An adventure

I can't wait until tomorrow when my quads really tell me what they think of last night's workout.

It started innocently enough - Running Room's annual 20-minute challenge. How gruelling could it be? We show up at the Westview store in North Vancouver, get our free running hats, to the 20-minute run, and then continue on a bit longer. Right.

We showed up - about 12-15 Burnaby runners. We got our hats (great hats - thanks, Running Room!) We set off on the run, north on Westview, and then left. Only we soon peeled off onto a trail, somewhere around Bewicke...

I'm not sure entirely where we went, but it involved mostly going uphill along Mosquito Creek (at least, I think someone said that's what it was), and then segued into a zig-zag clamber up a ski-hill steep slope. (I discovered a mild fear of heights I hadn't known existed, and was convinced at one point that I was going to fall off what passed for the trail and tumble down the hill. This was while I was not-quite hauling myself up by tree roots and anything else I could find to cling to.) Then we ended up on the Skyline Trail, which led to the Grouse Grind parking lot. (Mercifully, nobody suggested throwing in the Grind to top things off.) On the way back, we branched off on a downhill trail - that was a good move, because the Skyline trail would have been an uphill on the return. This led us onto a road, and from there back onto our original trail. And then a screaming run down the hill - about 2k. (Hence the whining quads.)

What a blast! Total time from the start at Running Room: 1h.28mins. Distance logged by my GPS: 9.3 km, but I lost the signal a fair amount, so who knows how much distance we actually covered - we decided to round it up to 10 km.

Definitely earned those nice yellow hats...