A group of people standing and sitting in front of a white wall at night in running gear. There is also a black and white boarder collie being snuggled in the bottom left.

Beers and Bears

Many great things have come from Kingston (author not included in this list); Hockey, The Tragically Hip, Don Cherry, Doug Gilmour, Kirk Muller, Bryan Adams, Sir John A Macdonald, Top Canadian Triathletes Simon Whitfield, Mark Bates and Sharon Donnelly. The list is actually quite long. Perhaps, however, the thing that Kingston can be most proud of is standardizing the rules of the Beer Mile. To this day if you talk to anyone about a beer mile they will often ask if you were using “Kingston Rules”? The standardization of the “Sport” was actually put in place by some Queen’s University runners back a couple of decades ago. I won’t go into all of the rules, but for those that are interested you can go to the official BEER Mile website and check them out yourself.

Quite simply, and for those who have never heard of a Beer Mile, the premise is pretty simple

Drink a Beer – Run a lap of a 400m track

Drink a Beer – Run a lap

Drink a Beer – Run a lap

Drink a Beer – Run a lap

(if you can’t keep your beer down before you cross the finish line you are forced to run a “penalty” lap)

On their own, either one of these things is quite doable. For most people one aspect is easier than the other. In the triathlon community, it is usually the running part that is the easiest. Putting these two tasks together often ends up in some exciting, if not hilarious racing and spectating.

At Human Powered Racing, The Beer Mile has been an annual Team tradition since we started back in 2006.

This years beer mile, while small in numbers (once again there were more spectators than participants) was a hotly contested event between defending champion Jay Krieger and first timer Dominic Bergeron on the men’s side and defending champion April Vesey and first timer Nancy Besharah on the women’s. Jay Krieger was able to defend his title in a time of 7:57 holding off Dominic by a mere 4 seconds while Nancy Beharah stole the crown from April with an 11:47 clocking.  (As a side note, the current world records for men and women are 4:33.6 and 6:08 respectively).

A big Congratulations to our newly crowned champion and defending champion!

For the full results list of this years race and past HPR races you can query HPR when you go here.

In other racing related news; Nancy was not finished with her racing as she was one of only 2 athletes on the team crazy enough to take on the Bear Mountain 10k on Sunday. Touted as Canada’s toughest 10k, this race takes place on the hills of the Bear Mountain Golf Course and is either up or down. Congratulations to HPR athletes Richard Boxhall on his 8th place AG finish in 48:27 and also to Nancy Besharah on her double racing weekend and time of 1:02:43.