July was a stokeworthy month: I returned from France and immediately set my concentration towards hosting our first Mountain Stride Trail Running Retreat in Kananaskis. We spent the weekend of July 12-14 running along ridges and beneath big mountain walls, sampling tasty vegan meals and chatting about all things trail running. Hardrock and Sinister 7 kept us busy spectating when we weren’t actually running or eating also.
The “wildflower” edition of our trail running retreat was hugely successful and I’m looking forward to hosting the “golden larch” edition September 11-13, 2015. Come join us!
The weeks post running retreat were spent ascending disparate summits around Banff, all free from snow since I left to visit Ontario in early June. I bagged Edith North and ran the Cory-Edith Pass loop; Sean and I climbed Cirque Peak in a tiny window of nice weather bookended by torrential rain and blizzards; I ran up one of my favourite and most frequented summits, Bourgeau, carrying almost nothing. Mainly just my usual haunts.
The end of the month was punctuated by my buddy Sean Bradley setting a new FKT on the Banff Triple (Cascade-Rundle-Sulphur), with us planning the logistics and running the first mountain of the day together. That morning’s slog up Cascade marked me curiously questioning my performance and realizing — gee golly — that my body was really tired from the previous month and that I hadn’t truly recovered. I’d returned to Banff and ran objectives near PR pace, feeling pretty fresh, but now the race in Chamonix, fifty-plus kilometres over the weekend of our retreat, and a habit of serial peak-bagging had caught up with me until I couldn’t deny that I felt drained.
Sean on Cascade during his record-setting run of the Banff Triple:
I took a break, slept in for a few days, bummed around, and did stuff completely not mountain running-related. I learnt that true recovery, for me, means not only physically resting but relaxing the psychological demand for performance as well.
I spent the last two days of July skateboarding back and forth to bag a local peak, then slogging up a glaciated elevener far from home. On Thursday (30th), I finally summited Mount Cory after three previous attempts, continually shut down due to rain or time or something. On Friday (31st) Glenn and I climbed most of 3400m Mount Athabasca via the AA Col “scramble route” which we’d done previously in 2013. Athabasca is amazing — views from the top reveal a metropolis of geometric mountain forms smeared with flowing white glaciers — though the route is one of the least enjoyable I’ve encountered. Imagine sidehilling through an endless ball pit of scree and grovelling up gullies of hard ledges littered with choss on top of choss. Sounds like standard fare when it comes to scrambling in the Canadian Rockies but this was particularly bad. We gained the 3400m Silverhorn and dropped down to inspect the final snowy ridgewalk to the summit, which realistically called for ice axes and some sort of traction device, at least Microspikes, rather than the bald and shredded MT110s I happened to be wearing. Not a bad accomplishment for running shoes, however.
Mount Cory:
Mount Athabasca:
Blood, Sweat & Scree Dust 