Lebanon Hills center and Irun Podcast

I decided to get in a quick 4 miler tonight and it felt "ok". Yes, "ok" is an improvement. No achilles pain :-)

I have been running lately in the center section of Lebanon Hills (link to an old post on the park), an often overlooked area of the park since it has the fewest miles of trails and most are horse trails not hiking trails. Total runnable trails in this section with the least amount of overlap is around 8 miles and that includes a couple of spurs that either leave the park, go to the campground or take you into Camp Sacajawea. If you ever run in Lebanon Hills give yourself a treat and check it out.

Here are the elevation and grade maps from tonight's run exported from SportTracks.


On this run, I was listening to a very enjoyable podcast called iRun - The Running Show. It is a Canadian podcast sponsored by the Running Room. The show is hosted by noted Ottawa Citizen running columnist, radio host and marathoner Mark Sutcliffe. He normally has on with him Ray Zahab. Ray is a very accomplished adventure racer and ultramarathoner, check out his website. You can get the podcast on Itunes, they have a link on the Team 1200 website.

On this episode (#44) they interviewed three ultrarunners: Dave McMahon, Ferg Hawke and Marshall Ulrich. Dave is a local Ottawa trail runner who provides a lot of good trail running tips and who video tapes (HD quality) his runs for the Canadian Space Agency. I even followed some of his advice and paid attention to my stride and foot pickup and no surprise my pace picked up and it didn't seem to take anymore effort.

Ferg Hawke and Marshall Ulrich are both accomplished ultra runners both having completed Badwater multiple times. Ferg Hawke is another Canadian and is one of the runners featured in the documentary on Badwater called "the Distance of Truth", it looks like an interesting movie. He has finished 2nd at Badwater a couple of times. Marshall has completed Badwater many times, once solo and he has done a quad Badwater, yes that means he ran it 4 times over 535 miles in 10 days. I believe he is alone in both of these categories. My only complaint is I think each of the interviews could have covered the entire show instead each is no more than 10-15 minutes. Still real interesting.