A return to running regularly after spending the month of April initially injuring myself, then recovering from that injury. Conditions in the valley have been mixed — days of blazing sun, others of blizzards and rain. Just spring in the mountains, I suppose. With six weeks until I leave for Ontario (for a wedding) and eight until the Mont Blanc 80K, I feel poised to tackle some pretty dense training over the following month while remaining cautious not to overdo it, either. I’d like to think the base fitness is there for me to slog endlessly through the hills; the best results will now come from sharpening a few particular skills. Six weeks of premature summer is the perfect amount of time to do that.

Weekly total: 9h53m/78km/4339m

04/27/15 – Tunnel – 35min/6km/300m
Up and down Tunnel from home, then downtown for sushi. Aiming to push hard and get a fast time, at least on the ascent: 23m48s to summit, 14min to Sushi Bistro.

04/28/15 – Tunnel – 43min/7km/340m
Up and down Tunnel from home. Wasn’t aiming to go fast but rather to feel effortless and comfortable. That being said, I’m not sure if I felt any more comfortable than yesterday although I was exerting myself less. I think my legs still felt the impact from yesterday’s sprint. Not much slower than yesterday, though: 25min to summit, 19min to home.

04/30/15 – Ha Ling – 2h53m/19km/1311m
Took me a while to figure out what to do this morning. Took the bus to Canmore and ran up Ha Ling from town. Not a particularly notable trip except that I felt pretty good and never felt like I was pushing too hard — compare with my previous ascent of Ha Ling, last Thursday. I tentatively planned on doing a Ha Ling/East-Rundle double-bag but it looked like a sheet of bad weather was heading toward me and I wasn’t keen on getting hammered by rain whilst in the alpine (some days I’m down for that sort of thing). Ran back to town via the Grassi Lakes and powerline cut-line trails.

05/01/15 – Sulphur Loop – 2h38m/20km/1077m
Up the back, down the front, from home. I don’t remember the last time I ran every step up the back of this mountain (if I ever have) but today I did. Tagged the Ray Station on Sanson’s Peak then descended down the front, which is drying out nicely. One could probably get away without Microspikes nowadays. Descended through forest to the Fairmont castle then took some sort of horse trail (I hate horse trails) which spat me out at Middle Springs. Continued to link up trail rather than run on the road, descending quickly down the forested back of Middle Springs to Cave Ave. and thence to my apartment.

Sidenote: One thing I’ve learned about myself from running is that I don’t interpret my fueling needs accurately and often associate the need for fuel with uncertainty of challenge or exertion or stressful conditions, as opposed to actual nutritional demand. That is, if I’m not sure how far I’m going to have to go, how hard I’m going to have to push, the challenges I’ll face, I’ll often feel the need to fuel which I genuinely interpret as hungriness. The moment I return to a place of psychological comfort or certainty, the feeling that I need to fuel, am hungry or am even about to bonk all fade and I am left feeling either actually hungry irrespective of my mental state (“Who cares? I’m home”) or not actually hungry or depleted at all.

02/05/15 – Tunnel + Sulphur Loop – 3h04m/26km/1311m
A decent-sized run, longer than originally planned, that illustrates well the deranged manner in which my psyche operates when it comes to motivation in the mountains. I left the house intending to do the exact same trip as yesterday but upon arriving at the Cave and Basin (~1km from my apartment), I stopped and marvelled at a wall of snow squall rushing over the top of Sulphur and up the Bow Valley toward me. As I was carrying almost nothing, I wasn’t in the mood to get hammered by flurries for an hour in shorts and a t-shirt on the exposed western side of Sulphur. I turned around and decided to stick closer to home and do something creative on Tunnel instead.

I headed up Tunnel and (of course) as I neared the top I saw the snowstorm beginning to clear over Sulphur. I felt so tricked and deceived by the weather that I decided that I would go bag Sulphur anyway, just out of spite. So I chomped half a Builder Bar on the top of Tunnel and swiftly descended back down to town, across the river, up behind the Fairmont castle and up the Sulphur Mountain trail. The run was pretty cruisy and in fact almost entirely running — err, jogging anyway — as opposed to the slogging I expected to resort to after a series of vertical-heavy days.

I scarfed the second half of my Builder Bar in the upper gondola terminal while warming my hands on my glutes, then sprinted out, tagged the Ray Station on Sanson’s Peak, descended the back of the mountain to the Cave and Basin, then to my apartment. When I returned to the Cave and Basin, I stopped and looked back up the valley just like three hours prior — this time with sunny skies — and asked, “What the hell just happened?” A Sulphur loop of logic.