Day 8, May 14 – Middle of No Where to 20km outside of Antigonish NS – 58.82km
14 May
The day started early at Tim Horton’s. I’m starting to get the hang of how much to eat. Yesterday I don’t think I ate/drank enough so today I got a breakfast sandwich and two bagels with cream cheese and drank a litre of Gatorade before starting my run. The run started where yesterday’s had ended, in the middle of nowhere. My feet were on fire for the start of the first 20km thanks to my increasing inventory of blisters but eventually became desensitized. I got off the dirt roads and back onto pavement. Mike and I were commenting on how we each really needed to find a washroom, and for me it was becoming difficult to run. Honestly, when I felt that I couldn’t run anymore and wanted to jump in the car to drive to a gas station, I turned a corner and there was a random outhouse on the side of the road. Not near a construction site, not near someone’s house, just on the side of the road. Fully stocked complete with hand sanitizer. Amazing! Mike nicknamed it the Miracle Hut. I felt pretty good after the first 20km until I took my shoes and socks off and looked at my blisters. They were forming on top of each other now and the one on the inside side of my left foot below my big toe was starting to look a little red.
After eating two sandwiches and trying to sleep in the trunk I started off on the second 20km. My feet were again on fire for the first couple of kilometres until I adjusted to the pain. Soon I was crossing out of Cape Breton on the Canso Causeway, a land bridge with no shoulder requiring me to run on the train tracks. Besides being slow, this played havoc on my blisters. Thankfully it was only about one km long. The rest of the leg was up and down but fairly straight and I was soon cresting the top a hill to finish 40km.
Mike and I then drove into Antigonish for a quick stop at the local pharmacy to try and find something to deal with my blisters. After chatting with the pharmacist who suggested I should stop running, we left with tape, blister pads, and polysporin. There wasn’t much time to get back and stay on time so we had a quick 2nd lunch and I worked on bandaging up my feet. I clearly didn’t do a good enough job because as I started on the 3rd 20km I could barely walk and had to skip for the first little bit as my feet got used to the pressure. They eventually did, but it required me to adjust my running style, which eventually caused my legs to get really sore. I started playing games in my mind to convince myself to keep running. I tried thinking about anything other than the pain from my blisters, and it worked for a while but my pace was starting to slow to less than a walk. I was getting all of the pounding from running but none of the speed and found that walking was not only faster, but also less painful. I decided to try and walk for 800 metres but only lasted about 100 and had to stop at 58.82km. So close!
We had dinner at Boston Pizza in Antigonish. The waitress was flirting heavily with one of us, we just couldn’t figure out with whom. Probably Mike because I wasn’t making much conversation, just sitting there with my throbbing feet watching sumo wrestling on the bar TVs. Back at the hotel now having soaked my feet in the tub, and washed my running gear in the sink, I hope my feet are better tomorrow morning otherwise I’m not sure how I’m going to run.
