So recently a friend and fellow blogger,
Solana from Beast Mode on the Run, invited me to a free event at Cypress mountain to try out some snowshoes and preview the upcoming Yeti snowshoe run in March.
I've never been snowshoeing before so I really wanted to try it out. I had a race planned for Sunday (the day after snowshoeing) so I wasn't sure it was the best idea, but I decided I wouldn't be snowshoe "running" anyway so why not give it a try?
On Saturday, I picked up Cindy and Jacki and we headed up to Cypress! The yeti was waiting for us when we arrived! (Thanks to Solana's husband, Jay, for all the awesome photos!)
It was nice to be up in the mountains with the snow! I felt totally out of place though, it has been years since I've done any sort of winter sport which is practically a crime here living so close to the North Shore mountains...
I think there ended up being about 40 or so people there and after a group shot, we split up into a fast and a slow group.
I decided that I wanted to hang out near the back of the slow group, since I was incredibly new to snowshoeing and frankly, didn't really know what I was doing.
The first part was probably the hardest because we kept going up and my legs were admittedly still quite sore from hill training.
I knew we weren't traveling at a very good pace, but when we got to the top of the intended location to turn around, we were only at 1.2km... That hardly seemed worth it and since we had the opportunity to try out these great snowshoes, we decided to keep going! All in all, we went just over 4km in about an hour. Very slow I know, but I enjoyed myself and my legs weren't tired at all, which was perfect considering I had a half marathon planned for the next day!
I won a 5peaks buff and Cindy made a valiant effort in the yeti snowman building competition:
I had such a great time that I'm strongly considering signing up for the actual race on March 8th!
After we headed down the mountain we went for a very filling breakfast at Tomahawk!
It was turning out to be the perfect Saturday and I was feeling awesome and ready for the race the next day! Everything changed that evening though... Stay tuned for more on that tomorrow.
