Hey athletes, 

I’ll be honest, my recent training block toward QMT eventually became boring! 

This should come as a surprise. I live in the mountains of North Vancouver 🏔️. One of the reasons I moved here was to have a sweet playground to train in, where I didn’t have to drive hours on end every day to get in good training. 

Now I just go outside my door, and I’m in  a mountain! And one that connects to every other ideal place to train here. 

But what sounds awesome eventually made my training mundane. 

I loved the adventure of training in Ontario because I would visit a different spot to run every weekend. I had to travel decent distances even for my weekday runs, and even though that was a problem for my schedule, it was also part of the adventure! 

But in the block to QMT, I stuck mostly to the same 3-4 spots for the entire training block. And I like a lot of these places. But I don’t obsess over how pretty any of them are! If someone asked me for an adventure run in BC, I wouldn’t suggest any of them. 

And that is where training started to become boring to me, especially as I trained alone.

So in my block to Harricana, I have endeavoured to change two things. 

1) Travel to a new spot at least once a week to explore a new trail.

2) Train more with other people. 

The art of exploration is so powerful to making a run more meaningful and memorable. Running with friends has the same effect. 

Being honest, I didn’t enjoy any of my long runs toward QMT, just trying to tick all the training boxes to make sure I was executing like a robot and not as a human that started trail running because it was fun! 

And already since QMT, I’ve enjoyed both of my “long” runs in successive weekends now, simply because I explored a really cool spot, not knowing what I might find. 

I’m sure I’ll eventually find my favourite routes here and make training more rigid, but I’m more excited for training again at the thought of exploring somewhere new with new people! 

So while this can’t always be possible within our life demands and weekly schedules, I encourage you to do the same in trying to get out somewhere new every so often. You want to keep training fresh and exciting, even if you have your favourite routes that serve you well. 

If you need any ideas on how to do this just reach out and ask! Thanks for reading and see you soon!