Day 92 August 6, 2011 Thunder Bay to Raith 66km

Turns out we didn’t actually miss the small plaque marking Terry’s end point, it was along the restricted portion of the highway so I didn’t run by it like I thought yesterday.

I felt a lot better this morning than I had yesterday, but I was still exhausted after this week of increased mileage. I started off by almost immediately turning north and running out of Thunder Bay.

It was hot and humid again, the theme of Ontario, and I was often wringing my shirt out. There were a number of construction sites that I had to run through today. At one of them, there was a traffic light one our side of a bridge that had been reduced to one lane. As I approached there was a semi sitting at the traffic light whose light was red. For some reason, after already having stopped at the light the driver decided that he should just go for it, and so he did. Predictably, he didn’t make it. He made it across the bridge but as he tried to continue up the hill, oncoming traffic, led by another semi ,came down toward him. The driver stopped and slowly started reversing and it looked like he might actually try and reverse back the entire distance he had covered. After about 100m or so though he changed tactics and reversed off into the closed lane demolishing about four large pylons. It was bizarre to watch.

I’ve been listening to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the past few days of running. It was slow to get in to at first but I have been told by two separate people that “it will change your life” so I persisted. I am now about 18 hours into it (out of 61 hours) and it’s finally starting to get good. It has yet to change my life though, perhaps that happens around hour 40.

I got a number of new blisters today, running along the gravel and uneven asphalt construction and it feels like my shoes are running thin, I can feel almost every pebble I step on. I’m already running on my 4^th and 5^th pair of shoes! I think I get the 6^th and 7^th pairs in Winnipeg though so they should last me until then.

I made it 66km, just before Raith, before deciding to stop. My iPhone changed time, from 5pm to 4pm, although Mike’s did not. We must be nearing the change to Central Time.

We spent the evening with Ryan Hunter, whom Mike and I had worked with at Camp Elphinstone, along with his fiancée Kathleen, mum Marg, and a number of their friends. We had a delicious home cooked meal, complete with homemade pies for dessert! After dinner we alternated between sitting in their sauna (which reached 90 degrees CELSIUS!) and swimming in the lake. It was awesome.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped by the Terry Fox monument and spent some time walking around it and reading everything. It was dark out but the monument was lit up nicely and it looks like it has a nice view of Thunder Bay.

Tomorrow we’ll see it in the light of day