Nurtured by Love

Category: Being active

  • Almost a circle

    So here’s how I felt on the third morning: revolting.

    Jittery, feverish and nauseated.

    The first day was amazing. I had rented a kayak from Smiling Otter in Slocan (my paddling destination) and brought it home the night before, depositing it on the lakeshore. I was on the trail before six for the short run to the lake, catching the first glints of sun sneaking through the Carpenter Creek valley.

    First sun: my shadow crossing the Carpenter Creek bridge

    It was a hot day but the lake was still in shade and I kept to the east side all morning, tucked into the shade of the mountains. I’d rented a solo touring kayak, much sleeker than our tandem, and made really good time. I’d allotted six to seven hours for the 27k paddle, and finished in four and change. Along the way I saw bald eagles, great blue herons, ospreys, mergansers and countless plovers, swallows, killdeers and such. The lake stayed completely calm until mid morning when some wind blew up. It was pushing me on my way, but the swells and chop were getting rough just as I was passing the cliffs at Cape Horn and knew I had nowhere I could tuck in. I kept checking behind me for the telltale “black line on the lake” that can arrive in ten minutes and capsize unwary boaters who don’t take shelter, but it didn’t come. I pushed hard the last few kilometres just in case, to the river’s mouth, and all was well. I let the river current push me the last couple of kilometres, returned the kayak, donned my shoes and pack, and set off on foot.

    Lake mostly shaded by low morning sun

    I took the afternoon’s run along the rail trail at an easy pace. I arrived in Winlaw by mid afternoon, hung out by the creek to cool off, then had an extended lunch/dinner at Sissies. Eventually I barefoot-jogged the 4 km to my B&B for the night. My chronic ankle problem had really flared up on the trail, and I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the next day’s 54km run, but I had a deep sleep and woke up the next morning feeling a lot better.

    Rail trail along the river
    Rail trail along the river

    The next 25k was also along the rail trail. I stopped after a couple of hours for a snack and was very surprised to pick up an unsecured wifi signal, presumably from a nearby house, though I couldn’t see anything. So I had a fun little chat with Fiona. Thanks, whoever you are!

    I met a couple of skittish bears and a tiny fawn and a few toads and snakes as well as making a positive ID on a Lazuli Bunting, thanks to my iBird app. Love that app! It also lets me talk to the birds by playing recordings of their songs. They get very intrigued and usually come closer.

    Lots of giant black slugs on the rail trail in the morning
    Lots of giant black slugs on the rail trail in the morning

    The southern part of that day’s run was amazingly hot. The forecast when I left home had been for cooler weather but the thermometer at Taghum at 3:30 that afternoon was in the 90’s. I was in full sun for most of the last four hours and although I stayed well hydrated I felt worse and worse. I suspect I was pretty close to getting heat stroke, as I ended the day nauseated, headachey and feeling weirdly feverish. Couldn’t stomach the idea of dinner. I couldn’t sleep, either, which was odd because I was definitely running a sleep deficit from the two previous nights.

    The next morning I decided to do what I’d been toying with the night before: take the bus to my bike, rather than running the 30 km along the west arm of Kootenay Lake. I was still too nauseated to eat, which meant all I’d eaten in the previous 36 hours was a small bowl of granola, a salad wrap and a couple of Luna bars — despite having run more than a marathon. I knew I couldn’t run until I could eat again. I worked into the morning gradually, drank more electrolyte stuff, and more water, and some coffee, sat around a bit, and then hopped on the bus.

    On the ferry
    On the ferry. My very old bike is awesome, but is currently in need of some TLC.

    I jogged to my bike, feeling a little better, and rode back to the highway. This involved a side trip across the Harrop ferry to my friend’s place, which was a nice diversion. A few kilometres later I stopped and managed to eat a bit of late breakfast.

    IMG_1143
    Near the summit of the pass, looking towards home.

    The rest of the day was fine. I felt better for the food. The ride to Kaslo was tougher than I expected, the hills more numerous and steeper. I’d been preparing myself for the big pass between Kaslo and home, but as it turned out the hills before Kaslo were steeper (5-10% grade) than the long slow climb over the pass (3-5% grade mostly, and no problem at all). But it was lots cooler on the third day and occasionally drizzly and made for perfect biking weather. I love that road over the pass anyway, thinking of it as my very own highway since it’s the one that our property is on, and I run on it all winter. There are no utility poles most of the way, so it feels high and lonely and wild. The descent was glorious and I whipped along at up to 50 km/h. Cutting off the morning’s run meant I got home in time to pick Noah up from work, cook dinner, eat (yay!) and get Erin to her gig. Watched an episode of The Newsroom with the younger three kids and went to bed before ten.

    I’m still a bit nauseated today but except for that I feel pretty good. A couple of blisters here and there, and that yummy feeling of having done something very long and difficult with my body, but pretty much my usual self.

    So yeah. Almost a circle. Not going to beat myself up over a small missing arc.

  • Circle Route

    Circle RouteThis circle route is one of those off-the-beaten-path gems. We live at the northwest corner of it. Once they widened the road at Cape Horn (at km 25 on the map) in the early 1990s, the motor homes began trundling through in ever greater numbers. Motorcyclists discovered it a decade or so ago and from the May long weekend until Labour Day we hear them droning by on the highway in clusters.

    When we first moved here I used to think about bicycling it. Could I do it in a day? I never tried. Life was too busy.

    In the depths of last winter, while bemoaning the fact that I wouldn’t be able to participate in SufferFest this year due to family conflicts, it suddenly occurred to me that I could turn the circle route into an endurance triathlon of sorts. Rather than taking roads the whole way, I’d do my first day on the lake in a kayak and day 2 would be a trail run along the Slocan Valley rail trail. The next day would be road-running from the bottom of the Slocan Valley over through Nelson and up the north shore of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. And the last day would have me on my bicycle heading through Kaslo and over the pass back home.

    I had originally hoped to carve out time at the end of June. But family and SVI responsibilities piled on. Then I had be around to get Erin when she got back from Europe, and then Fiona was asked to help out with the Music Explorers program, and had the Dance program to do, the combination taking up two weeks. So here we are in the third week of July already and I haven’t set out, nor have I really committed to doing it. Until today.

    I’ve worked really hard to get the SVI administrative stuff done. Noah is solid with his work schedule. Sophie has just started her job, but she’s confident she can get back and forth by bike or on foot as needed. Fiona and Erin will be having a low-key few days at home. Erin has one gig, but I’ve organized a ride for her. Chuck will be on call. Provided I stock the fridge and pantry with lots of food, I have their blessing to leave. So I booked a place to stay for the first night and arranged to rent a kayak and — gulp! — I think I’m going.

    I have no doubt that I can manage each leg of the challenge on its own. What worries me is putting them together in the space of three or four days. What will I feel like on the morning of the third day, having run 70 kilometres over the previous day and a bit, facing 35 more and then a bike ride over the pass?

    I suppose I’m going to find out.

  • Five years of running

    I run. Come rain or snow or slush or all three, I run. I have no particular goals. I have no races planned, I don’t track my mileage any more, nor do I measure my pace or keep track of how often I run barefoot, or how many days a week I run. I’d guess that on average this winter I’ve run about 5k a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not at all. But usually I run.

    It was almost exactly five years ago that I started making time to run. I’ve done a Half Marathon, a few 5 and 10k races, a Marathon and a couple of 25k trail races. I’ve usually placed pretty well, in the top 25% in my age-and-gender group, sometimes higher. But this year I don’t think I’ll be doing any organized runs or races at all. That’s just the way it’s worked out: there’s not much happening in the region, and what is available is at impossible times for me. Nor do I feel like spending hundreds of dollars, working out countless family-oriented logistical considerations and travelling hundreds of kilometres in order to test myself against someone else’s timer and a bunch of strangers.

    I’ve had my share of injuries, that’s for sure. I suppose that’s the price I pay for jumping into running at age 45 after fifteen years of not doing any such thing. The first year I had a mysterious deep hip pain that kept me from running and carrying heavy objects for almost three months and then miraculously resolved. A year later I hurt my foot scrabbling about barefoot (not running) and had to quit running for a couple of months to let it heal. And the then I developed a waxing and waning discomfort in the area of my left achilles tendon that has kept up ever since.

    A bunch of numbers that mean something or other.

    I have never really been able to figure out what’s going on in my ankle, because it didn’t behave a lot like a tendinitis or a bursitis. So I finally sought out a physiotherapist with a special (barefoot-friendly) interest in running biomechanics. She found a few little things in my biomechanics that needed work (my left hip abductors were much weaker than the right, which was weird but consistent), and I had a lot of mobility loss in my ankle as a result of two years of favouring it. Eventually after a bit of bewilderment she decided I was possibly suffering from a tarsal tunnel impingement, sort of like the ankle equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. Whether she was right or not, the active release therapy she did helped a bit, the prescribed exercises drastically increased my strength in some of the stabilizing muscles, the ankle problems are currently mild and manageable, and they no longer seem to be significantly aggravated by running. So that’s good. I still hurt a bit sometimes, but it doesn’t seem likely that I’m doing damage by continuing to run on an occasionally sore ankle.

    Ink’nBurn pretend-denim-jean capris and butterfly camisole. So nice!

    These days the stuff I use to run is as follows:

    • minimalist footwear most of the time: New Balance Minimus Trail shoes or Xero Shoes Sensori huaraches. Otherwise, if weather and terrain promise to be kind, bare feet.
    • my Fitbit Flex, because I like the feedback I get about overall activity level throughout a complete 24 hour day
    • For clothing, typically stuff from Lululemon and Ink’n’Burn. Most people are familiar with Lulu, but I think I like INB even better. Such amazing designs, with all the clever tech features I like. Neither are cheap.

    That’s all. No GPS, no stopwatch, no iPod or earbuds, no heart rate monitor. Not unless I’m on the treadmill.

    Would you run here?

    Speaking of the treadmill, I’m so grateful for it. It’s boring as heck, especially situated where it is against a wall and a door in the dark basement, crowded in from all sides by paint cans, home repair stuff, Chuck’s various hoarded things, old sports gear and the bokashi bins. But I feel crappy when I don’t get to run, and on days when it’s too late or too gross or too complicated to get outside for a run, it’s a great substitute. I also think that being able to do ten- or fifteen-minute runs two or three times a day has really helped my ankle improve this winter.  Running outside is just a big enough production in winter to make it best-suited to runs of 30 minutes or longer.

    Where am I going from here? Well, nowhere, really. I’m just going to keep running, doing what feels right from day to day. I definitely want to explore more of the amazing terrain in this area, whether by running, hiking or camping. And I want to continue to be able to move myself over long distances under my own steam, inspired by the wisdom of this quote from Born to Run:

    “You don’t stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running.”

  • Trail-building

    Trail-building

    Armed with three hand-tools — a mattock, a rake and a saw — I have been gradually building a trail from our yard to the Galena Trail. For years I’ve been frustrated by the can’t-get-there-from-here dilemma that separates me from my favourite running trail. We planted a geocache down on the trail more than ten years ago, and the GPS co-ordinates proved what maps had led us to suspect: while it took 25 to 40 minutes to get to that point on the trail, it was only about 175 metres away as the crow flies.

    The problem with getting to the trail more directly was two-fold: the grade, and the vegetation. The direct point-to-point grade was about 47%, which puts you somewhere in the realm of a black diamond or double-black-diamond ski run: definitely not the right way to build a trail. And of course trees, bushes and undergrowth had to be circumvented or moved. I ended up with a trail of about half a kilometre long with an average grade of more like 15%. Definitely hike-able both down and up.

    It was a curiously addictive process. I would go out planning to spend 45 minutes touching something up and return to the house three hours later. There’s something about actually changing the landscape, of creating something useful out of nothing — well, not out of nothing, but out of nothing that looks like a road or a trail, nothing useful from a human locomotion standpoint. It was like having a superpower: I bisect the wilderness with roads, using my own two hands!

    Next year I’ll get to work extending the switchbacks to allow it to be closer to bike-able. If it was manageable on a mountain bike, one could get to town quickly without needing to hit the highway at all.

    I’m sure there will be places where the soil will settle and the edges of my trail will need shoring up. I’d love it wider in some places, even for hiking, and there will be oregon grape and wild rose and bedstraw and devil’s club to be tamed continually. But the route is laid out and for now it’s useable on foot. Meaning my favourite running trail is just four minutes away (eight huffing-and-puffing minutes on the way back).

  • Sufferfest Weekend

    It’s Kootenay Sufferfest weekend. Chuck is away but the girls and I got involved in volunteering the first day. Fiona and Sophie volunteered as marshalling assistants. Fiona was marshalling up-mountain at the halfway First Aid and Marshalling station. She and I sat right at the snow line with slush falling for 7 hours. Plus it took us almost an hour each way to drive the logging roads to get there. So a very long day. But she was awesome: she saved the day a couple of times when the adults had got too distracted by communications issues to note a bib number on a racer.

    The experience played right into her wilderness skills homeschooling project what with the various pre-race first aid and marshalling planning meetings, the communications relaying (we’re way out of cellphone range, and sat-phones were unreliable in places because of terrain) and keeping an eye on runners and riders for signs of hypothermia, and watching and helping them avoid succumbing to the elements. We had a market tent, which helped keep us from getting soaked the skin, and also took our Biolite stove and made hot chocolate for runners and volunteers alike. I was working first-aid, and thankfully there was nothing more than minor stuff; a few of the bikers who looked in danger of getting hypothermic during the first loop judiciously dropped out of the race before attempting the second pass, and none of the die-hards got into difficulty. Not that there weren’t some serious worries by the organizers. It was so cold, and there was a lot of snow up high. The Idaho Peak Run came off just fine: 14 runners finished. But the early snow made for a lot more challenge and hazard than had been expected. I’m glad this hadn’t turned out to be the year for me to attempt that run.

    Sophie helped marshal the first and last runner aid stations. She and her marshalling buddy were on foot, carrying water and food since there was no road access. The race director and I had used backpacks and bike trailers to haul in some of the gear the day before, but they still had to carry some. They also had almost no radio or satellite phone contact, so were very isolated. They had a really long day. Sophie had left home by 7 am, and hadn’t surfaced again by 4 pm. I made a thermos of hot mochas, and took to the trail to run out and meet them. I met them at the halfway point of their hike out. I was very glad to see them still upright and coherent!

    Me (#493) and some of my running buddies, keeping warm in the rain and mud pre-race.

    Today I went over to Kaslo and ran the 10k Sufferfest trail race. I did surprisingly well: I got 1st place in my age-group (40th place overall). It wasn’t a big race — under 200 participants — but I was really pleased by how strong I felt. I haven’t run much the past few months, but I have done a bit of strength training, which is new for me.

    I haven’t run a race shorter than a half-marathon in more than 3 years and I really enjoyed the shorter distance. It was rainy, mucky and slippery, with lots of little steep hills, so the times weren’t that fast, but I got in in under an hour. The push up the hill for the finish left me feeling spent, but within ten minutes felt pretty much fully recovered and felt like I could have run a lot farther. Maybe next year I’ll go back to running the 25k. Or maybe not. At this point I find that a 10k doesn’t really require any training more than my haphazard recreational running, and that’s nice.

  • Treadmill!

    Look what lives in our basement now. I’ve been wanting one for ages, seriously doing price comparisons and reading reviews for the past 4 years. For whatever reason, we reached the tipping point. Maybe it was my need to revert (after next week anyway!) to a more carefully controlled and scaled-back running schedule in order to try to heal my bursitis. Maybe it was the impending cold wet fall gloom and the narrow slushy highway of winter. Maybe it was definitively getting Sophie on-side in the treadmill camp. Anyway, there is is.

    So here it is, squashed into the basement. The hope is that with the construction of a garage we’ll be able to get a bit of the junk out of the basement and clear room to both walk to the door and run on the treadmill. For the time being it’s either/or, and the treadmill folds up to allow one to get to the seldom-used back door. It doesn’t have fancy internet connectivity or a full-colour tablet with terrain-mapping or many other bells and whistles. It is quiet, and strong, and has the basic functionality we wanted. So theoretically after Sufferfest and any other fall hiking I ill-advisedly decide to do, I can start gently trying to rehab my Achilles area. It’s quiet enough that Sophie can use it in the mornings and any noise we hear is quiet enough to be in the “comforting white noise” category.

    Already I’m amazed at how it allows me to fit running in more easily. So much of my week is spent knowing I have one or another child to pick up sometime in the next hour. Without the treadmill, I couldn’t run at those times, since running would take me away from home and phone range for the better part of an hour. Now I can just take that window of opportunity to hop on the treadmill. If the phone rings, so be it: I hop off, answer, and then drive to town to retrieve whichever teen or pre-teen needs a ride. If the phone doesn’t ring, I can finish a nice 5k while watching my way through a Downton Abbey rerun.

  • Suffer-bike-run

    Suffer-bike-run

    Sufferfest went almost exactly as I expected, except that it was harder, and more fun, and the weather was exceptionally fine. So, not exactly as I expected. But close.

    The bike ride was long and hard. The 45k included about 1400 metres of climbing. I was worried I wouldn’t finish before the course closed: a number of people didn’t finish, and a few sneaked in just past the official cutoff but were granted finishes. It was a hard physical slog for longer than I’ve ever worked that hard. Longer than my marathon. I finished in under 5 hours, though not by much. Official times have not been posted. But I’m told I came 3rd overall among female riders. Maybe there were only three women? There were about 40 riders but it seems most of them were male.

    Surprisingly I felt pretty good once I had a chance to catch my breath at the end of the day. I had a scrape on my leg from a small crash but that was all. I went home, slept and got up for the run. Muscles still seemed happy enough to oblige.

    The 25k run was fine. It had about 650 metres of climb and an equivalent descent. As expected my bones and gristly bits held up well and the next day I just had a pleasant amount of muscle soreness. I managed to shave about 5 minutes off my 2010 time, sneaking in under 3 hours. Two years older and 5 minutes faster, even after a huge bike ride: I’ll take it!

    It was a really motivating weekend. Especially with respect to the bike. I have a decent amount of endurance, but I realized it would help to be a lot stronger when it comes to powering up hills. So there’s something to work towards for next year.

    Next year I’d like to do the bike ride again. And I think I’d like to run the 10k with Fiona. She’s started running with me and would like to keep that up. There were an impressive bunch of kids running the 10k this year, and she would like to be part of that next year.

  • Sufferfest v2.0

    Two years ago I ran the 25k Sufferfest True Blue trail run. I hadn’t trained specifically for it, though I had been training hard that summer. It was the first year for Sufferfest and I wanted to support the event, just a stone’s throw from my home town. I originally thought to run the 10k event, though the 25k looked enticing. I had just run my first-ever race, an Alberta (i.e. flat) Half Marathon three weeks earlier and was feeling good. I figured an extra 4 kms wasn’t that big a difference.

    But it turned out the Sufferfest trail run was a whole different animal. Steep up, steep down, rooty and rocky. I had also just switched over to minimalist trail shoes and though I had run in them a fair bit, I hadn’t really run any trails. I felt great at the outset and ran hard — over all that crazy terrain, which quickly took its toll on me. My knee and my foot were paying the price by the end and I did a long rallentando to the finish line. It took me weeks to recover.

    So you’d think that if I entered Sufferfest again I’d be a little more judicious in my choice of events. But no, I’ve gone an entered the 25k again, despite a summer of little to no training. I’ve been running on and off, but no real long runs, only a handful over 5 km and nothing at all systematic. (And I’ve entered the 45k mountain-bike race the day before. It’s a length that’s almost double the longest trail ride I’ve ever done in my life.)

    My old friend the Minimus 10

    The bike stupidity aside, I feel differently about it all this time around. I have a lot more experience pacing myself over long runs and steep trails. I’ve been running in a minimalist way for a long time now. I plan to run in my Minimus Trail 10’s. They’re considerably more minimalist than the shoes I ran my first Sufferfest in, but now they rank as old favourites, and more shoe than I usually run in. On roads I run barefoot. On rough trails these days I wear either Unshoes, my home-made huaraches or Minimus Zeros. So the Minimus 10’s are a solid old standby. I know they’ll work for me. My muscles, ligaments and tendons have adapted to this kind of running — and some — and I’ve done a lot of miles on exactly the sort of trails I’ll be running this weekend. I’ve also noticed that my body is pretty good at endurance running. It forgives my completely non-systematic increases in mileage. I’m fine running nothing more than 5 km for a couple of months and then going out and doing a challenging 15k. Sure, Sufferfest is a big run and I’ll be tired and sore as stink, but I don’t think I’ll be injured.

    Not unless that bike ride kills me. Stay tuned.

  • Ice

    The lake at the summit north of us has frozen clear, without snow. It’s not quite glassy, but quite skate-able. We’ve opted not to flood our backyard rink this year, so there’s even more reason for the trip to the lake to be worth doing.

    Fiona and I skated all the way across, and all the way back, and then spent some time “doing doodly-do’s” around the near shore. She found her skating legs quickly and despite the wind we both managed to generate enough body heat to stay toasty warm for an hour.

    While we were holed up in a “cave” beneath a rock, out of the wind on the far side of the lake, a coyote trotted directly in front of us, oblivious to our presence.