A long long time ago, Alex and I thought it might be fun to sign up for a 42km trail race together, the Powderface42 in K-Country. The flood had other ideas though, and the race ended up being relocated to the Canmore Nordic Centre. Less effort to get to, but not very exciting when we’d been looking forward to running new trails. After some indecisiveness we decided we may as well run it anyway.
The course involved two laps that reached all the way out to the end of the Nordic Centre and back, with a particularly cruel section of five kilometres or so of running back and forth above the stadium – being so close to home, but not quite yet there. The first few kilometres basically plunged straight into single track, so there was a lot of very slow shuffle shuffle through the trees, before we finally reached the boring double track and could actually pick up some speed.
There was a photo of Alex on his own, but he looked a little like a serial killer, so we’ll go with this one instead, where he’s peering out from behind a friendly looking stranger.
After running in a huge pack for most of the first seven kilometres, things thinned out more and more, until I was largely running alone for the second half of the race. The weather was good, our feet got wet in that one boggy section, the aid stations had tasty offerings, and the plunge into the Rundle Forebay afterwards was perfect.
(I was 5th female, in 4:40:00 – Alex finished in 5:02:06. We didn’t run together after the first few kilometres, but communicated for a lot of the race by sending messages while taking a break and walking up hills. Don’t message and run single track kids, you’ll sprain your ankle.)