Polishing the cutting edge of flintstone against alpine rock; riding a serrated arete between peak fitness on one hand and shattering the medium I’m working with. This is me at the climax of months of training in the Rockies, absorbing and integrating its lessons before applying it all elsewhere. My training season began way back in March but an abrupt jumpstart in vert and mileage contributed to a niggling injury in my left knee which reappears occasionally until this day. My most recent weeks have been spent mostly doing laps on Sulphur Mountain in Banff, a tamer mountain than my preference but my workouts have been more structured, consistent and measurable than ever in the past. A trip up Mount Aylmer on Wednesday provided the final dose of adventure I needed before flying off to Ontario for a week, then to Chamonix for the 80K du Mont Blanc. I’m excited to let this machine I’ve built do what it’s intended to do, then coast for the rest of the summer with the fitness I’ve developed, my concentration turned to ticking off personal projects with friends here in the Canadian Rockies.

Week-and-a-half total: 12h51m/92km/5376m

01/06/15 – Tunnel – 35m22s/7km/300m
Up and down Tunnel from home, as fast as possible. Started with a warm-up to Cave and Basin and back, then started my watch and started racing towards Tunnel. By the time I reached the upper trailhead, I knew my pace wasn’t sustainable; I was too out of breath and felt like passing out so I sullenly slowed to a jog to find some iota of recovery. My jog must have continued to be fast but I lost all intentions to push hard and break a PR, content with just tagging the top without losing consciousness along the way. Somewhere just shy of the summit, I dared to look at my watch, which was only thirty seconds or so off my PR time so I full-out sprinted up the last hill, down the rooty dip before reaching the red chairs, then clambered up the slabs to the summit, finding it busy, and immediately dropped off and down for a fast round-trip time. 35min makes that a new round-trip personal best.

03/06/15 –  Sulphur Double Crossing – 3h37m/35km/1900m
A pretty demanding run that started out cruisy and resulted in me knocking an hour off a routine 35km/1900m objective. Ran up the front, down the back; up the back, down the front. I am truly getting a little bored of spending all my time on Sulphur when there are so many other peaks coming into shape, but the weather was somewhat threatening this morning and this is probably where I needed to be today, sharpening up splits and racing habits, not frolicking on some random peak that is “more alpine” in character. The initial jog up the frontside of Sulphur was an absolute breeze — I tried to cruise along rather than push, and my relatively quick speed is evidence of speed workouts increasing my overall pace and decreasing my exertion. I tried to concentrate on not stopping, fuelling consistently and eating while running. I felt pretty punished by the end of the final 900m freefall from the top of Sulphur to Bow Falls but will take that as part of the pace required to knock over an hour off this objective. It was only in the last couple years that it would take me almost the same amount of time to go up and down Sulphur once that it now takes me to do it twice.

Splits:
1h14m    Sanson’s Peak
1h40m    Sundance Canyon junction
2h43m    Sanson’s Peak
3h14m    Bow Falls
3h37m    Home

05/06/15 – Sulphur (summits 2, 3, 4, 5) – 1h59m/19km/1200m
Messing around along Sulphur’s ridge today. Headed out on my bike to check out Cory Pass but rode for only a couple minutes before I realized my rear tire was flat. Took the bus up to the Hot Springs, dropped off work stuff, then jogged up the front of Sulphur to the gondi station (S2) and started working back towards some of the other summits. Although my legs were super tired from the previous day, once on the ridge I sprinted and scampered my way up slabs, reveling in the batteredness of my body. Reached S4, my goal for the day, looked out towards S5 and couldn’t turn it down. Tagged S5, took some pics, then headed back, tiptoeing along fractured ridgeline, bombing down the saddles and slogging exhaustedly back up the summits. My quads were pooched on the descent, but I was somehow able to relish that feeling of overall fatigue and recognize the benefits I’ll reap from continuing to push when so tired. Descended back to the Upper Hot Springs and hastily constructed a delicious sandwich.

10/06/15 – Aylmer – 6h40m/31km/1976m
A mighty unicorn slain. The way some people in Banff look upon peaks like Cascade and Rundle, that’s how I look at Aylmer. Just out of town, it rises high above everything around it and possesses a long approach trail frequented by berry-hungry Grizzlies. It has long been on my list of peaks to bag and I have gazed upon its prominent summit from my window for over a year now.

The initial gameplan for today was to do something far more training-specific: I intended to do a variation on the Canmore Triple Crown as a final preparation for my race in Chamonix, slogging lots of steep vertical and continuing to sharpen my ascent/descent splits. However, at the back of my mind, I needed something more alpine, more epic before leaving for Ontario, though I hadn’t overtly articulated these thoughts to myself yet. Yesterday I took a cab to work and the driver said that if he hadn’t been working, he’d be over there, climbing that thing, Mount Aylmer. Aylmer looked so sexy draped in clouds that morning, and the conversation with the cab driver seemed so meaningful, that I immediately texted Sean (who was joining me from Edmonton): “Change of plans. I need to do something more epic. Like this “. Sean had zero problems with the revised scheme and I knew he wouldn’t. After switching the plan, I felt an immediate sense of relief and enthusiasm.

Sean and I woke just after six though the sun had rose a half hour earlier. We made coffee, hit up Wildflour for snacks then drove to the trailhead, starting at 8:19 AM. The jog along the lakeshore trail was cruisy as we hooted and hollered our heads off to ward off grizzlies. The rest of the climb was uneventful save for some of the worst scree I’ve ever encountered, which took us an enormous amount of effort to ascend and later bombed down at terminal velocity in a fraction of the time. The views from the summit were impressive though I’d read somewhere they wouldn’t be, with many snow-clad 11,000ers visible along the horizon to the west. The valleys of the Ghost Wilderness area were lush and green. And the prairies were brooding with dark storm clouds.

We didn’t spend long on the top, skiing down fine scree with grace at times, and narrowly dodging broken ankles or necks at others. The run out was disproportionately tough — maybe because it was so hot or maybe because of the effort we spent climbing 50-degree scree earlier — but was made worse by a tactical rock strike to the underside of my foot, which was pretty tender and sore and still is. At any rate, I’m glad I did something like this that really engaged me mentally and made me exercise some mountaineering sense, and expanded my heart with stoke with a fresh ascent on a big peak, rather than doing a really long and boring workout. Arguable which would have been more advantageous but I definitely don’t feel like I lost — and definitively feel like I gained — something from our trip today.

Splits:
0h50m    Aylmer Pass junction
1h40m    Ascent gully junction
4h02m    Summit
5h13m    Ascent gully junction
5h46m    Aylmer Pass junction
6h40m    Lake Minnewanka parking lot