I stop to catch my breath. The morning sun is already warm. A fine change from recent weeks. I’m 7 kms in to my morning run and the sweat is beginning to sting my eyes. Keep moving! I am trying to tie off my monthly running goal by the end of the long weekend so I have a few days to shift gears. Doubtful. We’ll see.

I’m leaving in 5 days for the beginning of a wild adventure. Kelowna, Powell River, and the BP 50. All in about a 10 day span. The estimated total distance is likely around 130-150km travelled by foot.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that 3 concurrent projects in a week and a half is probably biting off more than I can chew, but when you’re on a time crunch, sometimes you gotta just roll the dice and be all in!

Project 1: A weekend flurry of adventure in Kelowna with a couple buddies that is a long overdue outing. A 30km overnight hiking trip in Okanagan Provincial Park. Last year we were sidetracked from this by the highway flooding, shutting down our access to not only Kelowna, but pretty much the rest of the country. This promises to be a good make up.

Project 2: Tackling approximately 40-50 kilometers of the Sunshine Coast Trail with one of my hiking partners. Situated just outside of Powell River BC. This will be the third leg of a journey I started a few years ago. It will be a quick turnaround as I get home from Kelowna Sunday night and fly out Monday morning. I hope I have enough time to do laundry?

Project 3: Well if the first two weren’t a tall enough order, why not throw in a 50km trail race across the popular Baden Powell trail, which runs from Horseshoe bay to Deep Cove, on the north shore in Metro Vancouver. This one was not on my radar, until my brother (who is doing the race) and I started talking about logistics of supporting him on race day, dropping a car off at one end and then getting him back to the other to begin an all day journey. The more we talked the more I thought, “well why don’t I just run it with you, then I don’t have to wonder what a race of that distance feels like.” Needless to say, I imagine the answer is that it feels shitty to run a race that distance.

So here we are. A few rest days and then it’s go time!

Cheers