After attending the Rememberance Day Ceremony Downtown today I zipped over to Gatineau Park to take advantage of the mid-week day off and hit the trails. There were a lot more people than I expected on the trail today.
My goal this afternoon was to do the 10.5 km Wolf Loop Trail in 72 minutes. To some people 72 minutes may sound like a lot of time to do 10.5 kms but in my defence the park map claims Wolf Loop takes 4.25 hours (that means it should take an active person about 3 hours to walk).
Why 72 minutes you ask? My Voyage into Trance (Paul Oakenfold) mp3 is 72 minutes of the best running music I`v ever heard. Trance music is the shiznit for running as far as I`m concerned. I guess the trance beat is my ideal running cadence.
My goal looked ambitious after the first kilometre which was mostly ankle deep mud - a trend that continued on the flats for the whole trail. Mud and wet rocks with cold, wet, heavy, feet is not condusive to fast times - just good times! In the end I managed to finish in 68 minutes 34 seconds.
I very happy with my time especially considering the trail conditions. I might not be so happy when I wake up sore and stiff tomorrow...
2 comments:
I went geocaching with a friend the day before Remembrance day - did most of that 12km loop in Long Lake Park only in twice the time and was twice as tired at the end....
Funny story about geocaching - last Saturday it was kinda overcast / misty so I thought I'd go for a "walk in the woods" - went online and picked out a geocache that was basically by itself apparently an hour's hike in .... so I wrote down the coordinates, got ready and headed out to the parking spot .... marked the car location in the GPS and punched in my coordinates, first for a bridge identified to turn at, then for the "cache" .... headed out along an ATV trail / old logging road and found the bridge, then went after the next set of coordinates ..... after about 45 minutes of bushwacking through dense forest and thinking "god bless that 9 year old if she did this hike" since the person who placed the cache had said in the description that his 9 year old daughter had done the hike, I finally came out... at my car!! hahaha
Lesson #1 - double check your coordinates cuz maybe you put in the parking lot instead of the cache site...
Lesson #2 - when you know you should be heading North and you look at the GPS and its says you are going South - PAY ATTENTION! don't blindly follow the arrow. hahaha
Lesson #3 - a misty day will turn into a raining, soaking wet day if you are walking in the woods!
I'm sure there are more lessons in there somewhere but those are the highlights. Now I'll have to make a second trip to find that geocache because I never had the right coordinates with me. By the look of today I might have to do it on snowshoes!
If you like trail running in Gatineau Park, you might want to consider trying the group trail runs Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings posted at the trirudy website. The group has moved to xc skiing for the winter though.
The fastest people (not me) run the loop in a time approaching 40 minutes. See activity 6324749 at motionbased.
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