Canmore has been phenomenal (as usual) for training this last month. We have definitely had our share of rain and wind, but for the most part there are pockets of sunshine even on those days! Over the last three weeks I have started to run a bit more. At first it didn’t come back that quickly- more muscle tends to take away from that wispy running feeling! and also we seemed to be focusing a lot on upper body strength.

Two weeks ago I raced in the Canmore Challenge- a grueling race that I don’t remember much of other then thinking around kilometer 1 that I paid $48.00 to torture myself, and lets me honest, it was a lot of fun in a really painful way! This race also served as the Canadian Mountain Running Championships to select the team to go to Worlds in Italy in September. We had just finished two weeks of tough training so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but this is the time of year to figure out how to get stronger and for me this was a perfect time to put into practice some mental toughness. We did two laps of 4.3km, the women took it out hard! We climbed higher then the World cup course at the Nordic centre and then came bombing down the ski trails to the bottom of the Nordic Centre and climbed the new Devonian Drop. I managed to tough it out for second place, but there was definetly no juice in the legs for a sprint finish and the girl who one had a gap of 45seconds, so all in all not too shabby, however I will say that running as a skier is not that fun! Any finesse and flow I had was replaced by muscling out the climbs and using sheer fitness for the flats and decents.

This week we have done two longer trail runs on two trails that I have never been on. We did a two hour below z1 run on the Highline trail. The first 6oom is a bit steep but then it flattens out into the most beautiful single track I have ever ran on! Talk about a fun trail and so easy on the legs. Today we did the who “orange loop” which is a mostly single track mountain bike loop at the Nordic Centre- they have done a ton of work on this trail since I last ran or rode on it and the lower section is super fun with some bridges, banked corners, steep decents and lots of roots!

I need to get a new camera so that I can post some photos of these wonderful mecca’s in my back yard!

If you getting bored of rollerskiing, put your running shoes on and head for some single track!

Brooke

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.