Running the Bruce Trail

Signed up for the Mont Tremblant Ironman in August 2012. As I write this I am on the stationary bike – seriously. Multitasking will be key to pulling this off with every other part of my life intact. Reminded as I am by this blog that the BT remains unfinished due to lack of time, the choice to do an Ironman appears ironic, dare I say stupid (certain people in my life would indeed dare to say that). But I’ve learned that I can’t go more than a couple of years without chasing some big goal like this. The BT is still hanging out there from from four years ago. Two years ago it was a wholesale career change. This year it will be Ironman. In my wildest dreams, while I am mega dosing on cardio and getting into the best shape of my life, I will find a way to knock off that final 10% of the Bruce during some spare moment. But who am I kidding? The next step, finding a training plan that everyone can live with. How few hours a week can you train for an Ironman, while still feeling like you approached your potential? It is a fine balance, and not many hours ever pass before I return to the question of why I bother. Then I train, I dream, it grounds me, and I have all the answers I need.

Running the Bruce Trail is once again stretching into more of a long-term goal than I anticipated. What started as a summer resolution is turning into more of a bucket list project.

While I prefer not to think of outdoor fun and family life as mutually exclusive, they can be at times mutually adjusting.

Going outdoors these days largely means going local, which is not a bad thing. And what’s further away geographically has become further away temporally as well.

That is, a place’s distance away in space places it a corresponding distance away on the road of life. That puts trail running on the Bruce Peninsula about 2-3 years out, pending a margin of error of +2 years due to the upcoming arrival of baby #2 next spring.

So, I have decided to forgive myself this missed deadline and let it ride for now.

Someday, when I find a big, comfortable space in my life to do so, I’ll strap on my shoes, pick up my pack, and run the last hundred-odd kilometres to Tobermory.

Tuesday 10 Aug
Spirit Rock Conservation Area to Hope Bay
Time: 8 hours
Distance: 45 km
Avg pace: 5.6 km/h

Total distance to date: 767 km
Distance to go: 118 km

Eighty-two kilometres in two days
I cannot be too impressed with myself because Charlotte Vasarhelyi – who ran the whole Bruce Trail in a new record of 13 days, 10 hours earlier this summer – ran this distance almost every day. However, I am not as fit as Charlotte Vasarhelyi, who trains by running over 100 miles every week. And Charlotte Vasarhelyi did not have to run with a backpack fully loaded with camping gear. This is still more distance than I’ve covered in a single weekend since starting the trail, and it still beat me up pretty good. If I showed you a picture of my toenails, you’d see what I mean.

(I made the critical mistake of wearing trail shoes which I now know are too small, and on the second day wearing Injinji Socks, which take up more room in the shoe by separating each toe like a glove. I will be paying the price until both of my big toenails grow back – until which time I will have to remember to always wear socks in the presence of my mother-in-law, who had already expressed opinions about my feet.)

I drove to Kemble and left my car by the side of the road. Bill and Nancy of The Bluffs B&B in Lion’s Head kindly shuttled my car up the peninsula to Barrow Bay. The Bluffs is part of the Home to Home B&B Network, an association of B&Bs that provide accommodation and shuttle services to Bruce Trail hikers on the Peninsula section of the trail (Wiarton to Tobermory).

I jogged the first day with a 55-litre pack with all my overnight gear, food for two days and about 5 litres of water to start. The Slough of Despond seemed appropriately named as I plodded past it in late afternoon. Its hordes of blood-hungry flies chased me on the long ascent up Skinner’s Bluff.

As I approached Wiarton at sunset, various sorts of pain set in: chafing on my back from the heavy pack, and the rope-like stems of Queen Anne’s lace whipping at my bare legs for hours.

Arriving in Wiarton, I snapped a photo of Willie the groundhog and ordered a medium Greek at New Orleans Pizza. I ate while walking  the last couple kilometres to Spirit Rock Conservation Area where I got spooked by the darkness and pitched my tent. In hindsight I’d have driven ahead to set up camp next to the bike tourers at the waterfront park in Wiarton rather than lugging my gear all day, but I’d thought that I would travel bravely by night and cover more distance, and didn’t want to be committed to a destination.

In the morning I stashed my overnight bag in the bushes near the Spirit Rock parking lot and ran with just my Camelbak. Sticky heat and sore feet slowed me down as I made my way up the base of the Peninsula. I’d meant to bring water purification pills but hadn’t had time to buy them before leaving Toronto, so I ran with a filter and stopped to pump water at Cape Croker Indian Park (there’s a boil water advisory at the park’s taps). In this summer heat at my modest pace, I drink about a litre every 10 km. My Camelbak holds three litres.

I was 3:30 when I arrived in Hope Bay, and I had no hope (!) of completing the distance to Barrow Bay, which was only 10 km up the road but another 20-30 on the trail. I took off my shoes, limped into Georgian Bay and lay down in the water. Then I got up and walked around the bay to the campground store.

Hallelujah, the first person I spoke to offered me a ride. I was still wet from the swim, so he grabbed a wool blanket from the back and threw it over the passenger seat. Half an hour later, I was on the road back to Toronto.

Tuesday 27 July 2010
Distance: approx 42 km
Time: approx 7 hours
Avg speed: 6 km/h
Total distance to date: 685 km
Distance to go: 200 km

Ranger and I ran a trail marathon this day, starting about 1:30 out of Owen Sound and running into dusk, with a car shuttle courtesy of my father-in-law, Phil. A hot day.

Earlier this summer, probably late June
Distance: TBA (approx 14 km)
Time: approx 2 hours
Avg speed: 7 km/h
Total distance to date: 643 km
Distance to go: 242 km

I’m falling a bit behind on the blog and I can’t find my notes, but I do remember that my first run this summer took me through Owen Sound and up the Sydenham River to Inglis Falls. I drove to Inglis Falls and phoned Red Line Taxi in Owen Sound to drive me and Ranger back to where I finished last season. It was late in the day and I didn’t get much distance in, but good to get out on the trail again. The section through Owen Sound is probably the most scenic since I left the Beaver Valley.

I had my VO2 max tested a couple of weeks ago and the result, 61.5, suggests that I’m in the “fit amateur” category, which is what I already knew. Most elite athletes fall into the 70 to 90 range.

But then I checked out an online calculator that claims to predict race times based on VO2 max and found out that my 61.5 means I should be able to run a marathon in 2:39.

2:39!

That is 13 minutes faster than my personal best performance after running 6 marathons and achieving what I thought was my peak.

That number got me all fired up about running again. I will train harder! I will run more! I will enter more marathons! Heck, there are some backwater races out there that I could win with a time like that! Bring on the trophies and shwag.

Then I talked to a coach who dampened my enthusiasm. He questioned the validity of my VO2 test, for one, and suggested that the online race time calculator was, well, bunk.

There are lots of things that determine race performance, like lactate threshold, and VO2 max alone doesn’t tell you much by itself. He said some people can run more efficiently than others at a given VO2, citing famous marathoner Frank Shorter who had a relatively low VO2 for an elite athlete but was incredibly efficient and able to run for a long time at a extraordinarily high percentage of his VO2 max.

The coach said if you want to run faster, this is what you’ve got to do:

1. Hire a coach and get on the right program.

2. Isolate variables so that you can measure your progress (such as running a set route under identical conditions and a set heart rate a couple times a month) and focus on improving your efficiency.

Those are two things I’ve never done in an organized way. So I may not go out and push myself to run a 2:39 marathon, but I know there are some things I can do to improve my running. Plus, thinking about this has got me fired up about the 2010 running season and building my distance so I can run 50 km days on the Bruce – even if takes me longer than the 3 hours 11 minutes that the online calculator predicts ( Ha!).

Winter’s here, with some fits and starts. It’s time to screw the hobnails into my second-run shoes and hit the local trails. I’m back in the game a bit after a slow year and went for a two-hour run in the Don Valley on Boxing Day.

New Year’s resolution numero uno: Finish running the Bruce Trail in 2010

Tory and I have been invited to a wedding in Tobermory at the end of the summer, so I have a deadline. It’s a long drive to the trail now so I want to up the daily mileage. I think I’ve got about 270 kilometres to go (contradicting my previous calculation of 236 and/or the advertised length of the trail).

Last night I started scribbling plans. Five, 40-50 km running days will put me at Bruce Peninsula National Park and the beginning of the last 40 km, which I want to finish on a two-day backpacking trip with Tory. The remaining running days look like this:

• Bothwell’s Corner to Glen Camp
• Glen Camp to Wiarton
• Wiarton to Hope Bay
• Hope Bay to Lion’s Head
• Lion’s Head to Crane Lake Gate

The logical way to do this would be a one-day run to Glen Camp, then a couple of 100-km weekends with overnights in Wiarton and Lion’s Head and shuttles from local B&Bs. This is how I imagined I would be running the trail from the beginning – in big chunks rather than 3- to 4-hour pieces. Full weekends for running are hard to come by, but I will try to make it happen in 2010 with some careful planning and negotiation.

A sub-resolution is to knock off one of these big chunks during the summer solstice, with an all-day run to celebrate the longest day of the year. Since starting this project I’ve dreamed of running a 100-kilometre day in June, but after my 60+ km day last year I don’t know if I’m up for it. I’ll be happy if I can do 100 km in a weekend.

After last year’s efforts on snowshoes, I’m happy to put this on hold until the snow melts and stick to local training. I can’t cover enough distance in the snow to make the drive worthwhile. Winter is for skiing.

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