Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Caines Head and Derby Cove - Seward, AK

Kevin and I have been dating just about 5 months now.  It was time for a relationship test, aka camping.  I am writing about this here because I took time off from the rigid training schedule to do this, and ended up not running for 2 weeks.  Why would camping keep you from running for that long you might ask?  Well, it wasn't really the camping.  My ankle was hurting before we left for the approx 4.5 mile hike to a public use cabin.  At least 2 of those miles were over slippery rocks along a beach.  So my cranky ankle became livid.  All my fault.  I knew it was hurting, I decided to go anyways.  I'm not really going to blame the hike for that.  I was also going to miss 3 days of training, but it ended up being 2.

What was that you said about some sort of test?  Oh yeah, well...many things that could go wrong did.  I am not sure if I passed the test, I hope I did.  But Kevin certainly did.  A man of great patience, calm demeanor and level head.  We were attempting to haul a heavy sled of fire wood so we could stay two nights.  Suffice it to say this did not go as planned.  We abandoned our sled and loaded up firewood in our packs, for at least one night.  Not too much farther along the trail we get to switch backs that no sled was going to manage, so we would have had to bail on it anyways.  And then there was the beach.  It was beautiful.  It was snowing.  But the tide was coming in.  Because our sled had delayed us so much we were now racing the tide.



We made it.  But it was tense, stressful and a little bit frightening.  Water coming in on one side.  Cliff with snow avalanching down on the other.

The cabin was a very welcome sight.  Surrounded by big trees.  Not a soul around.  And falling snow.  Peacefully serene.



It truly was a beautiful experience.  But it wasn't particularly easy on my ankle.

(all photos taken on our hike out, back to the car)

I made another mistake and when it was feeling better a few days later I went rock climbing.  That was going well until the last move on the last climb and I tweaked it.  So I finally laid off of it for over a week and didn't run until Sunday.  It's doing pretty good.  Had a nice 4.7 mile hilly run up on hillside with Micah.  11 min mile pace.  It was also nice to have company. And Micah kept up a running dialogue that was very entertaining and distracting and all of a sudden we were back at the house.

So 2 weeks without running.  And I still don't know why my ankle was hurting in the first place.  But it seems to be on the mend now.  Might have to skip out on rock climbing another week though and let it heal and strengthen up.

In other news...37 days to Wildflower.


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