The endurance bug hit Rob McLean when his brother-in-law signed up for a marathon. In his early 30s and feeling like he was “getting out of shape,” he signed up for the Detroit Free Press Marathon in 2013, despite having no background in endurance sports – he grew up playing hockey and golf.
“He signed up for a marathon and we’re kind of competitive with each other,” McLean said. “My furthest run was 5 km before that. He signed up for one, so I signed up for one. And then he kept signing up for marathons, so then I kept signing up for marathons.”
After finishing a “handful” of 42.2 km runs, McLean decided it was time for another challenge. He signed up for Ironman Louisville in 2015, learned how to bike and swim, and crossed off yet another bucket-list challenge with his 12:15:02 finish. A year later he would complete Ironman Mont-Tremblant, and return to Louisville again, improving his time to 10:55:55.
You can guess what is coming next, right? It was time for a new challenge, and McLean got it in his head that he wanted to compete at the famous Norseman Xtri event. He put his nam in the lottery and … didn’t get in. Shortly after he learned that he wasn’t lucky enough to get into the famous race in Norway, he learned that the inaugural Canada Man/Woman Xtri race would be taking place in Lac Mégantic in 2017. He signed himself up.
The race turned out to be a game changer.
“It it was amazing, especially the first year,” he recalled in an interview.
The Canada Man/Woman event was dreamed up by race organizers John-Thomas Boily and Daniel Poirier, who wanted to put on an event to help the community in Lac Mégantic, which had been devastated by a train crash and subsequent fire in 2013 that levelled much of the downtown.
“The start of the race was very emotional because it was pretty much four years to the day of the train crash, and the start was here at the Community Center,” McLean said during our interview in the Microtel lobby, a stones throw away from the original race start. “When I was here seven years ago, there was nothing here. It was just the Community Center and the Fire Hall. This whole area was just empty … they had just started the rebuild.”
McLean finished the race in 14:37, 34th overall.
“I had no clue what to expect for the race,” he said. “I made it through the swim. From there I survived the bike, but as soon as I got on the run, my legs were toast from the the biking, so the run was just a March to the finish. But it was enjoyable because it was so nice over here.”
McLean kept trying to get into the Norseman, but had no luck with the lottery, so he looked for other events. The second race was the SwedeMan Xtri race. He had a couple of buddies come along to support him, and they started to turn the races into a yearly trip. The following year they were off to Iceland. COVID put a kybosh on the European travel, so McLean ended up doing the Starvation Xtreme triathlon in Utah for three years in a row.
He considers that event to be the toughest of the Xtri events he’s done, thanks to the difficult course and the fact that the race is at altitude. Well, that and the Icon-Livigno Xtreme event in Italy.
“The bike has 5,000 m of climbing and you do five major mountain passes, including the Stelvio,” McLean recalls. “The bike was almost nine hours long.”
This year the Norseman organizers changed the way people can get into the race, basing the entries on points earned in the Xtri series. Thanks to all his races, the 43-year-old was finally able to cross the event off his bucket list. Turns out that despite all the other tough events he’d been to, it lived up to its reputation.
“I went in with an expectation that the bike wasn’t going to be as hard as the other races, but the first 35 km is all up hill,” he said. “But then there still was a whole bunch of climbing after that, which I wasn’t really prepared for.”
“The good part of the run is you start on the road for 25 km of relatively flat, so you get a chance to actually run it,” he continued. “But then the last 17 km is straight uphill.”
It’s worth noting that McLean lives in Windsor, which is one of the “flattest” cities in Canada, making his training for these challenging events quite a challenge.
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Even though he finally achieved his goal of competing at the Norseman event (and earning the prestigious black finisher’s shirt as one of the first 160 to the checkpoint on the mountain, which meant he could finish at the summit), McLean is here in Lac Mégantic again to take on the Canada Man/Woman again. So what keeps him coming back?
“It’s something more challenging and than Ironman and, to be honest, I kind of like that itsnot a competitive race,” he said. “It’s all about just finishing and there’s a sense of community. It’s kind of like ultra runners, but for triathletes. People are not really competing each other. They’re all supporting each other and it’s more of a community. Everyone is there to support each other and cheer each other on.”
What will the next challenge be once he’s finished his 10th Xtreme event? Possibly another bucket-list event – the Ironman World Championship in Kona. After finishing Ironman California in 9:29:26 (McLean is quick to point out that the down-current swim shaved off roughly 28 minutes from his normal swim time), he’s thinking he might hit an Ironman race next fall in hopes of competing for a Kona slot in 2026.
First things first, though – there’s another challenging Canada Man/Woman event to get done.
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