For my birthday I went for a little SUP paddle down the Bow River.
Then we drove down to Crowsnest Pass.
The next day (and into the day after) I ran the Sinister 7 Ultra 50 Mile Race.
I felt pretty strong and quite good after I warmed up until the T5 aid, except that my left shoulder started to hurt early on. I noticed it, but didn't realize how bad it was until I took my pack off at T5. It was so bad at T5 I felt sick, or maybe that was mild heat exhaustion. Got going again anyway eventually, and just didn't use my left poles or carry water or food in my left pouch of my vest. I felt better by the top of the pass north of the Seven Sisters. Though that was probably just from looking at the views. On the way down my knee started hurting. Then all all the way down just past CP6b, my back also started to really bother me. Never recovered from that. Also had a huge blister on the back of my right heel at this point. Walked it out more or less from 57km to 83km.
At CP7 I'd had to climb up yet another huge gain on an ATV trail and down a steep technical descent and then headed away from town to the checkpoint. I hobbled in and was having a mini melt down. Thank you so much to the aid worker who made me eat half a cookie, and walked me down to the bridge to get me going again. I fell on the last steep descent (and it wasn't even steep) after that, but thankfully not on my ass, it was a side fall. Got to the finish line and had all the emotions.
Thank you to Heath for crewing me, he got a lot of quality time reading and talking to people in breweries when he wasn't waiting around for me to show up in a worse state than the last time he saw me (repeated three times, T5, T6, and the finish).
I'm so grateful that my body (though definitely not in great shape, my back is actually quit messed with a laterally herniated disk I found out recently) could get me through this and I got to experience this. Now I have to rest and heal though. Its clear my left shoulder (which I aggravated on my backpacking trip) and my back (obviously a herniated disk is really not great) need a lot of work and will never really fully heal. I'm going to take it easy on myself going forward. Happy to have pushed hard and found my limit at one point in my life though.