Back in November I spent the greater part of a morning (okay, really it was a day) harassing, encouraging and peer pressuring Bow Valley friends to sign up for the Squamish 50 weekend. With the 50km selling out in under an hour, most of us ended up in the 50 mile event (some by choice, some after exposure to my intense peer pressure as mentioned above). Come race weekend, our group had taken the opportunity generously offered by Gary Robbins (the Race Director in case you aren’t a running person and/or are living under a rock) to drop down in distance, and we had a good mix of 50 mile, 50km and 23km runners spread out across the weekend. A hefty crew developed from the Bow Valley that weren’t even running any of the events. Whether it was the mountain biking, race atmosphere or social scene that enticed people to travel from Alberta, across BC for the race weekend, people were easily convinced! We had all the ingredients to let the good times roll.
Equally stealthy and cheap, I had booked 2 hotel rooms in Squamish as soon as I signed up back in November and we crammed 8 of us into the two rooms, all either running or crewing the 50 miler. This resulted in what I can only describe as organized chaos as the contents of our drop bags and gear we would need for the day seemed to find their way to every corner of the room. I had already prepped my drop bags back in Banff, and just had to throw in a few last minute items, so I was relatively chill about this process. After Sinister 7 earlier this summer, 50 miles felt short (I realize I sound like a dick saying that, but its true).
We awoke to Tyler’s phone alarm at “4am” on race morning for us 50 miler’s. It felt like a dream come true when Dave announced it was in fact 3am, not 4am, like Tyler had actually intended to set his alarm for (Alberta/BC time zone fail), and I was thrilled to drift back asleep for another hour before getting up at the real 4am. We took turns flitting around the room getting dressed, microwaving/burning the Starbucks coffee we had bought the night before, while I acted as “The time Nazi” announcing how many minutes we had until IT WAS TIME TO GO every 5 minutes or so. We made it to the start line with time to spare, which I used to stand in the ginormous porta potty line and fan-girl when I saw Courtney Douwalter emerge from one of the porta potties. I made sure to text Dustin “Courtney Douwalter just pooped”.
The gun went off and it took me about 6 seconds to remember the bottleneck that ensued if I didn’t get my ass further ahead in the pack, so I darted a bit frantically ahead, trying to pass as many people as I could in the first few hundred metres until I felt I could run a comfortable but firm pace. Yes, its an ultra, go out slow, blah blah blah, but with the course starting with 11km of totally flat, non-technical terrain, I wanted to be able to hit 4:45-5:00 minute km’s at an easy effort, which I did. Check!
The first two hours were really fun! After the first aid station at 11km, we entered the Squamish jungle and enjoyed several kilometres of technical but gradual, rooty trail that in general, climbed up. I shared a few km’s with Adriana Wild and a few other runners I didn’t know, but chatted with nonetheless. I pushed a reasonable pace, no longer taking it decidedly easy but letting myself race. I felt strong as a climber(whatttttt!?) and I passed three women on this section (they would all later kick my butt) and found myself really enjoying going uphill. The first long downhill was a rocky, double track section. As I descended at what I thought was a good clip, I heard a dude just bombing it down behind me and moved over to let him pass, only to see that it was one of the ladies that I had recently passed, just FLYING. I was blown away (and scolding myself for having assumed it was a dude), I wanted this chick’s ankle mobility and couldn’t believe how quickly she moved (this was Adrienne Dunbar who go on to win the 50/50 event for the ladies).
A bunch of actual dudes passed me as the trail turned to more technical, steeper downhill, but as the trail flattened out to more runnable stuff I stayed on their heels and rolled into Alice Lake, around 20km in with 2 hours elapsed. This was good! 17 minutes ahead of last year’s time, and on track for what I had mapped out to allow me to possibly sneak in under 10 hours for the whole day.
The next few hours were relatively straightforward and not all that interesting, with a few events standing out.
- I somehow ignored the wrong way sign and “X” spray painted on the ground and went off course, but luckily a spectator pointed out my error and sent me back on to the trail after max 200m
- My HRM died which was annoying, but not really a huge problem except my Strava upload later would appear that my heart rate flatlined at about 10km race effort for the next 8 hours (lol)
- I made it to my first drop bag, 27km in, to discover I had somehow removed the Ziploc bag containing all of my fuel I had planned to get me from 27-53km. LOL,k. Aid station gels for me! (PS do not ever, EVER try Honey Stinger Banana flavor)
Approaching the half way point, I went on a hunt on the biggest climb of the course, Galactic Schiesse. Galactic Schiesse sounds scary to the typical flatlander, but for those of us living in the rockies and regularly “running” stuff like Lady Mac, Ha Ling, EEOR, even Sulphur, I think the climbs through the Squamish 50 course are pretty chill and relatively runnable (depending on how you’re feeling with ~40km already under your belt). I’ve been busting my butt this summer to become a better uphill runner and I decided to let er rip on this climb, and I ran a lot of it. I caught several people, including Adrienne-Downhill-Dunbar(mentioned earlier) near the top of the climb.
I told her I would see her shortly as I knew she would utterly destroy the descent that would follow (she did, and I never saw her again!) Of course, what goes up must come down, and I was dreading what I remembered to be a long, dusty, technical descent that brought back memories of many near-misses, wasp stings, and being passed by like 20 people last year. It must have been where I was in the pack this year, but other than Adrienne flying by, I saw no one else except a male runner I caught up near the bottom. And the descent didn’t feel all that bad while it was happening. But THEN…..
My day started to go in the pooper after this descent, when the terrain flattened out and I approached the next aid station around 48km in. To put it eloquently, my right ankle hurt like a BITCH. This particular pain was not unknown to me, as it had flared up two weeks earlier after I had “added bonus miles” to my training plan provided by my coach, and more than doubled the elevation I had put in from one week to the next. After a day or two of total rest and the magic of compression socks, the pain had gone away, but today, the bitch was back. I like to call the last 32km of the 2018 Squamish 50 miler “How to Ruin Your Own Day 101”.
With only 5km to the next aid station and drop bag at Quest (53km in), I trucked along. I had fallen off my 10 hour pace but knew that was still within reach if things turned around again. Even if they didn’t, I knew I would greatly improve on last year’s team as long as I kept moving. At first only descents hurt my wailing ankle, but soon anything flat or even uphill did as well. Sitting here now writing this, I’m right pissed for not being able to control my mindset and not let it bother me so much, but at the time, all I could do was obsess about HOW MUCH IT FUCKING HURT and I let it make me miserable. I don’t think it was even slowing me down much, as it hurt the same amount whether I was going slow or going fast, but I certainly let it ruin my day.
I hate to write this as I think other days/races I’ve been so successful at managing and dealing with issues, not freaking out, and staying positive, but Super Liz apparently took a vacation day. I rolled in and out of the aid station at Quest after a sock change, but left feeling a little empty as there was no crew there to slap some sense into me or tell me I looked great (even though I probably didn’t). This wasn’t exactly a surprise, but I think I underestimated the value of having someone out to support for even a shorter event like this one. I grabbed my wireless headphones to try and motivate myself with some tunes but (despite fully charging them the night before), they were dead. May have something to do with the fact that I had put them through the washing machine accidentally a few days prior….ANYWAYS.
I started feeling more and more sorry for myself and dug myself into a mental hole. I was the President of the Association of Cry Babies. I wasn’t having fun, and how I felt seemed more than the typical, inevitable thoughts of “fuck this shit” that come up in any ultra. I figured the last ~27km would take me around 4 hours with how I was feeling, and wrapping my head around dealing with my stupid ankle did not put me in a better mood. A few km’s after leaving Quest, the course takes you off the road and back onto some climbing switchbacks. This is where I saw Marta, which made me so happy to see someone I knew, but so embarrassed for someone I knew to see me in such a pathetic state. I was about to get more company, as I heard a familiar “Hey Buddy” from behind me, as Dustin appeared, the standard Dustin grin plastered across his face. HE was having fun. We shared maybe a km or two together which definitely lifted my spirits. The stick of topical numbing medical balm Dustin let me borrow to put on my ankle tendon may have also been a factor.
I took my time making my way up Angry Midget and distracting myself by how much I hated like, EVERYTHING (my ankle, the trail, the trees, the stupid maple syrup gel package that had melted the remnants in my pack and was now stuck to my back, AND GOT ALL OVER MY HANDS WHEN I BRACED MY LOWER BACK WHILE POWER HIKING) with some casual conversation with fellow runners, though there weren’t many. My mindset and my attitude was just so……ugly. And I don’t really know why. It wasn’t about what I thought my time would be (even if I wasn’t going to hit 10 hours I was still doing way better than last year) or where I was sitting in terms of placement (I didn’t know). I just…..didn’t like how uncomfortable I was and couldn’t find the joy and satisfaction that comes with being able to push through that.
BUT I wasn’t going to quit. So I tried to keep moving as quickly as I could. As I approached the last aid station which meant only 10.5km to go, I found myself catching up to a guy around my age from Ontario. As a last-ditch effort to motivate myself I yelled at him “WANNA GO FINISH in 10.5 hours?” He asked if I thought we still could and I said hell yes. (I think we had about 80 minutes left to pull that off, which I knew was doable if we pushed it the rest of the race). We passed through the aid station and onto the last section of the course, and stayed together to the top of the last climb (Mountain of Phlegm). It really helped to travel in pairs. When we took a hiking break and he started running, I ran too. When I decided we didn’t need to hike and started running behind him, he would break out into a run too. Near the top of the last climb, it was obvious he was able to move at a better pace than I could keep and he broke free and ended up finishing 5-10 minutes ahead of me. Once I endured the last of the descent and was spit out onto the final ~2km of flat, road to the finish, I told myself DON’T YOU DARE STOP RUNNING, as I knew taking any kind of walk/hike break at this point would only be because I was being mentally lazy, and there was no reason I couldn’t run the thing in. I popped my backup headphones in to my phone, but they tend to not work so well when water/sweat gets into the jack, and they fluctuated the volume from completely mute to BLARING loud as if the Ultra Gods were sitting there, spinning the volume dial up and down just to fuck with me. Okay, I get it, no music for me today.
I crossed the finish line SO HAPPY to be done and honestly in a lot of pain, and I let myself have a pretty good, embarrassing, ugly cry. I don’t really know why I needed to cry. I wasn’t disappointed in my performance, this wasn’t really an “omg I did something I thought I could never do” moment, I think I just needed to freak the fuck out. I didn’t have “the perfect” day, but I didn’t have a particularly bad day either. Maybe sometimes ultras are just about letting things out. I’m kind of bummed I didn’t have more fun out there, but I definitely let it out. *See the bottom of this blog post for all the amazing things that people other than me pulled off*
The race was actually a very small part of the weekend. The real fun was to come the next day, with many of our friends running the 50km or 23km. I woke up early and my first thought was how much I would enjoy a beer. But Liz, it’s not even 8am yet, how preposterous! So instead I got up to pee. By the time I got out of the bathroom, Dustin and Tyler had already each cracked a beer. It would be rude to let them drink alone. So I grabbed a beer, crawled back into bed leaned over, grabbed a slice of cold pizza and enjoyed the true breakfast of champions. We headed to Quest Aid Station around ~27km into the 50km race to see everyone come through and then camped out at the finish line. More beers were drank, and it was so fun to hang out and debrief on the day before. I was 95% enthused to not be running the 50km as part of the 50/50 event, but I actually felt so good (aka “not that bad”) that I kinda almost a little bit sorta wished I was doing it.
After Dustin and I went for a 25 minute dumb run which I’m pretty sure ended up with him almost pooping his pants and me actually throwing up (maybe don’t eat a giant burger and drink a double caesar immediately before a run), we headed to the Backcountry Brewery to rejoin the group and truly celebrate now that everyone was finished. Sat around a giant, long table with benches like a large dysfunctional family maybe 25 of us from the Banff/Canmore running community threw back pints and pizza, and exchanged stories of the weekend, already plotting which race might be a good option for “The Weekend of 2019”. I had many thoughts of “This, this is why I run” at that table. The race was cool and all, but the weekend as a whole and the people who made it fun were what knocked it out of the park.
We were kicked out of the bar when it closed at 10pm, and Tyler, Dustin and I continued on our shenanigans into the night, starting with a challenge from Dustin to sprint, barefoot, in the parking lot (I won). We ended up at the only other bar open in town, and after a few more strong IPAs made their way into my belly, and a failed food mission to Panago (it was closed), we ended up at McDonalds. I think I had decided that I was 19, not 29. I did not want to get out of our friends car (who was NOT drinking by the way, because drinking and driving is not cool), but from what I was told, the boys went for a quick jaunt in the McDonalds playplace and returned with two McDoubles for me. My legs would hurt when I woke up the next day, but my abs were in much worse shape from laughing so hard all weekend.
Put Squamish 50 on your list, sign up quick when registration opens, and make sure to bring friends.
But wait! There’s more……
The Squamish-Banff Ultra
Tyler and I got the opportunity to practice our ultrarunning mindset on the drive back to Banff Monday, as we were faced with what seemed like an insurmountable distance to cover in a day (~950km), many fueling and logistical challenges, and countless highs and lows.
Like many ultras, the “race” home started with a massive bottleneck as we had to traverse Vancouver and got stuck in traffic heading east from the city (for real how do people deal with this every day!?). Once we were free from the lead pack, fueling became a huge priority as we were massively hungover from the night before, and still ravenous from Saturday’s actual race. We loaded up with two bags of chips, candy, caffeine and electrolytes (read: Gatorade) at several aid (read: Gas) stations which allowed us to endure multiple bonks through the trip. I tried a breakfast sandwich from Starbucks, which I ate half of before discarding it out of disgust and literally throwing it over my shoulder into the back seat of my car. (I rediscovered it about a week later).
As the highway opened up to multiple lanes, we were cruising the downhills and flats in my little blue Dodge Calibre. The real trouble came when we approached the uphills. Slowly but surely, the effort we were putting out was resulting in less and less power up each hill as we slogged up the Coquihalla. WTF!? Fueling had been on point, but our pace was slowing and we were plodding along at an embarrassing pace of 45 seconds per km (my goal pace was 30 seconds per km, even on this hilly course). Something felt off, and in Merrit we pulled off course, and thank goodness we did, because when I tried to get going again at a stop sign, I could barely move forward and we literally limped it into the nearest mechanics shop, feeling desperate and thinking this was the end of our race, erm, drive.
The crew went to work right away and told me that the transmission had overheated. Conditions were hot and dry, I should have taken it easier on the uphills, maybe taken some more breaks. But dropping now was not an option, we still had several hundred km to go and my bed in Banff awaited me. We would have never made it back out there without the crew at the mechanics shop, they drained and replaced all of our tranny fluids and just a short 4.5 hours later, we were back on course. Of course we had to let go of our goal of 9 hours 30 minutes, the goal was just to finish. Though Tyler neglected his pacing duties with a brief nap, eventually we reached the final stretch into Banff and before I knew it, I was dropping Tyler off. I reached home and crawled into bed stinky, exhausted, but with a big smile on my face.
I write this from Victoria, BC, three weeks after the Squamish 50 weekend. In a few hours I’ll be heading out to start the Finlayson Arm 100km. Tyler is running too.
In case you’re wondering, this time, we took a fucking airplane.
SQUAMISH 50 HIGHLIGHTS:
Karl won the 50 mile event and came less than 10 minutes from the course record. Despite our best efforts to get him NOT TO, he bought all of our pizza that night and physically body checked me away from the Panago counter when I tried to stop him
Simon toughed out a pretty crazy 50 mile run and was out there for 16 hours, which I think is seriously hardcore
Erin and Liza tied 2nd place for the 23km run
Alex was a ray of sunshine as per usual, despite having had her first 50 mile event (Fat Dog) cancelled the weekend before. Watch out for when she actually does get to run her first ultra, this chick is FASSSSST.
Tyler got to run for ~40km with Courtney Douwalter which is seriously cool, especially because we listened to a podcast with her and Joe Rogan on the drive out. He read us an insta message she sent him the next day in our hotel room and we all kinda hate him now
Joel landed a top 10 spot in the 50 mile mens field, I think this was his first 50 miler? Woot!
Dustin finished his first 50 miler! Dave gave it a solid go and pulled out for medical reasons, I’m looking forward to seeing his redemption run. At least he showed up to the start line with a cool Eric Senseman mustache
Svenja finished 4th lady overall, Jana Jurackova in 6th and I snagged the 10th place finish in the 50 miler. Bow Valley women made a good showing in the top 10!!!
Kendra smashed her goal of sub 3 hours for the 23km. Olivia a speedy 50km! Watch out for this one.
Tom, Heather and Gavin all ran a great 50km race and were all pretty close together. Heather was so focused that despite looking directly at us, and I’m pretty sure actually talking to us when we saw her at Quest, has no recollection that we were there. Evidence below.
A lot of the women that podium’d in the 50km and 23km appeared to have babies like, less than a year old. THAT is seriously impressive
K, the end for real.
This one time I went running 