Canfranc-Canfranc 100k

Last November I decided to get out of my comfort zone and do something big. Until then, I had raced distances from 15-110k with up to 5600m+. I had run through a night, but never through a full 24h cycle. In fact, I’d never run more than 15 hours at a time. So I’d never once doubted my ability to complete a course, because all of my basic needs (namely sleeping and eating) were still being met. To put it another way, while I’ve always loved pushing the limits of performance (how quickly can I cover a distance) I had never challenged the outer limits of my physical/mental/emotional capabilities. It was time to take on something I wasn’t sure I could finish!

Almost a year later I stood in the deep black of the Canfranc valley in the Spanish Pyrinees, shivering with cold, a pack bursting with mandatory gear on my back, and the familiar start-line noise of crowds and ACDC. I always feel immense relief when I start a race. Suddenly there is no pressure: all there is to do is put one foot in front of the other, and eat. Eat a lot.

I chose this event specifically for the elevation profile and for its technicality, almost more of a mountain climber’s race than a runners, for the fact it runs slower than many 100 milers. In short, because it scared the shit out of me. It was going to stretch and distort the horizon of what I imagined mountains could be, what I could be.

Before the sun, before even the full moon raised its pockmarked face to spread a yellow glow on the night and the peaks – while I still floated in a suspended bubble in the black, we traversed ridges, held fixed cables as we shimmied along cliff edges, thousands of feet of empty sky below, just one step away. We scrambled, hands on stones over two passes and a peak. It was better that I couldn’t see the consequences of a mistake. I was in the white orb of my headlamp. Just move forward. 

At some point way too early on, my stomach shut down and I was reduced to a crawl to cool my core temperature. I lost 45 minutes on one climb. But I fixed the problem, and I got back to the work of relentless forward movement and ruthless eating. On one descent, we heard a clattering rumble above us and had to step aside so as not to be swept away by tumbling rocks. The valley was thunder. The moon, scarred and sage, continued to look on. 

Very little was runnable in the first 50km and in retrospect, this was the part I most enjoyed. Even on the 50% gradient grass slopes were an impossible mess of lumpy loaves that asked you to trust and then twisted your ankle. And that tufted alpine grass is slick as ice. Amongst this sea of slippery grass were many hidden rocks – one I found with my tailbone in the first of five or six falls.

The second was a superman dive on a short bit of runnable singletrack where I kicked a rock. Thank the mountain gods it was dirt and not stone that I landed on, drawing only a trickle of blood.

I climbed strong, passing people on the uphills, and then being passed again on the downhills. I was not born with the power to float, as it appears some of these Europeans were. I was also in unknown territory, and trying to save my quads if possible.

As the red-orange sun crept up the horizon at dawn I gained the long, mostly runnable ridgeline to Moleta. The giant moon seemingly in the valley, 360 degrees of jagged, layered, and rugged peaks, a cathedral of rock everywhere I looked, and a sea-green abyss dropping below me on both sides. I wept as I ran. I don’t know why, but the tears came, and they didn’t stop for the whole length of the ridge as I ran, scrambled, lowered myself over ledges or tricky sections, and scampered up a rock tower. Maybe it was relief, maybe the beauty, maybe the comradeship I shared with others; maybe still it was the sunrise, or my mathematically improbable luck to be right there in the moment of space-time drinking in the world with a body that allowed me to.

The tears and sobs passed and that feeling of gratitude cannot be recreated. But I went on enjoying the experience all the same. After 50k, the sun was out, there was more water on the course, trails were a little bit more runnable, and all in all I was lulled into thinking I was through the worst of it. Part of my cooling strategy was to continually dunk myself in streams to keep my core temperature down so I could keep pushing. But what I learned is that while this can be done for 5, 10, maybe 15h, there comes a time where your feet become prunes and very quickly a bed of blisters. So it was that as I reached 17h or so – still 45’ off my pace, but not having lost anything additional (and over an hour longer than I had ever run in my life)- I realized the entire bottoms of my feet and heels were massive blisters, and it was too late. The next 9.5h (as it turned out) were utter agony. 

Stepping gingerly (and therefore slowly) does not result in less pain, but it’s hard to remind your brain of this. So I lapsed into much slower paces for long periods of time in the sun on ridgelines and tufted lumpy grass – stuff I should have been running hard. This caused me to hemorrhage another 45’ or so before I rolled into the large aid station at Candanchu where I ceremonially changed my shoes and socks (it was already hours too late). 

The last 18k broke me. A 1000m climb started quite well until we arrived into a cirque of peaks, a wall of rock 180 degrees around us. I could not fathom how we would get over it. I pushed to stay with the groupetto I was with of about 7 guys. I dug deep, telling myself that after this pass we’re basically done. Hands on the hill, heart in my throat, crawling, and hauling gels out of my sticky vest as I panted in the dying light. As the elastic stretched, we reached the pass, and I saw we actually still had 300m of climbing to the actual summit. Dark fell, the elastic broke, and so did my will.

As the headlamps disappeared up the mountain, I couldn’t believe I had been moving at that pace. They were gone in an instant. I stopped to layer for the final push and sort my headlamp out. I thought of dropping out, but I’d still have to get all the way down to the ski center which was just as far as the finish. By the time I reached the 2 exposed bolder moves and the scramble to the summit, I’d regained my determination. 

The descent was rocky, slippery, winding, and pretty sketchy for legs and ankles that had 23h, 90k and 8500m+ in them. The final aid station, suspended in the black valley, was run by costumed and jovial (maybe slightly tipsy) volunteers. Regrouping with some running buddies, I slathered vaseline on my feet, downed a delicious fried egg with cheese and set out for the final 10k, determined to match the split I had written on a piece of paper and covered in tape, and sweat and gels. 

I pushed and wheezed my way up the final climb, repeating “pain is only temporary; pain is only temporary.” I was objectively fast, and I was surprised to reach the pass so quickly. Then it was 130 switchbacks and 1100m-, where I had always vowed to vaporize whatever was left in the tank. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know where the will or the gas came from, but I flew down that hill. It wasn’t just a good finish for me. It would have been a good finish even if I’d gone 5h faster. I blew by 4 people on the way down. 

I’m deeply proud. My first jump into truly ultra distance, nearly 11h more than I’ve ever run, and nearly 3500m more than I’ve ever climbed in a single shot. I made three big mistakes, two of which I’m not likely to ever make again. And I stepped way the hell outside my comfort zone. Objectively, my training and my body permitted me to move quite smoothly through unimaginably (for me) rough terrain. 

10 days out and my feet are still swollen and blistered, my forearms creaky with tendon inflammation from 26h40’ of hauling myself upwards with poles. But I’m smiling.

High Trail Vanoise 70k, 5400m+

We are these beings, moving up like glow beetles on a black expanse of night. The utter insignificance of our choosing to bring ourselves to this point, at whatever speed, makes my head spin. Think of how many hours all of us have spent in our lives preparing for moments in the cold morning, shouted at by a loudspeaker; watched by the yet invisible mammoths of stone and ice that will still be here when the sun has risen above them and melted the snow and our rubber into the rocks; still here when our legs no longer work today, and in 20 years; still here when even our great grandchildren are wind and soil.

I’m here because I very much want to be. I crave this insignificance enough that I seek it out at every opportunity. I search the shared solitude that comes with finding a way to breathe my racing heart into the indifferent world, to push off of the ground that falls away behind me for hours and hours. To be able to voluntarily suffer, exist in movement on the side of a mountain, is a privilege and a need. And to end that pain is also something I search out.

Working hard at moving fast in the mountains is not more noble than any other distraction (though in my humble opinion it may be less destructive than some). Great or awful, the goings on of any life are random. Taking time every day to plan workouts, to run, to train, to stretch, to hydrate, to refuel takes many hours of effort and dedication, all of which gives me the illusion of control.  I am the boss. There must surely be some adage that says we are the makers of our destiny. I have never once believed that, but training hard certainly gives that comforting illusion.

Many events in my own life – as well as observing the world around me – have assured me quite clearly that most of what happens is simply chance, luck (good or bad). We are never deserving of what happens to us. We just exist. I know that.

So what High Trail Vanoise (HTV) reminded me was not that I am not in control: I already knew that. It showed me something about preparation. There are many details to consider, and I completely disregarded one key factor: the altitude.

I have raced three times at altitude, and two of them were some of my best performances in ultra mountain races. What I forgot, was that I was also living at altitude when I did those events. From the moment the horn went off for the start at 4am I was reminded that 2 kilometers in the air there is less available oxygen (and at 3600m there is even less).

The first kilometer I ran in the front group, but very quickly realized I was working extremely hard. I fell back to probably 35^th or so as I found a rhythm. It was dark. The mountains were just a little darker than the sky. The back of my throat was too dry for the speed I was moving. After a couple of kilometers of gradual uphill, the trail kicked right up. As we turned into the first switchback, I looked behind me to see the line of over 300 headlamps marking our trail through the dark, down, down, until they disappeared around a rock.

The sun came up and we were still traipsing up a glacier at over 3000m. The obligatory spikes came in handy as the gradient was by this point much too steep to go up “sans” major slippage. My head was pounding, the air was thin, and every time someone skied by on the fresh corduroy under the sun, I asked myself politely what the fuck I was doing here. Then I remembered.

After watching the leaders on both sides of the knife-edge of control as they came barrelling down the glacier at the edge of the world, their feet sinking in past their ankles to the ice below, eventually I got my turn, and it wasn’t pretty. I fell probably four of five times on my way down that glacier, already half an hour behind the leaders at less than 15k (to give you some perspective).

Once I found some rhythm and a bit of steadier (but still very soft) knee-deep snow, I really sped up and started to catch people as I ski/ran down the ~35% slopes to the aid station in the sky, and further to the wet access road. Then I stopped catching people and began to pound the further 5 or so kms to Tignes, around the lake in the sun, past the golf course and the gawking tourists (most of them quite encouraging. There it kicked up again, and there, that rolling terrain at altitude, that terrain that truly kicks my ass. I have a hard time keeping a good rhythm on here, and the grupetto of runners just ahead of me opened a gap on me. But thanks to the long descent through a pine forest, just technical enough, I closed the gap and caught the three or four runners just before the aid station at La Daille.

The next 4km had 1000m+, what is called a vertical kilometer or “VK” and here I found a rhythm leaving the village again and could begin to pick a couple of people off (really just the ones I had caught before the aid station) , keeping my eye on them above me as the pine forest made way for the switchbacks and the infinite hot sky.

Close to the top of the VK the front of the 42k race began to catch me. Just as I watched some fall back to me, I observed them moving smoothly, becoming smaller, until they finally went over the top, again near 3000m. The middle of the race from about 30-45km is a bit of a blur. I was moving fairly well, swiping my foam-fronted trucker hat in the cold mountain streams as I ran by, and forcing myself to eat every half hour or so.

Before feeling the altitude, I thought I could legitimately do this distance and elevation gain in about 10h. As soon as I started in the thin air though, I recalculated. 11h was possible. It would be tight, but possible. And until about 45k, I was just barely on pace. But as I passed the aid station at Col de l’Iseran and started my way up to the next ridgeline, scree field, and finally knife-edged glacier, this is where the altitude hit so hard it smashed my will.

I slowed to a crawling pace. My progress was slow, my breathing was fast, and my heart was racing from the effort. The final kilometer of straight climbing before turning back toward the aid station also offered the most panoramic views. Infinite jagged peaks, sawing into the blue, leaving snow about like sawdust, white and glaring in the sun.

The descent was through steep sometimes knee deep snow with the occasional treacherous drop or boulder. I rode the line of chaos for a bit, but it is a lot of concentration, a lot of energy to do that, and at some point that mental energy flags. I was over 11h now, and I still had 10k to go.

The aid station was packed with runners going up (as I was coming down). Thinking that they were well over an hour behind me and had a heinous climb in front of them made me almost want to vomit or cry for them. The road comes up to the Col, so there were spectators watching as I slipped pathetically in a puddle and fell face first in the only patch of mud on the whole course. What’s a trail race without some mud, right!

The last 10k were a battle of attrition, one that started with a scramble and a fixed rope up a near sheer loose cliff face to a tunnel. Then, it was apparently all downhill. Except that it wasn’t. This broke my spirit again. My legs were actually ok. All the repeats I’ve been doing at my local ski hill miraculously prepared them for the alps. However, so massively past my goals and so mentally broken by the effect the altitude had had on me, I did not move down those last 8k as I should have. More snow, more up hills, and more tourist hikers as we approached the final 3k descent to the finish. There I saw someone in the distance that had passed me on the last long descent. I didn’t have the will to chase. But then out of the corner of my eye I saw someone coming up on me quite quickly. And I thought “common Liam, do this, it’s a consolation, but you can do it!” and so I ran, I flew, I fucking soared down those last few kilometers, solidly dropping the guy who had almost caught me, and catching and passing two runners in front of me as I blazed out into the ski village. I looked at my watch. It read 12h40m as I rounded the corner into the gated area to the finishing arch. One final kick through the pain. One final kick. As I crossed the finish it occurred to me that the ground was the only thing I wanted. I let myself down and panted into the dusty ground as I waited for my heart rate to come down from 180.

“You’re ok Liam, you’re ok. You suffered well.” My friend Julien (my support, chauffeur, cook, jokester, friend extraordinaire) was waiting for me. After some minutes feeling the sensation of stillness, noticing the telescopic zoom lens in my face, hearing the crowd (a crowd at an ultra!! This must be Europe!!) I got up. I laughed, joked, smiled, ate, hugged, and hobbled my way to the shower. Bliss and some solid learning.

 

 

A change is as good as a…

This will be a round-up of sorts. Let’s start with a race report, before moving on to my rank among the most heinous of Luddites.

I did my last race of the 2018 season at the Bromont Ultra 50 miler on 7 October. A season of injuries and cross training meant that since July I’d been checking in daily with my coach Laura Perry to adjust workouts and manage whatever pain I was feeling. We did a good job at mitigating injury so that I could race, but there is an underlying stress to feeling like you’re perpetually on the brink of injury (or just injured).

Lining up at Bromont was a relief. I put in a solid (injury free) training block for it, so I felt zero pressure. There’s a mantra: “the work is done, now time to have fun,” which is true, but sometimes hard not to put pressure on yourself when you have put in all that work. I think I was just feeling a deep relief that I had arrived injury free, and would be able to have a mental rest really soon.

I awoke in the darkness of my motel room at 2:30am. I packed up, stuck my head outside, and was greeted by thick fog, misty rain, and about 5C. The gun went off at 3:30am and immediately I could see that I shouldn’t be in the front group. But I gave it a shot anyway, just to see how long I could/should stay up there. It was an infernal pace. And it didn’t stop when we hit the base of the ski hill. We were hammering the muddy single track and I was holding on for dear life through the thick fog. The only thing I could see around me was the ground and the white balls of light of the 6 guys in the group. In any event, the answer to my question was 4.92km. That’s when I said “fuck it,” pulled out my poles, and watched the white orbs disappear very quickly into the inky night.

I was caught from behind by three guys with whom I ran for some 10-15k. Without them, I would have gotten lost. At times you couldn’t see 15 feet in front of you for the fog. The one anglophone in the bunch gave us all a tip, to hold our headlamps down low so they actually lit our path instead of blinding us (same concept as foglights on a car). That guy turned out to be Brian Rusieki. If you don’t know who that is, look him up. He’s an ultra running legend. And he showed me that as he turned the screw on the long flat logging roads around the 20k mark. Never saw him again. One thing he said while we were scrambling up some steep rocks was “you Canadians start too fast; most of those guys won’t last.”

I finally found a great pace, and picked up two running buddies, Rich Paddy (an ironman triathlete doing is first 50 miler) and another Brian who was the first casualty of that front group (or, I guess, the second, as I took the honours). The three of us ran and chatted for probably 30k. They would get ahead of me on the runnable roads and double track, and I would set the pace on the steep single track, up and down.

By this point it had cleared: perfect temperature, great trail conditions (if a bit muddy at times – but what’s a trail race without some mud!) While I wasn’t able to eat as much as I had at Black Spur, I was still eating regularly and enough, and feeling pretty good at the 60k mark. So I started to push the pace, and was able to pull away from both my companions on a descent (where I also fell and smashed my knee). I caught two more casualties of the front group, and subsequently got passed by one of them.

Out in the clearing I looked at my watch. I was calculating a 20k acceleration, and a particularly fast final 5k. So I was confused when I saw the finishing arch and my watch only said 76.5k. I finished a bit stronger than I should have, with a somewhat confused smile on my face. Turns out my watch was a little off, and the course was a little shorter than 80k. Something like 78.5k.

I finished in 9:25, 35min faster than my personal goal and good for 8th overall in a pretty stacked field, where Brian Rusieki beat me by only 30 minutes, and the former course record was broken by the top 3. Able to push the whole time, but also be quite comfortable, I think it was a great and rather epic-feeling end to the season. I drove back to the motel, napped for 3 hours, and then packed up to drive the last 3 hours back to Ottawa to sleep in my own bed.

As always, a huge shout out to the race organizers, the town of Bromont, all the volunteers, and to everyone who toughed it out in the mud and rain and fog and cold. A special congrats to Rich for such a strong showing in his first 50 miler ever – top 10, DAMN!!

***

Right after I got home, my new mountain bike arrived – uber excited!!!! I have been riding a lot, resting those running muscles and ripping it (but more just ripping myself) up on the mountain bike trails. Around the same time I got my hands on a knock-off GoPro-type action camera.

I had been taking little videos while mountain biking, and learning how to use the camera. Two weekends ago I participated in a 6h team orienteering event with some friends – what a blast!!! And as I keep telling people: running AND thinking at the SAME TIME is pretty hard! Needless to say, while I do know how to use a map and compass, I wasn’t able to take bearings as quickly as Emil and Evan, so while I almost always knew where we were, I spent most of the 6 hours following Emil’s bearings. A fun mix of “braun” AND brains!

There too, I was trying to take some action videos during the event. All this to say, that as I sought to upload all the videos for editing, I accidentally “formatted” the card, thus deleting ALL the (probably sub-par) videos I had taken of friends and myself biking, running with maps through the woods in the rain, and generally having fun outside in the beautiful autumn colours. Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to remember those moments like we used to.

 

 

 

black spur ultra 108k race report: adoptive families, self inflicted suffering, bikes, etc.

I’ve had a season full of stops and starts, full of cancelled races, missed weeks of training. It’s been pretty hard to actually get into the rhythm of regular running because of all the injury. First it was patelo-phemoral pain, then shin splints, then more shin splints, then more again. Then just when I thought I was in the clear, bone scans told me I had a stress fracture in my tibia. Goose cooked.

I missed what would have been the most competitive ultra I’ve ever done in the Cayuga Trails 50 miler, but I refocused, spent many hours in the pool and at the gym trying to halt the backslide of fitness. Luckily I love being outside so it wasn’t hard to keep the life stoke high… it was pretty hard to be excited about running though, honestly.

Before I ever ran an ultra marathon, I had looked at Black Spur Ultra 108k in the Rockies in Kimberley, BC and thought that it would be an epic race and a beautiful thing to do. I loosely set my sites on it. I’ve thought about that race many many times since I started running. Steady as she goes. Each year I was building, and this spring I felt fit enough, ready enough to train and give this race my best shot. But you never know what will happen: here I was arriving at the airport in Cranbrook, cruising through the smoky skies, and being greeted by no view at all. My tibia still felt weird, my throat was getting itchy, I had started to sneeze and blow my nose, and a very real threat of cancellation due to forest fires raging all over the province. This would not be “what I signed up for.”

The first thing I did was to head downtown to rent myself a bike so I wouldn’t have to walk/run 4k to AND from the Kimberley Alpine Resort. At the evening briefing I met a family: the woman, a non-runner, with her husband (a self identified non-trainer) doing the 108k, and their two 20-something boys gunning for the win in the 54k. They adopted me, and how comforting it was to have my adopted mum at the aid station each time I rolled through.

I was all alone at my Air Bnb, pretty isolated from everything going on around me, so I had a lot of time to doubt myself. Early in the year I had set some lofty goals for this race, a sub 13h and podium finish. Now I wasn’t even sure if I would be able to finish, whether I’d remembered in this past month of no running how to keep a pace, whether the smoke would force me to quit, whether my leg would give out, or my stomach. The lack of long runs this summer might jeopardize my ability to digest during the event. Stomach issues can end your race pretty quickly. Heck, I didn’t even know if I’d be starting with all the wild fires. Basically there was a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of self doubt – a lot!

So I was relieved (more than anything else) when the gun finally went off Saturday morning. I ended up in the front group along with some 54k speedsters and some relay runners (also going faster). But I’ve matured. I went out conservatively, really just thinking about finishing injury-free.

Normally, Black Spur is a clover: three loops (we’ll call them A, B, and C) which the 54k runners do once each, while the 104k runners do twice each. Because of the fires, we were alternating A,C,A,C,A,C. Loop A is 16k with almost 900m+ elevation, while loop C is about 19k with 670m+.

On the first loop there is one long climb up to a ridge that starts as a road and fairly quickly kicks up and becomes a goat path. I went up this in a controlled manner, chatting with some other runners. I guessed I was somewhere in the top 10 at this point, but it was hard to say.

I descended very gingerly all the highly technical powder-dry single track into a shale rock ravine, and finished the first 16k feeling pretty good, and gaining a bit of confidence about my leg. I wasted no time at all in the aid station and felt I was moving quickly on the more flowy single track of loop C. But less than half way through I was caught by two runners. One of whom very shortly after sped away from us on a climb and into an eventual podium finish.

I spent the next 40k at least with Doug. We chatted, laughed, commiserated. We didn’t actually run together very much. We more yo-yoed. I would get ahead on the climbs, Doug would catch and pass me on the descents. It is fascinating to observe the high and low points of two different runners on the same course. Sometimes Doug would fly by me, whooping with joy while I seemingly shuffled down the mountain, nursing my blistered feet. Other times I’d energetically hike right past Doug on some steep uphill, keeping a strong rhythm youhooing into the smoky mountains and the quiet forest.

My last race was Sulphur Springs 50k, where I probably would have done a lot better if I hadn’t succumbed to one fatal error: not enough electrolyte. That error led to 20k of cramping. This time, I was on top of the electrolytes, and the two isolated times I felt the beginning of a cramp I made sure to drink double electrolyte drink at the next aid station. I also focused on balancing out all the sweetness of my (albeit delicious) Clif Bars and Endurance Tap maple syrup gels with salty snacks at the aid stations: chips, pickles, the works. I always chat with aid station volunteers because what they are doing is so selfless, and in many ways just as hard as what we runners are doing. But I never spent more than 2 or 3 minutes maximum in an aid station, and often much less.

One of the last aid stations that Doug and I rolled into together, I noticed that he had the words “not all pain is significant” written on his arm. We talked about this. We all make an informed decision to self-inflict this “suffering” on ourselves. We do it because it teaches us something about our own resilience. It is training for the real suffering of life. As our feet blister and pop, our muscles tear in thousands of places and each step becomes painful, even agonizing, there is a deep understanding that this pain, this physical (and even emotional) suffering is insignificant in the absolute sense of that word. It does not matter.

This may sound masochistic or egotistical, but I think it would describe it as meditative and deliberate. When you do an event that takes all day (or more, or much much more) you find that just as  in life, you are surrounded by people who are going through the same pain, the same vomiting and cramps, the same spasms as you. They are also experiencing the same euphoric highs, the same outpouring of gratitude and love. They understand and respect, and are supportive, compassionate. All that is true. And, in the end, you are alone. It may not have been possible to do without the support of other – that is true – , but in the end you go your own speed, you leave and get eft behind, and when you arrive at the silly blow-up arch at the finish, and the small crowd has gathered to cheer you on, you cross that line into the empty dark  alone.

In the last 40k I felt pretty good, and was eating well, about 300kcal/h. I was even able to push the last loop very hard as night fell and we all became moving lumens in the pit of the smoke-black night. I willed my legs to turn over, to fly back. I drifted far enough in front of Doug, that he didn’t end up closing the gap. I ran myself into 4^th place for about an hour, and then fell back to what ended up a 5^th place finish. As I hobbled or barrelled (depending on your point of view) down the ski hill into the finishing stretch, I could hear the announcer and the small gaggle of people clapping and cheering in the gathering cold. I didn’t collapse at the finish. I took my finisher’s medal and my beer. I leaned down into the pain in my hamstrings, the pain everywhere, into the dark ground, into the relief, into the happiness. I leaned down alone, into my dusty shoes.

My adoptive mother was there with a bucket of water for me to wash my legs. My socks were drenched in blood. I ate some (heavenly) soup and I gave my beer to a guy who was in the tent to change his shoes. He still had 35k to go. That was it. As I coasted down the hill on my rented cruiser bike toward home, I thought of all the many people still out there in the dark. I was done, I was pretty darn elated with 13h52m and 5^th place, mostly because nothing went wrong: I did not vomit, I did not cramp, I did not break my leg (!!), I did not get nauseous, I did not get suffocated by the smoke. And if I had, it would not have been all that important, because as Doug reminded me, not all pain is significant.

 

The rest of my trip was a combination of cramming my blistered feet into climbing shoes and struggling (very happily) up my first multi-pitch climb with my childhood friend Aaron and sharing with other adopted families! We hiked a few days of the beautiful Sunshine Coast Trail with Aaron’s amazing family; I laughed til it hurt; I became very well acquainted indeed with BC Ferries; and I capped it all off with a lot of excellent coffee in Victoria, where the true highlight was the people. I was welcomed, loved, guided, and deeply inspired by the generosity, creativity, calm, and openness of my dear friend Kayla and her housemates, partner, friends, and community.

 

Now I’m home, and hot damn I feel recharged!!!!

 

A bzillian thanks to all the (to me) nameless volunteers, to Brian Gallant and the Sinister 7 crew for putting on such a fantastic event; to Doug for the company and perspective, to Patty from Purcell Outdoors for being a friendly face out on the course and in town; to Trevor from Mountain Works Kimberley for the freedom of a bike in town; to my amazing magician of a coach Laura for getting me here, to the generous support of Clif Bar for keeping me fed in all my training and racing, and to Endurance Tap for keeping the tank full of maple syrup on race day!!

Finally, thanks to my dear friends Aaron for making race recovery fun and sendy, to Gillian, Ranjit, and Janet for the laughs and amazing hiking; to Kayla (and co) for making Victoria a welcoming, fun, inspiring, and accessible (yay bikes and gardens) place and showing me what rich community can look like!

54k-ish mark, still smiling

5 mins post race

hobbling up to Kimberley Alpine Resort for breakfast post-race

Top of my first multi-pitch

Campsite at Sarah Point

huuuge trees

Victoria – pretty nice spot

My 6th ferry ride

New and old poems

Settling back into a familiar environment in Ottawa these last few months has meant, for some reason, that I have not given myself the space to sit and write. I have time. And sometimes volition. What I lack is the ability to overcome the inertia of life’s moments .

One day, I’ll sit down and try to put words to the feeling of comfort, love, freedom; and the stifling claustrophobia, the nostalgia of home. The work of putting into words what it is to be alive is less of a project and more of a process – one that I’d like to continue. Sometimes, when I realize it’s been ages since I last wrote, I revisit old writing, hoping to spark something inside me. And it often works – enough to get me writing, even if the final product isn’t worthy of anyone else’ eyes.

New and old poetry:

Two years ago, I spent 6 months in Nunavik in the small Inuit village of Kangiqsualujjuaq. It was a beautiful, tragic, joyful, inspiring, exasperating, humbling time. I wrote a lot while up there, and after a few great editing sessions with my talented and dear cousin Stephan, and a lot of time to settle, a handful of pieces are as ready as they’ll be for the eyes of others. For more on the North, read Martha Baillie’s In Search of Heinrich Schlogel.  A fantastic novel and meditation on the North.

* 2018

**Nunavik (2015-16)

*

You have watched me through a crook of  branches

How have you seen me, moving through the years?

parting their stocks, husking cobs with steady, wizening hands?

am I strong? Do I stand an obelisk amongst the cracking shafts

bent in fingers of October howl? have I had purpose, my teeth

in peach-soft kernels? have I been straight and sure, smiling wisely?

 

these years you have watched me through a crook of branches

you have thought me strong, unwavering, bristles of adventure

growing on my chin

 

did you see the crackling light, my knees

in a rasping desert copse? did you see drops of blood parched

and flaking on my shins?

 

you have made something without my bulk. covered

in the pencil sketches of a child’s dream, a rose-coloured tunnel

you have become God

 

but you will be nothing

at the end

 

Spring

the blizzard grinds into soft flesh cheeks of spring

pelt the world with frozen lattices

origami into the ruffle of feathers

unflinching on a grey and swaying branch

it has transcended old hearths and rattling doorknobs

strangled failing army officers with hemorrhoids,

oxidized throats, chafed the angry skin of brittle limbs,

torn at family fabric

an overgrown garden of tiny feathers lie

for months, til they are consumed by a lithography of soil.

you sweat into the prickly bend behind your knees which is

soaked in expectations, the warming wind, a sun that is

toxic with eyes, and pins you to the same fluttering spot

where your head spun like an owl

 

**

the cycle

the kid everyone knows

is the kid whose insides

decorate one                       smoke peeled

room, one                       busy

funeral                       parlour

with traffic to match

the birth rate

what sage prophesied

a naked man, worn-out

leather draped on bone,

with a beard–

running over bearable

embers of blue ice

to a crack where he slips

beneath the roof

to look for mussels –

would never

sit down again

he would disappear

die?

a knot is not hard to tie

a loop is not hard to tie

a noose is not hard to tie

its like this, and then this,

I tie it, you remember

(actually, everyone does)

and then you’re done

you’re under that ice

it’s like when you put your  feet

into the snow, or your hands,

long enough they burn

and the burn goes away and then

you just don’t feel anything

anymore. once you’re down there

everything just turns off

even your ear drums freeze

so you can’t hear them talking

its not bliss, its just nothing

who never imagined

the ruinous contents of a bottle

half-empty, half-empty?

 

which mother gave her life

to a boy, her son, to eat

and walk into the warmth

of a far off winter camp

and where is she now?

 

where is her spirit in these

surrogate bottles?

 

End of a day

A stomach hollow emptied out each night

like the frozen body of a skinned fox in the snow

(soon it will be sinew and bones only)

 

when sun slides behind winter taiga – docile white ptarmigans

from afar, howling violent on approach – heaps

that grey and disappear behind ceaseless wind

there is not enough meat in the hollow to hang hopes

just frail sinew of that forgotten fox

twangs and resonates in the yawning glut of night

 

yellow globes in the river’s black bellows where

hooded children silenced by gutting wind, frozen stones

no more words

 

surely the little beast went blind before drifting away

 

it is an irreversible hollow and the night goes on

 

 

Nicholas: 2 poems

I

the birds are back

twitter in treeline brush

stunted spruce.

they are late. he has gone.

no more

steady muscles

silent in ripping wind.

 

his soft mouth pulled

a squinting smile.

 

snow melts in May; scrapes rock

clean and boggy – a cigarette butt

caught on granite fills its plastic

pores with brown, living water.

 

It is not Nicholas’, his hand

can hold nothing now

for the rest of time.

 

II

this is a poem for you

even though you can´t hear me

even though everything goes on

while you decompose

 

I wrote something else about

you, but it just sits

waiting for time to forget,

you´ll go too, I know

 

you´ve already faded

like everyone does –

give it a few years

you´ll hardly be a synapse

 

just flowers and permafrost

ok, I´ll probably never forget

you, and your sisters won´t

and your brothers –

 

My mind from a rocking chair

I rearranged the jars in the kitchen cupboard today

I moved the peanut butter into the fridge, shuffled

the dusty barley one spot to the left, put almonds above the stove

hid my guilty nutella behind something – I don’t even remember –

maybe the oats. the little vitamin jars I left right where they were

it snowed – not like the rains that come and go

old passions that turn blue and indifferent –

no, this snow was steady: hard, brash and delicate.

I sat in my rocking chair reading a story by Hugh Hood

 

wandering the streets of Montreal talking and laughing

with my lover between kisses as we passed

garden-rimmed brick mansions bantering and drawling

with the whiny well enunciated voice of a grainy

 

Jimmy Stewart, or a bespectacled newscaster talking

out of one side of his mouth, puffing into the studio’s

carpets and glass. Mr. Fenessden – was that his name?

– was remembering the drive to Williamstown

 

he was dying. an old bearded friend of mine in Indiana

told me the older you get the more you think about

your own death. I wondered am I old? between feeling and not,

warm yellow rays moved through leafy trees

overhanging Mr. Fenessden’s shimmering Raisin River

our lovers’ cheeks brushed to rosy by the sharpness of autumn

our eyes still warm, still brash and delicate. when I looked

up from my book, out from a petrified window

the snow continued its numbing project, powdering the icy street

 

with arctic air. some local Inuit boys ripped down the road on their ATVs

I finished what was left of the oily grilled peppers I had eaten for dinner

I rummaged through cupboards for sticky and sweet

managing a batch of almost healthy almost vegan energy balls

I thought of Mr. Fenessden’s dilapidated yellow house, the one

 

he never bought, crumbling under the weight of years

under the steeple of a scorched and sleepy town

his life whirred by me like a film real, a steady thing

like the snow – but there was time yet until the night

put darkness beneath my eyelids

so I got to shuffling around my cupboard

but I didn’t move the vitamin jars.