A small group checked out the Baden Powell Trail today from Cypress to Holly­burn. We found mostly con­tin­u­ous snow rang­ing from 30cm to 90cm. Snow­pack is melt­ing rapidly with rain and warm tem­per­a­tures. Watch out for posthol­ing and the snow­bridge at the first creek cross­ing will weaken con­sid­er­ably over the next week, so be cau­tious there. (You may need to find a cross­ing higher up from where the trail actu­ally crosses.) Some pothol­ing today and we put up tapes wher­ever the mark­ers weren’t obvi­ous. Ski runs  have a solid snow­pack between 60cm-90cm deep. Only one blow­down, located five min­utes east of Cypress Sk area, but easily bypassed.

“What’s the dis­tance for the Sunday train­ing runs? That info would help me plan my train­ing on days when I can’t make it to the offi­cial run.”

This recent ques­tion on our Face­book com­mu­nity page prompted a dis­cus­sion amongst our Knee Knacker Sunday train­ing run lead­ers. It’s a ques­tion that comes up every year (usu­ally fol­lowed by “what pace should I be run­ning?” and “how does my marathon time con­vert into a Knee Knacker time?”).

We don’t pro­vide distances–and at this point, any dis­tances we give would be esti­mates at best, sure to be argued by var­i­ous GPS-toting colleagues–because our phi­los­o­phy is that train­ing on the route (or sim­i­lar ter­rain and con­di­tions) is the best sort of train­ing for the Knee Knacker.

Run­ning on moun­tain­ous trails brings its own idio­syn­cra­cies, so the Sunday train­ing routes were not picked so much for dis­tance, but as a pro­gres­sion of time spent on the trail. Over the years, we’ve found this train­ing reg­i­men to be sur­pris­ingly effec­tive (for really only two months to get people ‘up to speed’ for race day).

Addi­tion­ally, it’s more impor­tant to train on dif­fer­ing styles of ter­rain in given peri­ods of time, instead of focussing on the actual distance.

For exam­ple, a hilly or tech­ni­cal sec­tion is noth­ing like the same dis­tance on a road or a flat gravel foot­path. Imag­ine plot­ting a 3km course on the Sea­wall versus doing the Grouse Grind.…sounds absurd? Not at all, as this weekend’s run incor­po­rates a very seri­ous climb up Moun­tain High­way to the top of Grouse Moun­tain, fol­lowed by (an optional) run down the BCMC.

If you really need to know the dis­tance, check out “Explor­ing Vancouver’s North Shore Moun­tains” by Roger and Ethel Free­man. It’s a bit old now, but the authors were fas­tid­i­ous about walk­ing every trail (twice) with a wheel to mea­sure dis­tances to the tenth of a kilometre! It’s still by far the best hiking guide to the North Shore.

Did you notice that we changed the website’s banner photos to fea­ture var­i­ous 2012 train­ing runs? Don’t be sur­prised if you appear in a future banner photo as our intre­pid pho­tog­ra­phers will be join­ing as many train­ing runs as pos­si­ble, look­ing for the best  van­tage spot and pray­ing to the weather gods for good, even lighting!

Some­times there are last minute updates to a train­ing run (eg. where to meet, where we’re going) so before you leave for the run, check the web­site or our Face­book com­mu­nity page for announce­ments. This applies to the Wednes­day runs (updates on Face­book) and the Sunday runs (Face­book and web­site). Most of the time there’s no update, but you never know! Having said that, the June 9 run will be from Deep Cove to St George’s Bench (not Mos­quito Creek).