It was a frigid day in January 1997 when Roland Delhomeau left his apartment to celebrate his 52nd birthday with friends. Despite the weather, the parking lot of his building had recently been flooded and plowed.
“As soon as I hit the clear ice, I fell on my ass,” Delhomeau recalls now, nearly three decades later. “I stood up and I fell down again. The end result was I noticed my ankle was at a 90-degree angle. By then I knew there was something seriously wrong.”
A building resident called an ambulance and Delhomeau was taken to hospital where he learned he had broken his left leg in two places and needed surgery to set it.
It was, remarkably, the beginning of his running career.
Delhomeau, now 79, grew up in Prince Albert and ran a bit in high school but didn’t keep up the sport as he moved into the workforce where he would go on to spend 29 years as a maintenance technician at a post office in Saskatoon before retiring in 2004. He worked 21 years without missing a day until that fall in the parking lot.
The accident limited Delhomeau’s mobility for months and left him craving movement. About a year after his fall, once the plates and screws were removed from his leg, he hopped on the elliptical at his building’s gym. Eventually he started doing run-walks along the Meewasin Valley.
During those forays along the river, Delhomeau often saw other runners wearing race shirts. “I thought: ‘Ok, well geez — I should get brave enough to enter a race.’” He did just that in 2003, signing up for the 10-kilometre event at the Saskatchewan Marathon.
“It was sort of scary for me, because I didn’t know anybody else that was a runner,” Delhomeau says. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing for that first race. I figured I was a slow runner so I started at the back of the pack.”
Delhomeau was boxed in for several kilometres and, when the field finally opened up, he passed dozens of runners. He crossed the finishing line in roughly 50 minutes and then got talking to members of what is today known as the Top Notch Masters program (back then it was Century Track). They told Delhomeau about the masters running scene in Saskatchewan and advised on other road races to add to his calendar. The following year, when Delhomeau retired from his day job, he became the club’s newest member.
“When I joined the Century Track Club, the only thing I was going to do was running. But within a month of joining them, I got sucked into doing high jump and other stuff,” he recalls.
Delhomeau became adept at throws, jumps and hurdles, and competes in the pentathlon and heptathlon in addition to track events and road races (though he is unsure what, if any, field events he will train for in the upcoming indoor track season). He and his teammates regularly travel to races and events across North America and Delhomeau competed twice in both the Huntsman World Senior Games in St. George, Utah and the American Masters Indoor Combined Events Championships in Kenosha, Wisconsin on top of several showings at the Canadian indoor and outdoor masters track and field championships.
As if the track and field schedule isn’t enough, Delhomeau has spend the last 21 years racking up finishes at road races from the 5km to the half marathon and regularly runs a parkrun 5km on Saturday mornings — usually at the Mendel Riverbank event in Saskatoon, but sometimes at the Wascana parkrun in Regina, the Ambleside parkrun in West Vancouver or the Mundy parkrun in Port Coquitlam, B.C. where his niece lives. Delhomeau attended his first parkrun on Sept. 11, 2021 and was on track to log 135 parkruns by Sept. 7, 2024 — an impressive record with few missed weekends. Sometimes Delhomeau will do a parkrun on Saturday and a road race the next morning.
Delhomeau, who had golfed before his accident, dropped the sport about a decade ago. “It was interfering with my running,” he says.
While his left leg still causes him grief at times — he struggled with severe hip soreness in 2022, which affected his parkrun time — these days he feels healthy and oddly grateful for the life-changing event that banged up his leg in the first place.
“Looking back after that episode, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten into running otherwise,” he says.
