trail running – Page 4

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.)

The Grizzly50: Where I inexplicably manage to run 50 kilometres

Although I couldn’t really claim to have run all fifty of the kilometres – like most people, I walked a lot of the steep uphills. On a course with 1700 metres of climbing, there were definitely some steep little climbs in there. And I did stop for a bathroom break, and to stock up on food. And to take a photo. But mostly I ran. And ran. And ran. For over five hours. But it was strangely easier than I was expecting. I was assuming there would be soul-crushing agony, teeth-gnashing, and stomach-gurgling, dead legs and embittered spirit. But instead there was just tree roots to jump over, people to high five, and say hello to, signs to look for, and more people to chase.

The course was at the Nordic Centre, so all the trails were familiar, mainly because I’d mountain-biked a lot of the single trail many times before. The sections of double-track were familiar from winter skiing adventures, and less fun to run on, but not as bad as I was expecting either. Although single track is much more fun, it also takes a lot more concentration to run on.

A team of friends were doing the whole thing as a relay, so I spent each leg wondering if I could catch up to them, or maybe catch a glimpse of them on the few sections of overlapping track. Instead I just found them all every time I ran through transition, with the next person already sent out on the leg I was about to embark on – although I did catch the first and last person for high-five action on the track as we passed.

All in all, it was an awesome event. Well organised, fairly well signed (Leg 3 and 4 could have both done with a few more signs to clarify things a little better at a few points), and a lot of fun. The variety of the five different legs made the 50 kilometres travel by a lot quicker than it might have done otherwise too.

A couple of years ago I assumed that people who ran 20 kilometres were a little crazy – forgetting that I’d kind of done that sort of thing when we were rogaining a lot about ten years ago – but then the running was more of a by-product rather than the main goal, so it never seemed to count. You never really know what crazy things you’ll end up enjoying.