Tales of Trails, Mountains and Rocky Roads

 After spending a few days in Jasper just before Christmas whilst I completed "The Snow Queen Ultra", it was nice to get home and have a few quiet and relaxing days with Andy and the pups. We didn't do much at all - just a few nice walks and some gentle runs, and it was nice to wind down for a few days. New Year's Eve was also a quiet affair - we've never really had anybody around over the festive period so the provincial Covid restrictions didn't really impact on us - and it was just Andy and I sitting around the firepit in the backyard, drinking a couple of beers before ringing in the new year. family time on New Year's Eve I'm sure many of us entered 2021 with caution but also a sense of optimism having been through what we had last year, and whilst there is hope on the horizon thanks to the vaccine, things definitely won't change overnight and I've already resigned myself to the fact that things will still continue in a similar vein, at lea...

 I felt so organised this time 12 months ago, and I was looking forward to knuckling down with my training, ready to work hard to achieve my racing goals for the year. Things started off well with the Hypothermic Half in February (a personal worst due to boredom running on the roads), and a fairly good result at the Weaselhead Cross Country race in Calgary a week later. But then things went tits up and all my planned races started to get cancelled. It would be another 8 months before I got to do another in person race ( Big's Backyard Ultra - World Championship ), and even that was very different from what I'd been used to. Thankfully, race organisers did a great job throughout the year to keep us runners motivated, and wanting to support them as much as possible in these strange times, I entered so many virtual events and challenges that I ended up running my highest annual mileage ever during 2020. By December, I had already ran close to 6000km for the year, but when my coach...