Day 88 August 2, 2011 Marathon to Terrace Bay 62km

Searching for pizza

I felt pretty tired after back-to-back 71km days and was slow getting going this morning. I was slow getting ready to run and I was slow running. The hills in this area are relentless as well. Almost nothing is flat; it’s simply one pass after another. I climb up to the top of a pass and as soon as I get to the top I see the sign telling trucks to gear down and I’m descending. It’s really frustrating. When I get to the top of these passes though it’s beautiful at the top, which almost makes it worth it. I can also see for miles from up there and I can see that there is no end in sight to the hills so I’ll just have to deal with it until I hit the prairies where I’m sure I’ll be craving the hills and lakeside views.

It was a muggy cloudy day and had been threatening to rain since dawn. Mother Nature made good on her threats not long before lunch when it started lashing rain. I hid in the MCC to see if I could ride out the worst of it, and after about 15mins it slowed dramatically. It was just a trick though as a couple of kms after starting up again the rain returned in full force and I resigned myself to running in the rain.

I’ve always loved running in the rain, and usually it’s one of my favourite running conditions, especially when there are puddles, but those runs don’t often last very long. These days, it just means that I’m running in wet shoes for hours on end and it does little for the blisters on my feet.

After the rain stopped the fog rolled in and made climbing the hills even more frustrating because I couldn’t see how far I was from the top. I ended up finishing between Terrace Bay and Schreiber.

Mike and I toured around Terrace Bay, which didn’t take long. Mike went to the top of a lighthouse that was nowhere near the lake, instead in the middle of “town”. It was quite tall and a number of flights of stairs to the top, so I stayed at the bottom.

We spent the night in a snowplow pullout just east of Terrace Bay. As we were trying to go to sleep there was a knock on the door. I went to see who it was and saw a giant man, at least 6 foot 6, in a black tank top, short black shorts, and black work boots. He smiled and I noticed he was missing a couple of teeth. He had a semi trailer with two trailers and had parked next to us in the pullout and wanted to give me some of the blueberries that he had picked in the bushes nearby. He told me that he had seen our RV and that “blueberries are the best things for the prostate”.

The rest of the night was uneventful.