Running Recap: Squamish 50 and Cap Crusher 13km
Ok so this post is well overdue, but better late than never! Here is a quick recap of some running fun I had 2 weekends ago. Leigh and I decided to charge in different directions the weekend of March 22/23. We both feel it is important to our personal and combined growth if we spend time apart in our chosen pursuits. What we learn separately we can share with each other on our next combined adventures. Saturday, March 22, I was signed up for the first of 4 Squamish 50 Orientation runs. I will be attempting to run the ultra distance of 50 miles(80km) on August 17th, which is definitely going to be the hardest thing I have ever done to date. Needless to say I do most of my training runs on the trails around Squamish, so I am quite familiar with the course route, but I still love attending the orientation runs. I get to run with friends, make some new friends on the trail and feed off of the general stoke of the day, which is usually very HIGH. It gets me excited to train! With a large group, of usually close to 60 people, there is ALOT of fun to be had on the trails. Plus these runs are almost like a mini race in themselves. Gary Robbins and Geoff Langford (directors of the Squamish 50 race) make sure to have the route marked pre-run with spray chalk and ribbons, making it almost impossible to get lost. They even have an aid station mid-run stocked with the usual goodies…cookies, salty chips, orange slices - it’s a veritable runners smorgasbord! The cutest Mascot ever! You will see Oreo at all the races. A veritable smorgasbord! So that Saturday, was no exception to the 5-star service all the runners have become accustomed to at these orientation runs. The morning started off chilly and we even had fresh SNOW! It was a large group of smiling, excited runners ready to hit the trails. I was excited to start that morning with 2 of my running buddies - Adam, who will be running his first 50km (so excited for him, he is going to crush it!) and Hailey(check out her page Run Like a Girl), who will be attempting to best her time from last year (I have no doubt that she will). Of course there was a lot of laughter, pre-run, run and post run that morning…runners are a crazy bunch of people…crazy good! Crazy good! Trail running is beautiful. Running through the lightly snow dusted trails was so beautiful. Winding through the forest, over the wooden bridges,...
3 Types of Fun
“Aw man, this is totally a Type 2 fun kinda day” I can’t remember who said it, or what I was doing when I heard it, but I remember I was suffering. My body was aching, I was a little scared and I just wanted to be back at home, safe, curled up in bed trying to forget about this day. After that experience was over I remember a while later reading something, in a blog post or article online, where somebody categorized their adventure as definitely “Type 3 fun”. It was said in passing, almost with the expectation that if I was reading this article I should already know about the types of fun. At the time I had no clue. I thought fun was binary, you were either having it, or not. To hear people talking about scales of fun seemed odd, so I did some research. I couldn’t find a lot of information at the time although more people seem to be writing about it now. Most of the actual information I got about it came from talking to people on the trails. What I found out is that there are a total of 3 types of fun. Most people only recognize Type 1 fun, but if you push yourself to go on adventures, and try to find the edges of your comfort zones you will likely experience the other two kinds of fun also. Here’s how they are defined. Type 1. Fun to Do. Fun to Remember. When most people think of fun, they think of this. Some examples would be: Eating out at a good restaurant with friends. Spending a day at a water park riding the slides. Beach holidays in the Sun. Personally, I’d add mountain biking and trail running near town, bouldering near the parking lot and skiing at the resort. These are Type 1 fun for me because the commitment is pretty low. While they might all be scary depending on the difficulty, the physical investment of time and effort is pretty low. I find it can’t become Type 2 fun for me until I’ve completely left civilization behind and entered the wild. Type 2. Not Fun to Do. Fun to Remember. Most people likely have experiences that fall within this bracket, but they likely don’t actively put themselves in positions frequently were they will experience them again, some examples would be: Anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone. Learning a new activity that makes you feel clumsy and awkward in comparison to others who are adept at it. Planning something that you imagined would be within your abilities...
Quotes for the Untamed
When I’m not scouring maps and reading up about new places to explore I love to read the thoughts of fellow mountaineers, climbers, adventurers and explorers. There is a certain kinship to be found when I read words, centuries old, that could have been taken from my own mind. Alan Bennett puts it best. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours” - Alan Bennett This feeling is so true. I first felt it strongly when I read these words: “From the moment my eyes rested on the snow-clad alps I worshipped their beauty and was filled with a passionate longing to touch those shining snows, to climb to their heights of silence and solitude, and feel myself one with the mighty forces around me. The great peaks towering into the sky before me touched a chord that all the wonders of my own land had never set vibrating, and filled a blank of whose very existence I had been unconscious.” - Freda Du Faur Freda Du Faur was born in 1882 in Australia and became the first woman in history to climb Aoraki / Mount Cook, the highest Mountain in New Zealand. I have never been to Australia, nor am I from her era, yet, her words, at the time that I read them, were like seeing my own thoughts laid out in front of me. I read her words in the months after I first moved to Canada from Ireland and while I loved the rolling farmland of my original home, the snow-clad mountains, of which Ireland has few to none, that I was now surrounded by in Canada, truly did fill a blank inside me that I had been unconscious about before. Reading the thoughts of others I’ve found has a way of turning an intangible feeling into an idea with form. Here are a few more quotes that I’ve been inspired by and feel will inspire you also. “When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D.H. Lawrence...
Get scared.
“Do one thing everyday that scares you.” Eleanor Roosevelt Last week I decided to accept this challenge. I chose to go trail running at night… solo. Now I love running trails solo, but have never ventured out into the night on the trails. I have journeyed out into early morning darkness, but that was based on the knowledge that the darkness would quickly turn to the lovely golden light that brings with it feelings of safety and confidence. This run was going to be very different, it was going to start in darkness and end in darkness. There would be no warming glow of safe sunshine, just the bubble of light cast from my headlamp. I tried to keep my focus within this little bubble of light, not thinking so much of what might be happening outside of it, what might be scurrying in the depths of the forest or peering at me from the darkness with vision more accustomed to nightlife. I left the house that night, reached the car and turned right back towards the front door, but just before I reached it, I forced myself to stop, turn the other direction and head right back to the car. “Just go!” When I actually got to the start of the trail and started running the first section, which runs parallel to the highway, the presence and light cast from passing cars gave me a sense of security. Somehow I convinced myself to just run to the top of the section, before it spit me into the forest. “Just cut it short it’s okay” I told myself. But the closer I got to top I couldn’t let myself be that easily persuaded, I knew I would regret not following through. So into the dark forest I went. Shouting and clapping as I went, I refused to look behind me, which I often do on trail runs during the day to make sure I am not in the way of oncoming bikers or faster runners. But this time I knew if I looked behind I would see only a few feet of light cast by my headlamp and then darkness. In all honesty the only fear I had that night was of large animals that may be roaming looking for a night-time snack, and I did not want to surprise anything that was out on the trails looking for food. My mind mostly turned to cougars which frequent this particular area of town. I had to keep telling myself that the only difference on the trails at night is the absence of light; there was nothing out to get...
The Runners High
“What the hell was that?” Breathless, I sat beside Spring as we got into the car. Spring spoke but there was a dull ringing in my ears that muted her voice. Eventually I heard her say “something got into you eh? You just took off, how long were you waiting for me at the end?”. We drove home and pulled into our driveway. Spring got out, she noticed that I wasn’t following and asked “Are you coming?”. I responded “In a few minutes”. I needed to understand what had happened. Where my mind had gone. Before distractions dulled this experience and reduced it to something imagined at a later point in the day. Like a dream, precisely like a dream to be exact, I needed to not let this memory fade into the ether now that I had regained composure, regained consciousness. I looked at the running app on my phone. I had run the fastest split time for that distance in my life, at least 25% faster than when I had ran the same trail and distance a few days prior. I rejoined Spring in our apartment; “I think that was it” I said, “I think that was a runners high”. This experience happened some months ago. In the period between then and now I have battled with whether I should write about it or not. I’ve written drafts of this post and then scrapped them. I’m skeptical by nature. I spend my leisure time in the mountains and take calculated risks. The key point is that these activities require me to be calculated, to evaluate the hard evidence, to mitigate dangers and to move safely through the terrain. There’s no room there for flights of fancy or the unquantifiable. I like the raw honesty of the wild and the trust I can put in those experiences. Rock is hard, Ice is cold and the Mountains are eternally indifferent. I’ve heard of climbers refer to being in “the zone” but it always sounded foolish to me. Nobody plans a trip and says “ok, when we get to the base of this climb we’ll enter The Zone and then climb effortlessly to the summit”. It sounds farcical. The sporadic nature of accounts about this heightened state of awareness naturally leads one to be skeptical. Yet I couldn’t deny my own experience. That state I was in while running was not normal consciousness, it was not a normal level of awareness. It was different. I’d read about the purported “runners high” before. It always seemed like marketing fluff to sell more race tickets or running shoes. Or just another way...
Currently
This has been an odd Winter. Really odd. I’ve experienced 3 Winters since moving to Southwest British Columbia in 2010 and I’m being told that I was spoiled with how amazing they were. Watching this winter unfold has felt like watching an awkward stage performance on some reality TV show were the individual tries to sing but sounds like someone strangling a cat, at first the fact they can’t sing is humorous, in a schadenfreude kind of way, but eventually you become uncomfortable at the display and wonder why somebody isn’t escorting them off the stage. Somebody needs to escort this Winter off the stage. This Winter was going to be The Winter we’d nail skiing, not only resort skiing but backcountry skiing. It’s been a hard activity for us to get good at but we hadn’t really put much effort into it in the past. This Winter we planned to change that. I’d imagined doing midweek night skiing at Cypress Resort, then getting out into the backcountry on the weekends to experience the joys of powder skiing that we’ve heard so much about. So far, those dreams haven’t materialized. We’ve had a few large dumps of snow broken up by long stretches with no precipitation and the temperature and freezing levels have been really high leading to heavy, wet snow cheerfully referred to locally as “elephant snot”. We’ll just have to see how things progress as the Winter goes on. For now it feels like I’m in a holding pattern, waiting for permission to land. So I thought I’d write a “currently” post, a post about what I’m doing right now instead of planning my ski trips. Currently… reading The Rock Warrior’s Way, I think the title is lame, and I’ve found the writing so far to be pretty verbose, but I’ve seen some great improvements in my own climbing focus from the techniques it recommends so far, so I’ll continue to read it. loving Sticking dynos at the local bouldering gym. I’m not a fan of gyms in general but climbing indoors is actually pretty fun. Working a problem for a few days and finally sticking that crux dyno move is pretty damn satisfying. I’ve only been at it for a few weeks and I already feel functionally stronger than I have in my whole life. thinking a lot about Social Media and Networks. I’m always on this knife edge between loving and hating it. I love that it gives me a medium to inspire people to get outdoors, but when I see people in the wild staring at their phones, holding them up looking for reception,...
