Racing!

It's been a great couple of weeks for racing. Last weekend, I stopped at the 5 Peaks race in Calgary for a 5.4 km trail race and then headed to Red Deer to run Woody's RV Marathon. We've still got tons of snow around Banff and so I signed up for this road marathon in order to get some good mileage and speedwork in and ended up really enjoying the race! I've never been to Red Deer before so it was a good way of seeing this small Albertan city and the marathon itself is very well organized and supported. Kudos to the organizers and volunteers for making everyone so welcome. My goal time was 4 hours and I ended up crossing the finishing line at exactly 4 hours. I was pretty happy with this as I wasn't pushing terribly hard so now know that I could finish a marathon under 4 hours if I needed to.

And this weekend was another long road trip to race the Blackfoot Ultra. This race offers various distances and I'd signed up for the 80 km hoping that I would be able to recover quickly and so far feel pretty good. I was hoping to finish in 9 hours and crossed the line in 9.09 so was again pretty happy with that. My last lap was definitely a lot slower than the others but it was fine for a training race. And the added bonus was that it was hot, dry and snowless!

Next up is Western States at the end of June. Blimey! What have I gotten myself into?!!!