What motivates you?
I can’t believe I almost didn’t get out on the trails today. Let me tell you how the morning started. The alarm went off at 5:30,which thank goodness for the end of daylight savings time, was actually only 6:30. Nonetheless the alarm was set early as Leigh was heading out on a hike/climb with some friends and I decided to take a day to myself (yes sometimes we do things separately). I thought I may as well make the most of the day, get up with Leigh make some breakfast and coffee and then head for an early morning training session at the bouldering gym, as I would probably have the gym to myself at that hour of the morning. Where Jack-o’-Lanterns go to die? How I would have felt if I stayed home. The bouldering gym. Sunlight beams through the trees. This is exactly how it played out as well. I seen Leigh off and was at the gym by 7:45. I played around for an hour, and I say play because it is way too much fun in there to call it training, and then decided to call it after I started to feel a bit sore and too pumped to stay on any of the holds. Made it home by around 9:00 and decided to have a second breakfast, which ended up being a little more leisurely than it should have been, but hey it’s Sunday! It’s always good to take some time for reflection. After a little perusing on the computer I came across an article (check it out here) by a local ultrarunner about staying motivated during the dark, rainy winter season of the PNW. Now today was nothing but sunshine but it was a good thing I read it when I did, because at that moment I was contemplating a nice long nap! I was starting to lose motivation fast, my mind was trying to convince me I was too tired and that I should be kind to myself. This is the oldest trick in the book though, my brain was trying to convince me of something I knew I would deeply regret later, and I almost fell for it. I read through the article and it smartened me up right quick! “The less you do, the less you’ll want to do. The more you do, the more you’ll want to do.” Those words kept buzzing through my head and as I lay on the bed feeling sorry for myself I firmly decided to get up and just put my running gear on. “You know you’ll feel better after you run.” “Just take...
The Shoulder Season Shuffle
Before moving from Ireland to Canada I had never heard the term “shoulder season” before. Largely because Ireland only has 1 Season, which is that it’s rainy, a little cold, a little warm, sometimes sunny, all year round. Whereas Canada, more specifically, Southwest British Columbia where we live, definitely has 4 distinct seasons, well, that isn’t entirely true, it’s more like 2 seasons with 2 shoulders abutting them. The two main seasons are Winter and Summer, or, colloquially for outdoor enthusiasts, Snow Season and Bug Season. Spring and Fall feel like blips on the radar, as soon as they start it feels like they’ve already ended. Which is why they’re known as the shoulders, Fall is the trailing edge of Summer leading into Winter, and Spring is the trailing edge of Winter. They’re periods of transition and flux, before the relatively stable conditions of Summer and Winter settle in. This flux creates, predictably, unpredictable weather. You can have daytime highs in temperatures that feel like Summer and nighttime lows that feel like Winter. Trusting forecasts even a day in advance is usually a fools errand. At this time of year, personally, I try to look at the forecast the morning of a trip and even then I take it with a pinch of salt as the weather can vary, dramatically, in the mountains from valley to valley. At this time of year, in the Fall, if you want to continue experiencing the outdoors, you have to be flexible and zen about it. You have to be mentally prepared for the fact that, even though the forecast is for sunshine it may in fact start snowing on you on the top of a mountain. As the song goes “Que Sera, Sera…” Last weekend, the first weekend of October, was a typical Fall weekend. The preceding weekend had seen the mountains in our corner of British Columbia turn, almost overnight, from Summer to Winter. A large storm had rolled in and dumped massive amounts of precipitation on everything. People sometimes say to me “You’re Irish, you must be used to the rain”, I can tell you, we don’t get rain like that in Ireland. It was “biblical” as the expression goes, with curtains of rain coming down. We were signed up to run the Rubble Creek Classic that Sunday, a ~25km trail race through a high mountain pass in Garibaldi Provincial Park. By early on Saturday though the organizers postponed it to the following weekend. In typical fashion, we shuffled things around with word of the postponement and went for a run locally. This weekend the forecast looked good and I...
Animal House II: The Tenquille Invasion
“Are you guys all from Whistler?” I asked. He finished chugging another Pilsner and shouted out: “Yeah buddy, how’d you know?” I smiled as a reply and kept walking, past the Canadian Tire Queen sized inflatable mattress floating in the lake with somebody passed out on top of it, the shotgun and shells, the brewery worth of beer cans, the frenzied pack of dogs, the bleary eyed girlfriends wearing swimsuits that might have originally fit them some time back around ‘95, the Brahs tomahawking hatchets at the nearest tree trunk as if training for Z-Day, wearing board shorts, 5 dollar shades and baseball caps with comedy sized flat brims (still nonplussed by the sticker) Yes, yes, we had arrived, along with approximately 60 other people, 3 babies, 10 dogs and 8 mountain bikes at the Tenquille Lake Recreation Site to bask in the glorious death throes of Summer, long may she rest in peace. Getting here had been no mean feat for our 2WD jalopy. It had developed a mean cough in its muffler somewhere along the 4WD section of the Birkenhead River-Tenquille Creek Branch FSR. As we crawled through the water bars, giving the belly of our steed a good scratch I thought the lady doth protest too much. Eventually though we realized that she was hobbling along slower than we could actually walk this road, so we parked about 3km’s back from the Trailhead. Indeed, we walked at the same speed or faster than other 4WD vehicles on the road, overtaking them at the waterbars. Do yourself a favour, bike the road. Unless your truck is seriously jacked, you will be crawling it. A bike would be faster on the way in, and way faster and more fun on the way out. We made short order of the trail itself. It looks like somebody is trying to reroute the old trail away from all the muddy sections that have become hilariously braided. This rerouting is creating a bit of chaos as there are now branches off the main trail everywhere. We talked to some guys who had tried to hike in the previous night, took a wrong branch, and ended up back at their trucks via a different trail a few hours later, wherein they decided to camp instead for the night. Another aside, cross to the other side of the lake outflow on the way in for the shorter and easier trail to the cabin. Over the weekend we summited Tenquille, Finch Ridge, Copper Mound and McLeod. All nice, hands in pockets, rambles in the Class 2 range. Views were pleasant. Some MTB’rs got heli-dropped onto...
Magic number 50
Yes, I have a magic number. Now it’s not magic in that I believe it has any supernatural traits. No, it’s actually more like this number gives me the ability to remember what I am capable of when I am feeding off of my last ounce of energy, physically or mentally. Repeating this number to myself, as if invoking my brain for some special power it didn’t realize it had, is a way of getting myself through some tough challenges. So what is my magic number? Well up until August 10th it was 42 ( and if I am going to be really specific 42.2). That’s right in kilometers that is the distance of a marathon, of which I have run 2. This is no great feat, as many people have run this distance, but it does provide a keen sense of mental awareness of what your body can achieve. Just knowing the distance you can push your body to run, translates to being able to push yourself in so many other aspects of life. For myself it has become a mantra I say to myself when the going gets tough. During a long hard day in the mountains I can draw energy from this number, if I can run that distance surely I can tackle the physical and mental challenge I currently find myself facing. What happened August 10th? Well that was the day of my first 50km ultra trail race, the Arc”teryx Squamish 50. I tried to post updates regarding my training as the months passed, but as I mentioned in a previous post, this did not pan out as well as I hoped it would. Nonetheless race day came, despite my inability to catalog the months and days leading up to the race. So here are a few thoughts on how that day went. Race day was forecast to be 28 degrees (celcius) but feel like 31, so I was concerned about running in the heat. But when I woke up to a cloudy sky in Squamish I was so thankful! Driving down to catch the bus to our respective races, Leigh to his 23km starting line at Quest and me to the 50km start at Alice Lake, we could see the sun streaming through the clouds above the chief. Beautiful though it was, I hoped that the sun would duck back behind the clouds for just a few more hours. Arriving at the start line, with 1/2 an hour to spare, I seen the familiar faces of friends also running the race. It helped to calm the nerves, just a little bit, and the excitement...
Running the Arc’teryx Squamish 50 23k
Photos by Lesley Morgan Loree Photos by Lesley Morgan Loree On Saturday, the 10th of August, I ran in my first ever race, road or trail, the “Squamish 50” 23k. It’s called the Squamish 50 as the main race is 50 miles long, but they also offer variants of the course that are 50km’s and 23km’s in length. Spring, the other half of pebbleshoo, ran in the 50km, a mammoth achievement, and will be posting her thoughts on that also. If you’ve been following this blog you might remember I posted about my reasons to run this race back in January, you can read that original post here: Twenty Three Well, did I hit my goal of losing 23lbs in weight? No. I did not. I’m around 15lbs lighter. I guess something changed between writing that initial post and actually running the race. Weight loss is still happening but I don’t frequently monitor my weight so it isn’t like I’ve set weight loss goals and am keeping track that I’m hitting them. I imagined I might lose around 23lbs by the race simply by being very active. I guess my body is happy with its current weight and doesn’t want it to drop much lower for now. Another aspect is that I don’t like feeling hungry. It’s an unnecessary mental distraction. Since January and when I wrote that first post about signing up for this race I’ve been doing a lot more Skiing, Mountain Biking and Rock Climbing, as well as some Backpacking and Mountaineering. Primarily though, compared to the last 3 years, I’ve cut back on Backpacking and spent a lot more of the Spring and Summer Mountain Biking and Rock Climbing. Generally, when my body is losing weight quickly, I feel hungry. When climbing it made me feel weak and when biking it made me feel shaky. This wasn’t good. I decided that I’d rather feel satiated and enjoy learning to get better at these activities than spend time thinking about food I could be eating. It seems to be working. I’m eating enough and I’m still losing weight, it’s just very, very slow. What has helped is that rather than reducing the quantity of food I was consuming I’ve changed the quality of it. I’m eating a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. I’ve cut out a lot of dairy as well, I consume no milk anymore (replaced it with Almond milk), I eat a little cheese and yogurt and trace amounts of butter. I’ve also cut back on wheat, refined sugars and canned foods. You might have noticed above that I didn’t mention running as...
