Emilie was involved in many sports at an early age – from soccer to mountain biking…she began competing in athletics at age 14, first as a multi-event athlete then turning her focus toward distance running… winning her first national junior cross country title in 1997 was her breakthrough on the national scene… soon she landed her first junior national team – the 1998 IAAF World Cross Country Championships, where she finished 10th, one of the best placings ever by a Canadian athlete at this event.
Emilie is from a small city in Quebec… she developed a interest toward nature and animals, which lead her to enroll in Biological Sciences… she moved to British Columbia in 2001 to train and study at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, where Mike Lonerhan began coaching her… she finished 2nd in the 2001 National Cross Country Championships when she hit the senior scene... by the next summer, she was ranked in the Canadian top three in three different track events and she claimed the 2002 national 1500m champion title… in 2001 and 2002, Emilie also competed in the NAIA American universities league which lead to a NAIA national cross country record.
In 2003, she became known on the international scene with a 13th place finish at IAAF World Cross Country which was followed by a Canadian 5km Road Record. During the summer season, she became the first Canadian women to ever run under 15:00 for 5000m which she did at World Championships in Athletics breaking National 5000m record and ending up in 12th place. In 2003, she decided to stop competing in the NAIA and focus on National teams and professional races for ADIDAS. Her first IAAF title came when she lead Team Canada to get the bronze medal on the senior short course race (4km) at the 2004 World Cross Country Championships. This medal is the first earn by Canada in cross-country since 1983.
In the summer of 2006, Emilie moved to the Ottawa area to train for the marathon under Ken Parker, founder of the Ottawa Athletic Club Racing Team. She was to make her marathon debut at the 2006 New York City Marathon.
On September 9th at approximately 3 PM, following a 2 hour training run along the Rockcliffe Parkway accompanied by her coach Parker who cycled along side her, she left to drive to Mascouche, Quebec for a high school reunion and to visit her family. While driving along hichway 417 towards Montreal she lost control of her car and crashed. She was airlifted to Ottawa's Civic Hospital where she passed away without regaining conciousness.
The following article was written by Rob Brodie of the Ottawa Sun prior to the Canadian National 10K Road Race Championships:
A day to celebrate Emilie's spirit
Today should have been a day of pure joy for Emilie Mondor.
The kind filled with the exhilirating feeling running always brought into her life.
Instead, it will be an afternoon tinged with terrible sadness.
Mondor isn't part of the field for today's TransCanada 10K Championships, and for the most wrong reason of them all. On Sept. 9, a single-car accident on Highway 417 near Hawkesbury killed the native of Mascouche, Que.,tragically ending her life at age 25.
Among other things, it prevented her from running competitively for the first time as a resident of Ottawa-Gatineau, an area she fell in love with during the Ottawa Race Weekend back in May (Mondor was the third women's finisher in the Nordion 10K).
"She was the first elite athlete to register (for today's event)," said Ken Parker, the coach who was helping her transition into a marathon runner. "She was excited about it ... It was to be her first race in the area as a local resident."
But Mondor's presence will be clearly felt just before the runners head out from the Canadian War Museum at 3:30 p.m. A special ceremony honouring Mondor will precede the event, with Parker presenting a special memento on behalf of Athletics Canada to her parents, Nicole and Francois, who no doubt feel the loss of their energetic daughter.
"She had that very passionate way about her," Martin Goulet, Athletics Canada's chief high performance officer and a Mondor family friend, told Canadian Press a few days after Emilie's death. "It was so deep in her, we could feel that fire just being around her. Running was very special to her."
Perhaps every runner today, who will wear Mondor's picture on their racing bib, will feel a bit of that passion. They should be so lucky. Parker, who worked with Mondor only briefly, surely felt it, and the connection between the two was almost immediate.
Mondor, who finished 17th in the 5,000 metres at the Athens Olympics, had struggled in recent years with an assortment of ailments -- most notably an osteoporosis-like disease that caused a number of stress fractures and had her contemplating retirement at the beginning of this year.
But the third-place finish in the Nordion 10K had buoyed her spirits, and she eagerly dove into the possibility of becoming a marathoner. So much so that she bought a condo in Gatineau, right across from Jacques Cartier Park, and moved to the capital to train for the 2008 Beijing Olympics with Parker.
They had finished a two-hour, four-minute training run -- "the longest run of her life (29 km)," said Parker -- just before she began the fateful trip home to Mascouche to visit family and attend a high school reunion. She didn't make it.
Parker received a steady flow of grief stricken e-mails through his RunnersWeb. com website, every one of them stunned by the news about Mondor.
'A GREAT LOSS'
"Emilie was better known outside of her country than in it," he said.
"I got e-mails for several weeks (after she died) from people around the world that she'd touched as a runner, saying what a great loss it was and that she was such a great competitor."
Mondor had targeted the prestigious New York City Marathon on Nov. 5 as her debut race at the distance, and was supposed to head off to Philadelphia for a half-marathon the weekend after her death.
"But something happened on that highway," said Parker, noting New York Marathon officials were so moved by her death that they sent a representative to Mondor's funeral in Mascouche.
Days after her death, he quickly decided to rename the women's 10K race he sponsors after the runner whose enthusiasm for the sport was so infectious. An event, in another cruel irony, she never got to tackle -- Achilles tendinitis sidelined her just days before the debut race last June.
But Emilie's Run, set for June 23, 2007, will live on as a tribute to a special passion for running Parker admits he's never seen the likes of before.
"She truly loved running," said Parker, who believes Mondor had it in her to run marathons at two more Olympics beyond Beijing. "She was only 25 and she had been running competitively (since age 14), but she was as enthusiastic about it as someone who had taken it up a week ago. There is no doubt in my mind she would have done really, really well in the marathon."
Sadly, we'll never get the chance to know.