Keep the Faith

Last weekend I became a pilot!

I did my P2 paragliding high fly test in Golden, BC.

What that actually means: I stopped being a student who launches, floats a few hundred feet, and lands. I went up a 4x4 road to a 1200 meter launch and get real altitude under my wing. I stayed up there long enough that it stops being a ride and starts being flight. Bigger air. More decisions. More time alone with the thing you’ve been training for.

I nailed it (Well maybe my launch could have been a little more graceful).

It was a genuine milestone, the kind you work toward for a while and then one morning it just happens, and you’re up there over the valley with the whole thing working exactly like it’s supposed to.

The weather has been atrocious, we had to scrap several launch opportunities and Saturday morning was not looking a whole lot better. Low cloud meant you could hardly see the launch from the ground. We were supposed to meet at the LZ for 8am. Keith, our intstructor messaged at 7am, “Go back to sleep for an hour and I’ll check in then.”

Damn, not looking good. Then at 8am he messaged “Meet at the LZ at 9am.” I checked the conditions online from the weather station on the launch site. Winds looked perfect but visibility still near zero. Keith gave us a quick briefing at the LZ and finally said “Let’s go up to launch site.”

We were still unsure if we would be able to launch but the anticipation (and nerves) were starting to build. When we got to the top the inversion was stunning. Low cloud everywhere. The LZ coming in and out of sight as the clouds drifted and shifted.

The instructors huddled around discussing conditions.

It looked like the clouds may be lifting. My heart started racing, my stomach tight as my mind vacillated between the excitement of a possible launch and the fearful part of me secretly hoping we would have to postpone.

Then Keith said to our other instructor Kyle, “Talk to them.” and slowly wandered off to the launch. Kyle briefed us again on the things to be cautious about, the route to the LZ and where to hang out to lose altitude when we got close to the LZ.

Holy shit, this is going to happen. The next thing I knew we were watching Keith launch. He would be at the LZ on radio guiding us in and giving us instruction if we needed it.

Before I knew it, it was my turn. “Mike, setup behind Sam!”

One aborted launch as my wing came up lopsided. Second launch square but still not exactly graceful, but I was in the air.

Hold it together. Get my bearing first, then settle in. Turn left so you don’t end up on the wrong side of the valley. Half wrap the brakes. Choose a target toward the LZ.

My mind cycling through everything we learned. I felt prepared. Then I hit some turbulence.

That was different. Wing vibrating, harness shaking and the sudden realization that I am flying a tent attached to me with dental floss completely changed the mood.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake!” might have cycled through my mind for a fleeting moment. Then I settled in, leaned back and got intentional about enjoying the experience. Tears of gratitude welled up as I took in the surrounding landscape. The majesty of the Canadian Rockies all around me.

That’s the headline this week. Not a number on the scale. Not a long run. A wing, a mountain in Golden, and a test I’d been building toward finally going right.

Here’s the part that connects to everything else I write about.

Golden was not on the training plan.

Week 12 was a deload week. A planned recovery week after the biggest block of the whole build. Lower volume by design. Easy running, one modest long day, two strength sessions, legs back under me before the last hard push toward FatDog. Clean and tidy on the spreadsheet. The kind of week that looks like it’ll unfold exactly as drawn.

Then a weekend in Golden went on the calendar, and the plan did what plans always do. It bent.

I wasn’t home in Canmore with my mountains out the back door and my whole week laid out. I was on the road, chasing a different kind of flying, with my running stitched into the cracks around it. And I’ve said this since Week 1 in a hotel room in Langley: you don’t schedule your life around your training plan. You schedule your training around your life, or you don’t train at all.

So I adapted. And I still got the work done.

The proof is in one session I love.

Thursday, instead of a standard elevation run at home, Michelle and I ran up to scout the paragliding launch. Eighteen and a half kilometres, two hours and fifty-one minutes on the move, 753 metres of climbing to go look at the very hill I’d be flying off. That’s not a compromise. That’s a long run and a recon mission sharing the same pair of shoes. Time on feet, big vert, and we got eyes on the launch before we ever strapped on the harness.

The rest of the week fell into the same shape. A little in Rocky View County, a little back in Canmore, more in the Columbia-Shuswap around Golden. Four regions, a handful of runs, nothing that looked heroic on any single day.

But add it up and the week still climbed 1,316 metres against a deload target of 800. Even backed off, even on the road, even with a wing taking up half my attention, the vert landed over target. The engine kept turning.

The strength work didn’t happen this week. Zero of two. A travel week with my focus in the air is exactly the kind of week that eats the gym, and it did. It’s a deload, so the stakes are low, but I’m not going to dress it up. Running I’ll protect anywhere. Strength still finishes second when the week gets weird. Same old lesson, still on the list.

Here’s why “Keep the Faith” is the right title for all of this.

Paragliding and ultrarunning reward the exact same thing, and it isn’t nerve. It’s faith, the earned kind, not the blind kind. You don’t launch off a mountain because you’re feeling brave. You launch because you did the training, you’ve trusted the process, you checked the conditions, you know your wing, and at some point you have to trust all of that and commit. Same as a start line. You never toe the line at a 120-mile race feeling certain. You show up having done the work, and you trust the work was enough, and then you find out.

Adapting a plan isn’t losing faith in it. It’s the opposite. Keeping the faith means holding onto the goal while letting the details move. The map changes. The destination doesn’t. Golden didn’t cost me a training week. It gave me a different one, a big-vert long run, a milestone in the air, and one more rep at the thing this whole project is actually about: doing the work when the week doesn’t look the way you drew it.

Six weeks out. The wing is a new kind of faith. The mountain in August is the old kind. I’ve got both, and I’m keeping them.

Keep the faith.