Adventure Racing: Adventure Runner Racks Up New West Coast Trail Triumph

Wednesday, August 08, 2007 - 06:16 PM

The Importance of Crowd Support CANNOT Be Overstated!

Gary Robbins lay awake early Saturday, knowing it was 3:20 a.m. and the alarm was about to go off.

He was half an hour away from starting a solo 130-kilometre run over the West Coast Trail, the Juan de Fuca Trail and the road that connects them. All in under 24 hours.

"I just said, 'Oh God. I don't want to do this today,'" laughed Robbins yesterday, two days after completing the excruciating feat.

Robbins, 30, an adventure racer from Squamish and the manager of North Shore Athletics, said he did it because he wanted to challenge himself.

"There's something about testing your physical and mental limits," he said. "I think with every goal you set for yourself, after you achieve it there's a big part of you that wonders 'Well, what's next? What else can I achieve from there?'"

The ultramarathoner has run the 47-kilometre Juan de Fuca Trail before. It goes from China Beach, just west of Jordan River, to Botanical Beach near Port Renfrew. The difficult terrain took him about the same amount of time as the 77-kilometre West Coast Trail, from Port Renfrew to Bamfield.

He says he completed the route, non-stop, in 23 hours and 40 minutes.

He began at 4:04 a.m., using a headlamp to navigate in the dark.

His buddy Carlos Castillo met him between the trails with clean clothes and more food, but Robbins was by himself for the run. He said the Juan de Fuca is continuous hills and "completely unrelenting."

Robbins said between not sleeping well the night before and being so nervous he couldn't eat, the first five to six hours -- in which he ran a distance equivalent to a marathon -- were the worst.

"When you do something of this length, there's a lot of highs and a lot of lows involved," he said.

"Any time you hit a low you've just go to fight through it and tell yourself that the highs are not that far off and you'll be feeling good again in a few hours."

Robbins' next challenge is in Australia with the 800-kilometre XPD, an expedition adventure race involving running, biking, kayaking and snorkeling.