Levins sets course record despite intense heat at Canadian Half-Marathon Championships

On a sweltering day in Winnipeg that saw many half-marathoners miss their personal best by several minutes or drop out altogether, Cameron Levins managed to break a course record and win a national title.

The Campbell-River, B.C. native and 2021 Olympic marathoner took home gold at the Canadian Half-Marathon Championships in Manitoba on Sunday, covering the course in 1:03:23 four fill minutes ahead of his closest competitor: his marathoner teammate on the Tokyo Olympics Ben Preisner.

“It was a lot slower than the paces I had been hitting in practice,” said Levins, who has run 62:15 in the half-marathon “but I ran way closer to my PB than anybody else did, it seems.”

Racers who had come from across Canada to partake in the championship were met with 30-degree heat with a humidex value of over 40 degrees: temperatures extreme enough to force the race’s organizers to cancel the event midway through the marathon, at roughly 8 a.m. By then, many half-marathoners had already finished, but not without struggle.

On the women’s side, Tokyo Olympian and Canada’s second fastest half-marathoner Natasha Wodak won the race in 1:15:20, nearly six minutes off her personal best. Sasha Gollish was second in 1:16:55, and Laura Desjardins was third in 1:18:19. Gollish, just as the men’s silver and bronze medalists, Preisner (1:07:20) and Thomas Toth(1:08:22), missed her personal best by at least four minutes.

Levins, meanwhile, managed to break the Manitoba Half-Marathon course record of 1:04:44 by more than a minute. He attributed his performance to a combination of smart pacing (he adjusted his expectations after looking at the forecast) and a habit of running on a treadmill inside an altitude tent in his home in Oregon, to simulate heat and altitude training.

“I tend to do my secondary, sometimes tertiary run of the day in the tent and it gets really boiling in there.”

Levins said he expects his next race to be the marathon at the World Athletics Championship in Eugene, Oregon in July. There, he hopes, the conditions will be on his side, and that what he encountered in Manitoba was just a fluke.

“This was devastating weather… that’s not what I was expecting when going to Winnipeg,” he said. “For the elites, we can get through it, but for someone going out for their first marathon, that’s pretty brutal… it’s a race I certainly won’t forget.”

Full results can be found here.

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