authenticguccishoes

The city didn't just host the Ottawa Marathon on Sunday. To a great degree, the city was the Ottawa Marathon.

When the world's best hockey players come to town, it's not really Ottawa that hosts them -at least not in the same way. They use luxurious and exclusive amenities, of the same type they use everywhere they go.

And except for those lucky residents who have Senators tickets, it's almost a matter of trivia that a regular season game is happening here -unless you're stuck in traffic on the Queensway on game night.

By contrast, when some of the world's best marathon runners come to town, they run on the same ground as the 5,000 other runners, the same ground all Ottawans walk and cycle and drive on every day.

Yesterday, under clouds and through light rain, they saw the ceremonial precincts and the trendy neighbourhoods. They saw the new arch in Chinatown.

More than that, the run was so intimately Ottawacentric because of the fans and supporters who lined the city streets, all of them close enough to touch the runners and close enough to say whatever they chose and be heard perfectly.

For those reasons, if every runner on the course had been from Ethiopia, it would probably still have been the most uniquely Ottawan of our major sporting events.

Then take into account how many of the runners were from Ottawa, earning their right to run freely over so much blocked-off city infrastructure through a winter of training in ice and slush. When the crowds saw those runners, the lonely, ordinary-human types, they met them with a type of cheering grown-ups rarely receive.

Derek Spriet, a 35-year-old teacher at Lester B. Pearson High School in Gloucester, was struggling through the late stages of his first marathon when he heard people calling his name as he ran along the canal. Those people didn't know him, but that's one of the reason's each runner has their first name printed on their bib, so the crowd can give help to the strangers in shorts.

"They said, 'Go, Derek!'" Spriet said afterward, his finisher's medal around his neck. "I was suffering the last five kilometres. When people call out your name it just pushes you through."

Race Weekend as a whole pushed through a lot of runners. Between seven events of various distances, nearly 40,000 people participated. Together they took hundreds of millions of strides on Ottawa pavement. At a conservative estimate, more than $5 million worth of running shoes hit the ground. Organizers say the three-day event generates $25 million for the Ottawa-Gatineau economy.

While some of the runners were pushing themselves to record times fast enough to qualify for next year's Boston Marathon, Gordon Pilotte was visiting from Boston to run in Ottawa.

"It's beautiful," said Pilotte, who has done the Boston run 11 times and said he was impressed with how well-organized Ottawa's event is.

Claude Brault, 49, cycles to his public service job at the CRTC, so he already had a close relationship with the city streets. For him, it was a treat to be on them with no cars.

At the end of Sunday's race, as thousands of participants limped away from City Hall, where the race began and ended, Brault said he wasn't sure he'd ever want to run a marathon again.

Like most of the exhausted runners, he had no idea the race was won by a Kenyan named Laban Moiben, whose time was about half of Brault's three hours and 52 minutes.

Brault said the race's medal and bib weren't such a big deal. But the knowledge that he'd taken on more than 42 kilometres of his city and defeated it will stay with him.

"I know I did it."