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...

When I travelled to Corner Brook on July 30/31 for a test run on the Steep Ultra course, part of my plan was to write a blog detailing the trip and discussing the course, to help some of my friends, and any other runners, who weren't going to get a chance to see it before race day. After the race got cancelled, I lost the motivation to write that post, but I still think it's a good story that's worth telling. Unlike the rest of the posts in this series, this post (and the next one) will only cover a two-day window and will be focused entirely on that adventure. I hope you enjoy it. _____________________________________________________________________________________ When I woke on the morning of Thursday, July 30, 2020, I was prepared for a hectic and exciting two days. My plan was to leave mid-morning, drive across the province to Corner Brook, have a quick night in a hotel, wake up super early the next morning, run 50k, and then drive home. I was planning for all of thi...

Beautiful coastline on Motion Path. As the calendar turned to June 2020, I was coming off the high of completing the Limitless Vertical Challenge the previous week while simultaneously beginning to come to grips with the fact that I was less than two weeks from being unemployed for the first time in my life. The first week of the month was mostly spent allowing my body some recovery time from all the climbing I'd done during the challenge, while beginning to tie up any loose ends and preparing handover notes for my projects at work. I had a session with my psychologist during the middle of that week, and I remember him asking me what my first feeling was when I found out I was losing my job. It took me a second to respond, but the answer that I ended up giving him was, "Relieved." In hindsight, that response was very much a reaction to the feelings I had been experiencing relative to my work over the previous months and years. As the pandemic had dragged on and the impact...

 As April rolled into May, the day-to-day routine of living through a pandemic had become somewhat normalized. I was working from home during the week, which allowed a little more flexibility as to when I was able to run from Monday to Friday. And while all of the typical road races that I would run in the spring had been cancelled, I was signed up for three virtual races, which helped give me a little extra motivation in my training. The Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee (GVRAT) was created by Lazurus Lake, the organizer of the Barkley Marathons. I've mentioned before that Barkley was my first introduction to the sport of trail running, and so the idea of running an event being put off by Laz was immediately appealing to me. This event required participants to cover 1,022 km between May 1 and August 31, and we were required to enter our distances daily to the website, where we could track our progress across the state of Tennessee. Concurrent to this event, the Paradise Running ...