Tales of Trails, Mountains and Rocky Roads

Things had been going so well with my running. I'd been doing speedwork once a week - 5 x 800m repeats since you ask - and had been hitting an average of 6.30 miling despite sometimes snowy, icy or windy conditions. When things started to warm up, my easy mid-week runs became faster, and I was comfortably running sub 8s again, which started to give me the confidence that my running really was going in the right direction.  My training schedule recently has included 4 hour hilly trail runs on a weekend, and for the past few weeks, I've been pretty consistent in getting out to the local trails to get those runs in. Unfortunately, when least expected, the husband got called away from work at the last minute. It was only meant to be for a couple of days, but ended up being two weeks, and this inevitably had a huge impact on what, where and when I was able to run. Working full time, plus trying to train at a fairly decent level, and then having three pups that need lots of exercise,...

The past month has really seen the miles increase, and not only have I been hitting the climbs, I've also had double run days which have really tested my resilience to keep going when I really am quite tired. When it comes to running trails, I tend to head out to Devon which is less busy than the Edmonton River Valley, and I usually have the trails to myself, particularly in the winter months. The weekend following our winter camping trip in Banff, I had a good four hours of hilly trails in my schedule, so I drove out to Devon with the intention of doing multiple loops of the same route, enabling me to use the car as a base for refilling my water bottles and stocking up on nibbles. The weather was still on the cooler side, but it was much warmer than the previous week, and with blue skies and bright sunshine, it was actually quite nice running on the trails with the trees sheltering me from the wind. The warmer weather also seemed to bringing out the wildlife, and the sounds of cha...