Take the good weather when it comes: A 4 hr trail run with April

Heading out from Dave's house

Well, it may only be September, but it sure feels like winter has already set in. The heavy rains have started.

So April emailed Dave and me a few days ago. She’d been checking out the forecast for the week, and it was calling for a short break in the weather for Wednesday. “Are you guys up for a 30k trail run?” she asked. Of course we were!

She and Dave decided to do a 50k road bike ride beforehand. I politely declined. They are both faster runners than me anyway, so I was happy to have them wear themselves out a bit before we started.

Port Alberni Trail Run Roger's Creek

We started at Dave’s house – partly because it is Trail Centrale, with

Elk Lake, Victoria: A new run with an old friend (who I’d never met)

Arriving at Elk Lake... ready to roll!

Well this is exciting! I went out for a 25 km run with my Twitter buddy Lorne Daniel (@LorneDaniel) today!

I am down in Victoria for the weekend, visiting Fiona (who came on the Copper Mountain/Alberni Inlet run with Dave and me a few weeks ago). So I tweeted Lorne to let him know I was coming, and we set a running date for this morning.

What is cool about this is that Lorne and I had never met face-to-face. He is one of my best Twitter buddies. We’ve known one another for about a year and a half, and have found that

Sometimes we cycle

[by Dave] When we aren’t running we cycle and swim.  Road and offroad.  Yesterday we rode a 62 km loop from home to the end of Beaver Creek Road (25 km on pavement), back along the Log Train Trail, crossed the highway at the CandyStore, through Grad Drunk, then wound our way through the logging roads and trails behind Bainbridge Lake back to home (37 km on trails and logging roads).  About five hours of riding.

[by Jackie] Part of the reason we wanted to do this ride is because we want to run it. Most of our big trail runs are on pretty tough terrain,  so we actually walk a lot of the uphills and some of the tricky parts (we value our health and our continuing ability to go out on these

A big and wonderful day in the mountains – Della Falls, Love Lake, and back!

On Great Central Lake, 6:30am. Dave points to where we'll be going.

We don’t know if anyone has actually run this before – so we are claiming the world record for this route! If anyone has already done this, we will back down – but for the moment, we consider ourselves the record holders (legends in our own minds, you might say…)

So I’m not actually sure if this was Dave’s idea or mine – to run up to Della Falls and, if we were making good enough time, to continue right on up to Love Lake (up and down in a day) – but, whose-ever idea it was, the other one agreed right away.

Can't go anywhere without fiddling with the GPS watch!

I’ve wanted to go to Della Falls for a decade or more. It’s the highest waterfalls in North America – located in Strathcona Provincial Park, in the middle of Vancouver Island – but very hard to get to. The main Strathcona trails don’t