Cathy Maclean
Cathy MacLean has achieved elite running results both within and outside the Glengarry community.
It wasn’t until she was in her late 40s and after her family had grown up and left home, that Cathy began to run consistently and participate in local road races. She completed her first marathon a month short of her 50th birthday.
Cathy has the innate ability to set attainable running goals and a rigorous training program for herself. Her story is organic in the sense that she devises and executes her own training program. She enters the races of her choosing and executes a near perfect race strategy every time she competes. In order to be successful and avoid injury, Cathy’s race plan is calculated to include important factors such as terrain and of course weather conditions that can change throughout a race. She maps out her training program, her diet, her mental preparation and the important and costly logistics involved when she travels outside the community to compete.
Locals can set their clocks by Cathy’s run schedule as she completes her year round training through the streets in Alexandria, on River Road and other surrounding rural roads.
Training for the top marathon events as Cathy does requires incredible self-discipline, perseverance and determination.
Beginning in 2002, Cathy completed her first Ottawa Race Weekend marathon recording a finish time of 4:03:21. Again in Ottawa at the 2007 marathon, she ran and achieved her personal best time ever of 3:48:02 in the 50 to 54 age category. Cathy has raced and finished the Ottawa marathon 10 times. In three of these marathons, she finished first in her 60 to 64 age grouping. Later years saw her place 2nd three times in the 65 to 69 age grouping.
Cathy ran in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 2005 and her result served as a qualifying time to run Boston in 2006. Since, she has completed the Boston Marathon 10 times and has qualified once again to compete in April 2020. Cathy was only 500 meters from the finish in 2013 when race officials halted the runners due to the bombings at the finish line. Cathy qualified and ran in the New York City Marathon in November of 2018. On this day, Cathy finished 28th of 172 runners in her age group, and was second amongst the Canadian runners.
Woven throughout the 20 plus marathon races, Cathy has completed over 20 half marathons and too many to count 5 and 10 k races. Since 2011, Cathy has been a regular participant at the Canada Army Run events held in Ottawa in September, generally running the half marathon event.
As an aside from her running accomplishments, for the past 5 years Cathy has participated in the Glengarry Sports Hall of Fame Polar Bear Dip fundraiser event. She now volunteers with the Summerstown Friends of the Trails. Cathy will continue to run and adds that perhaps in the future she would like to train for a triathlon event.
Cathy shares that she runs for the pleasure of the experience and feels very fortunate to have achieved the race results that she has.
