The Yearly 4 - DONE

With the wrap up of all my major races for the year, I've been enjoying my time back at the studio and reconnecting with all the CBC crew as people return from summer play outside! The Fall has come way too quickly and I wondered for awhile if I would be able to get all of my favourite trail runs in. The alpine just didn't clear very fast this year and it made running up high very difficult. As my previous blog postings reported, I managed to run Rubble Creek (base of Black Tusk) twice and get up to Elfin Lakes several times. Then, 2 weekends ago, Jenni Chancey and I took the window on a sunny Sunday morning to run musical bumps off the top of Whistler and descend down Singing Pass. It was awesome, reminding me once again that my true passion is in alpine running where the views make you stop and appreciate how lucky we are to have an amazing playground around us. This was Jenni's first run out there and she did great! By the time we made it back to Whistler village, the rain had begun to fall and by the next morning, it was full snow up there!

This weekend I made it home to the Island to see my family for Thanksgiving. I had planned on running the Victoria marathon on Sunday then hitting up the 47km Juan de Fuca marine trail on Monday! However, dinner plans required me to change things up so I opted for a Saturday JDF adventure so that I could return back to North Vancouver for a Sunday family gathering. Thanks to Don Peterson for still driving us to renfrew at 5am that morning so that my brother in law Todd and I could run. Don and I run this every year but he'd been a bit sick and wisely had to pass on it this time round. My salomon team mates Rumon Carter and Adam Campbell also had to pull the plug last minute which was unfortunate. However, I was determined that to still get out there, allowing that trail to take me to my happy place! Todd is one of the country's top marathoners, his speed blows my mind! However, Todd had never run over 4hrs, never mind adding in muddy and constantly undulating technical trails to the mix. I don't think he was really aware of what he was in for (why scare him off :) as I wanted him to experience the trail and how awesome it was. Trail conditions were the best that I had ever seen them which, trust me, doesn't say a lot when we are talking about a trail situated in a west coast rain forest. The rain held off until 1 minute after we had reached the car! Todd and I took our time out there, taking a breather at Sombrio (no surf to report) and walking the beaches rather then running them! It was my idea of a great way to spend Thanksgiving weekend and Todd did great. I've promised him a shorter trail run adventure next time, agreeing that him puking his guts out in the car ride home was not exactly considered fun!!! I told him that it was just his body adapting to 7+hrs of running - kind of like how I feel when running a 3hr marathon at max heart rate :)

I wrapped up the weekend with a great Thanksgiving dinner with Norms family and a great reminder of all the great things, experiences and people in my life!