Day 21 May 27, 2011 Coal Branch to Rogersville 60km
27 May
5:30am alarm goes off…….6:30am get out of bed
So much for my early start. I’m having trouble getting out of bed. It’s making my days very long.
I started running around 8am and felt pretty good. The road was fairly flat and the weather was good, at least in the morning. My left hamstring and right shin started bothering me somewhere along my first run. Nothing bad, but I could feel it. Our first break was again in the middle of nowhere, off to the side on a dirt road that looked like it was rarely used but that had a surprising amount of traffic on it. A familiar unwanted discovery was that the number of bugs had exploded and any time I stopped, or if I ran too slowly, they would swarm me. Not my idea of a good time. The front of our bus was littered with squashed flies!
By the time I took to the road for my second run fog had rolled in and by about halfway it was raining. The good news about rain… no bugs! My shin got a bit better and my hamstring got a bit worse. The time flew by though as I’ve started listening to Ricky Gervais podcasts while I run.
Towards the end of the second run I was stopped on the side of the road when a car pulled over to talk to me. Kathryn Roberts from Coal Branch had driven past and turned back around to make a donation!
The third run was hard to get motivated for. I was tired, my legs hurt and it was raining. About halfway in I entered Rogersville. While running through I was stopped by teenager Cedric Leblanc who wanted to know why I was running and if he could make a donation. I used this as an excuse to stop and stretch a bit while Mike took a video of a fox running along the road.
Thanks to the late start this morning, I didn’t finish running until around 8:45pm. Too late; I really need to start getting up earlier. We drove North to Miramichi, mainly because Google showed that it had a McDonalds and therefore WiFi. I thought it was going to be a little bigger than Rogersville, but I was wrong. It was way bigger. It looked at least as big as Moncton, with a huge bridge across the Gulf of St Lawrence.
We got more blister supplies, parked briefly in McDonalds to use their Internet, and then had a quick dinner and went to sleep in the Sobeys parking lot at 11:30pm.
Way too late to go to sleep, especially if I hope to get up earlier tomorrow.
