Day 91 August 5, 2011 Dorian to Thunder Bay 71km

One of the hardest days of running so far on this trip

I felt exhausted throughout the entire day today. It was a struggle from around 5km this morning. I had to take a number of breaks just to make it through the day and my pace was about as slow as it’s ever been. There weren’t many hills, it wasn’t that hot, just a little humid, and there wasn’t a huge headwind, but I was completely whipped.

I wanted to stop after 15km. I really wanted to stop after 30km. I had to play some serious mind games with myself to keep going but I was running along the Terry Fox Courage Highway and I wasn’t going to stop early, not today.

I ran as far as the highway would allow, but 11km before the monument the highway became restricted and didn’t allow pedestrians or cyclists so I had to turn onto Lakeshore Drive and continue along there. It was a nice road, along the bay, but I didn’t see much of it, as I was so tired even my hat felt heavy on my head.

At one point I looked down and noticed that the distance on my watch wasn’t turning over. I hadn’t started it up again since the last time I stopped to get a drink of water. This happens not infrequently and I usually just get a little angry with myself, start it up again, and keep running. Today though I was too tired to run the extra distance it would take to reach 70km according to my watch knowing that I had run a portion of the way that had not been counted. I got into the MCC and Mike drove me back to the spot I last had a water break. I turned my watch on and we drove back to where I had noticed my watch wasn’t on. It was only 1.4km but the way I was struggling 1.4km felt like 10 and while I was determined to hit 70 I was not going to do any extra!

I also somehow managed to miss the small plaque that indicates the actual spot that Terry stopped at. We were told it was small but both Mike and I had been looking out for it so I was disappointed that we missed it.

I finally finished at 71km in a small residential area of Thunder Bay, over 12 hours after I had started this morning. I was very hungry and incredibly tired. We found the closest place to eat; a Subway restaurant and I quickly ate 2 footlongs.

It was not hard to fall asleep.

Day 90 August 4, 2011 Nipigon to Dorian 60km

Terry Fox Courage Highway

I started off on that nice uphill I finished at the bottom of yesterday and it wasn’t long before I was running through Nipigon. It started getting really hot and humid early, and I was wringing out my shirt every 2 or 3km.

About 10km before lunch I entered the Terry Fox Courage Highway, which lasts for the next 100km and will take me to Thunder Bay. AWESOME!!! I’m really looking forward to getting to Thunder Bay and seeing his monument.

The actual road itself isn’t the most runner friendly though. There is almost no shoulder and it’s really busy. But every once in a while there are signs showing a picture of Terry Fox, which makes it worth it.

800 metres before lunch I couldn’t run anymore because of a huge blister on my left foot that was under a big callous, so there was no way for me to get at it. I folded up a large pad of 2^nd skin and placed it across the ball of my foot along my toes. It was uncomfortable for the rest of my toes but it felt so much better on my blister that I didn’t care and I managed to make it the remaining 800m to lunch at 45km.

I continued into a nasty headwind after lunch for 15k to make it to 60km. I had wanted to get to 70 so I was going to come in and have dinner and then continue on after dinner for another 10km but once I got into the air conditioned MCC and started doing the calculations to Winnipeg I discovered that if I average 68km from this day forward, I will arrive in Winnipeg on Thursday the 18^th of August, which is still ahead of schedule. So I didn’t go for the rest of the run.

During dinner two cyclists came into the gas station parking lot we are in and we went out to chat with them. It turned out to be people that I had met in PEI, Mary and Brad. They had done a much larger route through NFLD, Labrador, Quebec etc and were now on their way to Banff before they head North to Alaska. They told us about this website called www.warmshowers.org where people sign up and offer their place to cyclists to come by and have a warm shower. It sounds pretty cool and apparently there are people that have signed up in small towns all across Canada, so definitely something we’ll have to check out. We shared stories about people we had met and things we had seen and then compared tan lines and Brad was clearly the winner as you can see below.

As an aside, it was 10 years ago today that 28 friends and I completed our cross country bicycle ride across the U.S. from New Haven, CT to Seattle WA for Habitat for Humanity. It brought back a lot of memories.

Tomorrow I should make it to Thunder Bay

Day 89 August 3, 2011 Terrace Bay to Nipigon 71km

I set 6 alarms on my phone last night. We slept through them all.

As a result it was an hour later than usual when I started running, but I felt good during the morning. I didn’t feel as good a few hours later when the hills started taking their toll on me. By the time I made it to lunch I was exhausted.

The scenery is beautiful which really helps keep my mind off how tired I am. I started breaking the distance up into 2.5km segments so that I could tell myself that I only had 2.5km left. Then I would stop and get a drink of water from Mike and start again and tell myself I only had 2.5km left. It worked surprisingly well and I did it 7 times for the remaining 17km to finish at 71km. I’m going to start doing this more often.

I finished at a scenic pullout about 20km outside of Nipigon right at the bottom of a nice big hill that I’ll get to start on first thing tomorrow morning. We drove the short distance into town for gas and a swim. While in town we saw two softball teams playing. I wonder how hard it is to form a softball league when your town population is 1,800 people.

I’m getting pretty close to Thunder Bay and I think I’ll be running on the Terry Fox Courage Highway tomorrow.

Day 88 August 2, 2011 Marathon to Terrace Bay 62km

Searching for pizza

I felt pretty tired after back-to-back 71km days and was slow getting going this morning. I was slow getting ready to run and I was slow running. The hills in this area are relentless as well. Almost nothing is flat; it’s simply one pass after another. I climb up to the top of a pass and as soon as I get to the top I see the sign telling trucks to gear down and I’m descending. It’s really frustrating. When I get to the top of these passes though it’s beautiful at the top, which almost makes it worth it. I can also see for miles from up there and I can see that there is no end in sight to the hills so I’ll just have to deal with it until I hit the prairies where I’m sure I’ll be craving the hills and lakeside views.

It was a muggy cloudy day and had been threatening to rain since dawn. Mother Nature made good on her threats not long before lunch when it started lashing rain. I hid in the MCC to see if I could ride out the worst of it, and after about 15mins it slowed dramatically. It was just a trick though as a couple of kms after starting up again the rain returned in full force and I resigned myself to running in the rain.

I’ve always loved running in the rain, and usually it’s one of my favourite running conditions, especially when there are puddles, but those runs don’t often last very long. These days, it just means that I’m running in wet shoes for hours on end and it does little for the blisters on my feet.

After the rain stopped the fog rolled in and made climbing the hills even more frustrating because I couldn’t see how far I was from the top. I ended up finishing between Terrace Bay and Schreiber.

Mike and I toured around Terrace Bay, which didn’t take long. Mike went to the top of a lighthouse that was nowhere near the lake, instead in the middle of “town”. It was quite tall and a number of flights of stairs to the top, so I stayed at the bottom.

We spent the night in a snowplow pullout just east of Terrace Bay. As we were trying to go to sleep there was a knock on the door. I went to see who it was and saw a giant man, at least 6 foot 6, in a black tank top, short black shorts, and black work boots. He smiled and I noticed he was missing a couple of teeth. He had a semi trailer with two trailers and had parked next to us in the pullout and wanted to give me some of the blueberries that he had picked in the bushes nearby. He told me that he had seen our RV and that “blueberries are the best things for the prostate”.

The rest of the night was uneventful.

Day 87 August 1, 2011 White Lake to Marathon 71km - Halfway Point

I’m halfway!!

I spent the entire morning wearing the GoPro on my head, from before my alarm went off at 4:30am until I started running. Mike is planning on doing a short video from the point of view of my forehead. We’ll see how it turns out.

It was a cool morning and I had to wear gloves for the first time since Nova Scotia, though it quickly warmed up. Early in the morning I passed a large sculpture with the town name Manitouwadge. It had a waterfall, rock and a ski-doo and ATV. So of course we needed to climb it.

Mike spent much of the morning trying to take artistic photos of the sunrise relying only on his iPhone.

The run was fairly uneventful save for a number of cyclists going the opposite direction and the reappearance of a lot of very steep hills. At 67km I officially reached the calculated halfway point of the run at 3,300km. It was fairly anticlimactic as I was exhausted and still had 3km of hill road left.

But we celebrated by driving back to Marathon and taking a swim in Lake Superior. It really is huge and the view from the beach reminded me a lot of the view from the North Shore in Vancouver looking out towards Lighthouse Park and Vancouver Island.

We tried to find a place to eat in town, and even got a number of recommendations from John and his two kids, a local from Marathon. Unfortunately though everything was closed thanks to it being a long weekend. So we had tortellini in the MCC and celebrated with root beer!

Tomorrow I should make it to Terrace Bay

Day 86 July 31, 2011 Hammer Lake to White Lake 71km

Where is this kid going?

The day began at 4am as Mike and I slowly, and somewhat reluctantly awoke and prepared for the days adventure. It was a cool summer morning, but the slowly rising sun gave a hint of the heat that would begin by midday. (Random HBC reference!)

I felt pretty good this morning although my right hamstring was a little tight and I had to stop a number of times over the course of the morning to stretch it out. The road continued alongside the many lakes that make up this region and though promised hills by a number of people, I have yet to encounter them.

Lunch came at 45km, Mike’s sandwich special. I’ve started listening to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged but I’m finding it hard to get in to. So I’m interrupting it occasionally with the CBC program The Debaters, which is sometimes really funny.

I continued on with a goal of reaching 70km. At about 65km I noticed a kid walking along the road up ahead. We are in the middle of nowhere and I hadn’t seen anything for quite a while. I ran passed him and he looked to be about 15 or 16 years old and it seemed like he was trying to hitch hike. Mike stopped to talk with him as I continued on (I wasn’t stopping at 65km for fear of not getting started again). Turns out he’s from Mobler (sp?) and was trying to hitch hike to Marathon to see a friend of his. He had already been walking for 3 hours and no one had picked him up yet. Mike asked if he had done this before, and he said that he had, but that it never took him this long to get picked up. He doesn’t have a car and there’s no transit along this road so I guess this is his only option. I’m not sure if he has a point where he’ll turn around, but I would have thought he’d already reached it. Mike gave him a bottle of water and he kept walking. He seemed like a nice kid and was a little wary of Mike. I wonder if he made it.

We currently find ourselved at White Lake Provincial Park.  Mike and I went down for a swim in the lake and had been in the water for less than 3 mins when we spotted multiple large leeches. Our swim did not last long. It’s too bad because it was a really nice beach and the water temperature was perfect!

I am currently 67km away from the halfway point of the run, so if I can make it to 70km again I’ll reach halfway at the end of tomorrow!

Day 85 July 30, 2011 Day off in Wawa

WawaWow

We slept in until 10am this morning and it was everything I thought it would be.  We had breakfast at probably the only place in Wawa you could have breakfast, the Embassy Restaurant. I think I’m getting used to the heat because now any time I go into a place with air conditioning I freeze.

The rest of the day was spent doing laundry and stocking the MCC for the long run to Thunder Bay, anticipating that there will be nothing in between although in reality Marathon and Terrace Bay will probably have places to restock. At the grocery store our shopping cart was towering, and for some reason we weren’t allowed to take the shopping cart out of the store. So instead two guys came over with metal buggies of sorts and carried our haul out to the parking lot for us.

We finally found the cooler we were looking for at Canadian Tire and now hopefully we’ll be able to keep the water and Gatorade colder longer.

I’m currently missing what is easily my favourite weekend of the year back at Lake of the Woods. All of my family is gathered together in Kenora, and this morning there was a 3km swim that we do every year followed by a dance this evening. Then tomorrow there is a huge picnic with about 60 people and a huge volleyball game. So after getting back to the hotel we had a quick skype with those at the cabin. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t there for the August long weekend and I felt a bit homesick. The good news is I’ll be there in just over a week and a half!

The plan was to get to bed early but seeing as we haven’t had access to Internet in a number of days that plan didn’t really work out as we spent the rest of the night updating Facebook, Twitter and my blog.

C’est tout