travel

I ran my last half marathon of the year in October and a summer of training followed by an autumn of faster training netted me a pretty decent time.

About mid-month we packed up the new car and drove for twelve hours westward on Friday morning. It was planned. I had registered for the Okanagan Half Marathon in Kelowna, British Columbia, a beautiful little mountain valley city on the edge of a lake and tucked inside a microclimate that made it feel more like September than the nearly-winter chill back home.

San Fransisco was a whim.

I mean, who doesn’t have “run across the Golden Gate Bridge“ on their bucket list? Or, at the very least, the flexibility to add it when six weeks before a race there a cheap flight is discovered online and karma aligns for a weekend getaway in California?

Las Vegas was, believe it or not, a family vacation.

We connected with Jenn and family and planned a multi-week trip that started with a race and ended with a theme park. Vegas was not the first choice for a race, tho. Originally, we had been talking about a California adventure that included Disneyland and one of those great RunDisney races I'd done previously. But the RunDisney folks seemed to have dropped all plans to continue running through Anaheim.

Plan B was to fly to Vegas, run the Rock'n Roll down the strip, then drive over to California.

The Banff-Jasper Relay is an annual run through the 260 km stretch of mountain highway stretching between Banff, Alberta & Jasper, Alberta where 15 runners tag along and each travel a bit of the distance on foot over the span of a single day. There are amazing views, wildlife encounters, epic challenges of endurance, absolutely no cell phone coverage, and opportunities to take selfies while hot, sweaty, and staring down a fifty-thousand year old mountain glacier.