Day 141 September 24, 2011 Roger’s Pass to Revelstoke 51km

Downhill hurts

It was cold at the top of Roger’s Pass this morning, but not nearly as cold as those mornings back in Banff. Mike and I started running and it quickly became apparent that my quads were going to be harassing me most of the day, my left one especially. It was really awkward running down the steep western side of the pass not being able to favour one leg over the other as they both hurt. My progress was slow and anything but steady and I quickly found myself losing time.

By the time I got to the bottom of the steepest part it was 10km later and my quads were really sore. I took a quick break but the pain was the same when I started up again so I essentially limped through the rest of the day. I’m scheduled to have a day off tomorrow but I decided that it might be better if I had a shorter day today and then run a bit tomorrow, giving my legs some time to recover yet still getting ahead of schedule.

Dave has been slowly increasing his mileage each day he’s been out here, and he’s gotten a number of people to agree to sponsor him per km if he can do a minimum of 30km. When he started he had trouble running 3km, today he ran 10km total and I think he totaled around 39km and raised some money for Step Into Action at the same time.

We drove the 15km from my finish point into Revelstoke to the fire hall and were met by Gary, one of the firefighters. Gary was awesome and gave us warm showers, fresh water and even got one of his own attachments from home to help us plug into their electricity after ours started smoking (no better place than at a fire station).

We had dinner at the Village Idiot with two of Dave’s friends, Michelle and Aaron. After telling Aaron my story about my busted iPod he immediately ran to his car and got me his iPod to use for the rest of my run. Amazing! Not only that but Michelle made a generous donation to SIA. The icing on the cake was the dinner I ordered, a huge burger called The Kitchen Sink, which included in addition to the usual fillings a beef patty, cheese, bacon, chicken breast, corn, and a fried egg, with a side of perogies. I’m enjoying being able to eat like this while I can because in 10 days I’m going to have to cut my intake by about half, actually probably more.

Tomorrow I’m only running 30km so we get to sleep in!