Engineered to Run

A beautiful August day at Cape Spear. At the conclusion of the previous post, I had just received an email on the evening of July 31 informing me that the Steep Ultra race scheduled for September 5 had been cancelled. There had been rumours circulating amongst the trail running community for a few weeks that it was unlikely the race was going to go ahead, but getting the news while sitting in a hotel room in Terra Nova, after spending the previous day and a half driving across the island and back for a test run on the course, was still a bit much. I woke the next morning and completed my drive back to Mount Pearl. My legs were not feeling great, which I chalked up to normal soreness and fatigue from running a 50k the day before. I would later discover that this was not the case, as my legs actually felt much better after longer efforts later in the year. While I can't definitively state that driving for 6-7 hours immediately after the 50k was the cause, it is the one important vari...

At the conclusion of my previous post, I had just gotten back to the Man in the Mountain trailhead after a navigation mishap had derailed the first half of my 50k training run. After a brief wait, I was picked up by a taxi and took the short drive to my refuelling supplies at the base of Marble Mountain. When I arrived at Marble and reached my cooler, I was quite eager to change my clothes. It had rained most of the morning, and I was wet from head to toe. I put on a new shirt and a new pair of socks and immediately felt much better. I did discover the start of some blistering on my feet, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about that with the supplies I had on hand. After topping up my water bottles, grabbing my extra food, and plugging my phone into the charging block I was carrying with me, I began the climb up Marble. In light of the navigation errors in the morning, I was keeping my phone handy so that I could check the map when necessary. The top of the mountain is in tha...