It’s been a month since race day and while things are fairly quiet in the Knee Knacker office, the trail run­ning com­mu­nity con­tin­ues to hum along. So through­out the rest of this year, we’ll post inter­est­ing trail-running news that we find for you. And if you have some­thing of inter­est to share, you can email it to us or post it on our Face­book com­mu­nity page.

The Car­dio­vas­cu­lar Phys­i­ol­ogy and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Lab at UBC (http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/warburtoncardio/) needs run­ners to par­tic­i­pate in a 75km trail run on August 20 and 21. This will take place at the Pacific Spirit Park and UBC Endow­ment Lands. There is no entry fee for this race but you must be capa­ble of run­ning the entire race.

The race involves five laps on a pre-set 15km course. Run­ners will be tested at the end of lap 3 for cog­ni­tive and car­dio­vas­cu­lar mea­sures, as well as after the race at three sep­a­rate inter­vals (race finish, 60 min­utes post race, 90 min­utes post race). On course water, sports drinks, gra­nola bars and energy gels will be supplied.

Prior to the race, run­ners will be invited to the lab for a free base­line health and fit­ness assess­ment, includ­ing a VO2max test.

This research may have appli­ca­tions for the health and train­ing prac­tices of ultra-marathon run­ners, and is the first study of its kind. If you are inter­ested but cannot make the August 20/21 week­end, the lab would still like to hear from you.

For more details, con­tact the lab at cprlab@gmail.com or call 604.822.6881.

Short arti­cle in the Geor­gia Straight about this year’s race, includ­ing a train­ing run video by William Schuurman.

Meghan Rance spent race day making a video of her friend, Louse Oram, who won this year’s women’s divi­sion. You can view the video here. (Note: The video requires Adobe Flash.)

Well I had to smile at Andrew’s post last Sunday along the lines of ‘we’re all done until next year’… that shows Andrew’s level of orga­ni­za­tion and effi­ciency. I, on the other hand have been nurs­ing my com­bined Knee Knacker “high” and “hang­over” for a full week.

Thank you again to all of our won­der­ful vol­un­teers, spon­sors and run­ners who make the Knee Knacker what it is. I sin­cerely appre­ci­ate all of you who have reached out to send your thanks and offer help (for next year already!). We had the high­est number of fin­ish­ers this year at 198, and a full roster of 250 volunteers.

We will send out a survey to both run­ners and vol­un­teers in the next week and I look for­ward to your feed­back and sug­ges­tions. We’ve already got sev­eral inter­est­ing ideas about next year that we’ll look into over the upcom­ing months. (eg. Pos­si­bly live webcam for the finish line and a live/online lot­tery draw… no promises yet, but it could be fun.)

We do have a couple of lost and found items left – if anyone can iden­tify the camera they lost and what piece of their Garmin equip­ment is miss­ing, we do have these items ready for you to pick them up.

We’re proud this year to be donat­ing $4,000 (plus any pro­ceeds from the photos) to North Shore Search and Rescue, and very much appre­ci­ate their race day and year round support.

We will con­tinue post­ing pic­tures (thank you Karen!), sto­ries and info over the coming weeks, and then we will hiber­nate a bit while we enjoy the rest of the summer. Come the fall, we’ll gear up again and start to reach out with info prior to the end of the year.

Thank you for another out­stand­ing year & happy trails,

Kelsy