probably 21 or 22 degrees. Even when I started out at 7 o'clock in the morning it was already 10 degrees,” he said.
“As I was running I had to stop at aid stations and get actual pitchers of water and just pour them down my shirt, just to cool my core temperature down. The ice cubes felt “absolutely amazing, actually,” he said with a laugh.
D'arcy believes the heat, the extra weight of the wet jacket and all the gear combined forced him to slow down.
It was a tough decision to do that though.
“It turned into a bit of a mental battle. It was like, ‘can I finish this or can't I?'
“It turned into a case of ‘OK, I've got to make a decision here. I can either take the chance, keep going the pace I'm going and risk going up and not finishing or slow it down, guarantee myself at least a finish, whether it's two hours over what I was shooting for or whatever, but I would finish,” D'arcy said.
“That's kind of what I decided to do in the end, was tone it back and just go over the finish at the end.”
He was determined to make it all the way, even if that meant giving up his dream to break the world record.
“I've never not finished a race before. And if I did not finish this, it would have been the first time ever, so I didn't want this to be my first occasion when I couldn't finish a race,” D'arcy said.
“I'm sure there's going to be a period of time some point in my life – one of these races I'm going to be tired, sick, something, and I'm going to pull out. But I didn't want it to be this one.
“I crossed the finish line with a smile on my face in as much pain as I was, and I've no regrets. The biggest regret I would have had would have been if I didn't finish it, and I finished it,” he said.
Still, it was an immense struggle to get to that finish line.
“At one point, I had to lay on the side of the road and massage my legs to get them going again, due to the cramps in the boots,” D'arcy said. “I was on the side of Memorial Drive with my legs up in the air and I was just trying to massage my legs that way. I managed to get myself going again, but yeah, it was painful.
“I mean, by the time I was finished, coming in towards the end of the race, every 100 metres I had to stop, massage my legs, go again, stop, massage my legs.”
The support D'arcy received on Memorial Drive helped propel him to the finish line.
“As I got back on Memorial Drive, there was a lot of crowd support and stuff like that. So a lot of that kind of got me through. I fed off of that.
“Also, a whole bunch of the guys from the fire department actually came down. They saw me off at the start and I saw them twice during the race. So that kind of gave me a bit of a boost as well.
“They were there at the finish. My wife was there as well.”
Medical staff had been watching D'arcy throughout the race. They were concerned with his condition.
They were there when he crossed the finish line.
“When I came over the finish (line) I was literally swarmed. They wanted to get the gear off me as fast as possible, just because of the heat,” D'arcy said. “My legs seized up and I was wheelchaired into the medical tent where they worked on my legs.
“They wanted to put me on an IV initially to get me rehydrated but I told them I was fine; I didn't need that. I told them what I did need is I needed a physio to work my legs. So she worked my legs; gave me a half hour of painful, painful massage of my legs. It probably saved me a lot of pain in the days after,” he said.
However, only a couple of weeks after the Calgary Marathon, D'arcy was back at it, training for the Crowsnest Pass run.
“I did a 38-K run and there's no lasting damage,” he said.
D'arcy has noticed some fallout from the run.
“My appetite has been uncontrollable,” he said. “For instance, a couple of days after, I'd eat a meal, half an hour later I'm hungry. My body's just absorbing everything I eat right now.”
When asked what drives him to do things like this, knowing the toll it takes on his body, D'arcy said, “I'm kind of addicted to fitness, I guess, and you have a challenge.”
D'arcy sees one other positive aspect of running in the marathon, besides simply completing it. He raised $1,650 for his charity of choice – muscular dystrophy. That's well above his target of $1,000.
"I crossed the finish line with a smile on my face in as much pain as I was, and I've no regrets. The biggest regret I would have had would have been if I didn't finish it, and I finished it."NOEL D'ARCY
