Amber Rollack is a go-getter. So as soon as she started fifth grade and was old enough to join school teams, she signed up for the first one available: cross country running.
The decision didn’t just turn Rollack into a life-long runner; it also inspired her dad, Rod, to pick up the sport. Now 42 and 70, the pair have lined up together at start lines for nine marathons and more than 20 half marathons.
The first time Amber and her dad ran together was a few weeks after Amber joined the cross country team. The city championships were coming up and Amber wanted to practice on the race course so the Rollacks drove out to the two-kilometre loop and started running together. Amber’s mum dropped back after a couple minutes, but Amber and her dad ran the whole course.
“At the time he remembers he wasn’t really enjoying it, but he couldn’t let his 10-year-old daughter keep going without him,” Amber recalls. “The next day he woke up feeling really good and he thought, ‘Well, I think this is something that I want to do more of.’”
Amber placed fourth in the city championships and her affinity for the sport encouraged her to keep running. She joined a track club in middle school and later ran for the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, specializing in middle distances. Rod, meanwhile, began running regularly and competing in local road races.
When Amber graduated university and stepped away from the competitive track world, she felt “a little bit lost.” It was watching her dad train and compete on the roads that gave her a blueprint for what a post-collegiate relationship with running could look like. She remembers how inspiring it was to watch Rod run his first marathon in October 2010, where he qualified for the Boston Marathon, and then run Boston the following spring.
“He was really the one who brought me into road running because of what he was doing,” Amber says. “After he ran the Boston Marathon, I said, ‘Well, I’m going to run a marathon too.’”
Amber and her dad lined up for their first marathon together at the 2011 Queen City Marathon weekend. Amber crossed the finish line in 4:01, 30 minutes after her dad.
“I remember being in that last 10k of the marathon — that’s always really hard — and being like, ‘I’m never doing this again. I hate this,’” Amber says. “But within 10 to 20 minutes of finishing, I was like well, ‘No, I want to do better at this. What’s the next one I can sign up for?’”
In the years that followed, Amber and her dad trained for eight more marathons together, often doing tempo and speed workouts together at the Field House in preparation for spring races. Rod predicted Amber would start to beat him in 2021 — and he was very nearly spot on.
As Amber’s times improved over the years, qualifying for Boston became a very real goal. She had hoped to chase the standard at the 2020 Saskatchewan Marathon, but the pandemic forced her to push her goal back to 2022. That May, she and her dad ran in lockstep, crossing the finish line in 3:38:13, good enough to send both of them to Boston this past spring where Amber finished ahead of her dad in a near-personal-best time. Both race weekends were emotional experiences for the pair.
“The thing that impressed me most over the the years is that you never, ever, ever quit,” Rod said to his daughter. “We used to cross paths after a turnaround, and there were many times that I could see that you were starting to struggle. And you still had a long way to go. I hated seeing and feeling that. But you always pushed through. And, in the end, you would quietly analyze your race and then improve on the next one. Now, it’s me that is chasing you and I love that.”
This weekend, Amber and Rod are excited to race the half marathon at the Saskatchewan Marathon and Amber’s nine-year-old son, Beckett, will run the MaraFun.
With Boston behind her, Amber is keen to keep whittling down her marathon personal best, but more importantly she wants to keep having fun with running. She wants to inspire Beckett to chase goals that bring him joy and aspires to live up to the impressive running career she set her dad up to have on that cross country loop all these years ago.
“I see what he’s doing at his age, and that’s ultimately what the goal is: to be able to continue to run and find love with it and enjoy it and be able to do it when I’m 70 years old, just like him,” Amber says. “If you love something, you’ll stick with it.”
