July 31, 2012

North Shore Athletics Evening Tuesday August 7th

If you are in North Vancouver next Tuesday (August 7th), North Shore Athletics is hosting a Grand Reopening Evening!  Come along at 6pm for a short (few kms), easy paced group run with myself and others, then head back to the store for various specials and give aways!  Then the highlight of the evening will be a screening of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run move 'Unbreakable' at 8pm.

Please click here for more details of the evening and to purchase your movie ticket ($10, goes to North Shore Rescue) as seating is limited.

Click here to see the trailer of JB Benna's fab movie.

July 29, 2012

You know you are an ultra runner when.... White River 50 miler race report

This weekend I had the absolute pleasure of running White River 50 miler near Crystal Mountain, Washington.  What a fantastic event that I can only recommend you go run yourself; beautiful trails, stellar views, well marked course, fab race organizers, friendly vollies, great post race eats, lots of give aways, cool camping ... the list goes on.  I had 7h40 to consider the question: you know you are an ultra runner when...

- You sign up for a 50 miler 3 weeks before because you have nothing else in the diary that weekend, so why not?  Might as well really, it'd be silly not to...

- You consider that this 50 miler will be good training for another 50 miler 2 weeks later which will be good training for a 100km race 3 weeks after that...

- You elect to camp the night before the race cause heck - it's 100 metres from the race start line so that will mean a sleep in and you won't have to get up til 5.30am - blissful lazy days!

- You figure this is only a 50 miler so hey - take it easy on Thursday (1hr run, 1hr yoga), don't run Friday, race Saturday - perfect taper plan.

- You now consider 6min per km a pretty good race pace.  3m45 per km downhill seems downright speedy.

- Lunch consists of gels, shot bloks and chips, all washed down with some thirst-quenching coke.

- At 42km into the 80km race you begin to feel better, like you've finally warmed up and stretched out the legs a little.

- At 70km into the race you begin to wonder whether 50 miles really is spot on 80km, maybe it's less, maybe it's more, oh well - what's a few kms here or there?

- It seems well worth running for 6+ hours just to get a good panoramic mountain view.  I mean you could drive up the mountain to get the same view, but who would want to do that?

- Your idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon is hanging out in a forest parking lot, unshowered, in race gear, chatting to new and old friends, eating any food you can find and then popping into the river with new friends for a refreshing ice bath.

- You don't run Sunday and instead go for coffee, go for lunch, hang out with friends, and spend the whole day wondering if this is what 'normal' people do every Sunday.


A pretty special number - previously worn by Anton Krupicka and Uli Steidl