Canmore Weekend

The weekend of June 20th the family decided to go down to Canmore and spend the weekend in the mountains. Everyone else met up in Calgary on Friday morning at the zoo, but because of Kate's work, Kate and I left Edmonton Friday night. This trip had two purposes; first was the relaxing weekend with family and second Kate and I were running the 100 mile Kananaskis Rely with Kate's firm. More on that later. We ended up pulling into the condo in Canmore pretty late because although we got away from Edmonton in good time we stopped in Calgary to have diner with the 10 person relay team.




The place where we stayed was really nice and had a great view.



A couple of months ago Kate started talking about this run up in the mountains that her firm was going to put a team into. At first she sort of made it sound like I might be invited to run with their team, but only if they couldn't fill it internally first. She kept sending me the web page to look at to see which leg of the race I would want to do, but I felt like I was in no position to pick anything and would be happy with whatever leg they wanted to give me (if any at all). As the race came closer Kate started to sound more confident that I would be running and that I should really pick a leg. This time I took her advice (sort of) and I tried to look the website, but none of the links on the page showed up, so I put it off.

You get sort of get a sense of the hills from these. I like the second one because if you look close you can see a 7% grade sign for traffic going the other way. I'll never look at those signs the same way again.


After some time Kate told me that all of the legs were full except for one, so I was stuck with it. Turns out that no one else wanted this one because it was 18 Km of hills, and no not the nice gentle inclines or better yet declines, this was ascending to the top of a mountain pass with all but 3-4 Km going up. Of course no one wanted it. Well, anyways that's the leg I ran and considering the hills, the altitude, and the heat I felt pretty good afterward. (The leg after mine has 9Km down hill). Each team was responsible for water and support of their own runners so while we weren't running we would stop on the side of the road and wait for our runner to go by.

Kate trying to "mist" me with water as I run by. Turns out it was more of a full stream that hit me in the face.


Kate ran later in the day and her run was pretty challenging too. I wasn't at the start of her leg because I was dropping people off at their start points, but did catch up to her. I think her ran 16 Km and it was really hot. Her biggest problem was that she drank too much ahead of time and was feeling the effects of that a couple of Km in and of course there are no bathrooms on the side of a highway so she had to go in the "not so concealing" bushes (at least it wasn't between two cars at a car dealership in the winter. You know who I'm talking about). She finished and said she felt pretty crappy but that wore off after a few minutes and she was already planning her next race.

If you couldn't tell from the pictures it was a beautiful race.


"The Nolans"
In case you forgot this post started off about the weekend with family in the mountains, and that's what the rest of the weekend was. We ended up doing a couple of little hikes around the town and swam in the pool at the condo, we even ended up playing board games which is a rare thing we do.