Day 90 August 4, 2011 Nipigon to Dorian 60km
8 Aug
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 2nd 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 18th 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
