Day 130 September 13, 2011 Medicine Hatt to Suffield 62km
20 Sep
Playing with Tanks
The morning began with a radio interview. I was exhausted, a fact that the host commented about on air. We noticed last night that we had a hole in one of the four rear tires. When we arrived at the shop we discovered that we actually had two holes in the inside tire and one hole in the outside tire, all on the right side. It’s amazing we didn’t have a blowout while on the highway.
Thanks to the interview and tire patching we didn’t start running until just before 9:30am. Today was a nice day for running, maybe a little cold, but flat and no headwind. At some point during the morning an RCMP officer in a police pickup pulled us over and asked if we needed help. After talking with us he decided to escort us into town. Then he called his friends in town and got another squad car to meet us and they took us through town blocking traffic lights the whole way. Russ ran with me for most of the morning and ended up doing about 24km during the day.
They split up once outside the city but spelled each other off and actually took us for 45km today, our longest escort by far. The officer in the truck drove from where we parked at lunch to where my finishing point was going to be just to track it. He volunteered for it and so I didn’t tell him that I had a pretty good idea based on the GPS on my phone. His was more accurate though.
With about 10km left to run a friend of mine, Matt Green Armytage, showed up and ran with me. Matt is a captain in the British military and is over here for 6 weeks on a training exercise. After running he took us up to his military base and let us climb all over his Warriors, tanks and other cool military vehicles.
We joined Matt for dinner in the officer’s mess and met a number of other officers. The food was great and I managed to get garlic bread, pasta with beef stew, tacos, onion rings, potatoes, kool aid and yogurt. From there he took us to the officers bar and we had a couple of pints. Freaking awesome!
We couldn’t stay overnight on the base so we had to drive back down to the highway and stayed in a gas station parking lot.
Tomorrow we probably won’t get to play with tanks.
