Tales of Trails, Mountains and Rocky Roads

 Just two weeks after the backyard ultra, I was toeing the line at my next 5 Peaks trail race, this time at Chickakoo. I'd purchased a season pass this year as I wanted to use the shorter trail races as good tempo or hard workouts for the bigger things, and so far, the plan had been working perfectly. It was another hot and sunny day for Chickakoo although storms were in the forecast for later in the day. I wasn't sure how recovered I was from the BYU but it turns out that I was more recovered that I realised, and I ended up having a really good run/ The course at Chickakoo isn't easy. It starts on wide double tracks, but then as you turn into the trees and hit the single track, things become much hillier and more technical. I was surprised at how well I was running and how confident I was feeling, and I ran the hills feeling stronger than I had done for a while. I'm sure my marathon training earlier in the year had helped with this to some degree, and I was keeping a p...

Having raced Whitemud 5 Peaks a few weeks ago, my focus shifted to building up the miles again, this time in preparation for the Backyard Ultra at the end of July. Even though I had covered 100 miles at Survivorfest 24 hour, I was lacking in confidence about whether I had actually completed enough miles to do myself justice at the BYU. My weekly mileage had been pretty low when compared to my previous attempt, and I was concerned that I just wouldn't have the strength of body or mind to get to 36 hours like I did last time. It didn't help that I had to skip competing at Rundles Revenge 50k this year - Andy was working out in South Korea and I had nobody to dog sit for me whilst I raced again, so I ended up heading to Banff for a weekend of camping with the pups, but with no real running or hiking to get build up the miles. It was Canada Day weekend the following week, so having spoken to coach Paul, we agreed that I would do 3 consecutive days of back to back long runs in the h...