Livin' on a Prayer

Bon Jovi says we’re halfway there.

I’m past it. Week 11 of 18. Seven weeks until I stand at the start line of FatDog 120 in Manning Park, and the truth is the back half of a training block doesn’t feel like the chorus. It feels like the bridge, the part where the key changes, the volume jumps, and you find out whether you actually meant it.

This is the loud part. And I’m in it.

Here’s what the last couple of weeks have actually looked like, because I’d rather show you the work than describe it.

Two weeks ago I closed out a week at right around 70 kilometres of running with about 2,300 metres of climbing. I capped it on a Saturday morning with a long run from the house over to Dead Man’s Flats then up Wind Ridge. 33 kilometres, nearly 1,400 metres of vertical gain, five and a half hours on the move. That’s not a workout. That’s a small expedition with a breakfast attached to the end of it.

Then this week, on a Thursday, I went out and climbed 926 metres on Lady MacDonald in just eight and a half kilometres. While I’ve done Lady McDonald several times, it was kind of cool as this was the first time I’ve stood up where the helipad used to be and thought about the fact that I could actually fly off there with my paraglider.

I’ve still got a bit of gliding skill to build before I do that but I can picture it coming soon.

That’s the shape of peak training. Big long days on the weekend, brutal little vertical grinders mid-week, easy runs stitched in between to keep the engine turning without lighting it on fire.

I want to flag one thing that I’m genuinely proud of, and if you’ve been reading since the spring you’ll know why.

Back in Week 1, in a hotel room in Langley, I admitted that the strength work was the thing finishing second. Running, I’ll always protect. Running I will find a way to do in the dark, in the snow, in a strange city with no good roads. But the strength sessions — the single-leg work, the core, the stuff that holds your body together at hour twenty of a mountain race — those kept getting skipped. I said it needed a better system.

It got one. The strength sessions are landing now. Twice a week, mostly, baked into the schedule like the runs are. It took until the back half of the block to make it automatic, and I’m not going to pretend it was clean the whole way. But the loop is closed. The thing I was worst at in April is the thing I’m most consistent at in June.

That’s what eleven weeks of showing up actually buys you. Not a personality transplant. Just a slow conversion of intention into habit.

The scale, since I know someone will ask: still drifting down. Another kilogram since the middle of May. I’m sitting around 64.7 kilos now, which puts me well past where I started Operation Bon Jovi Body last September.

But you already know how I feel about the scale. It was the headline in October. Now it’s a footnote. The headline is that I climbed 1,400 metres on a Saturday and then got up and did more on Sunday. The number on the scale is just the exhaust. The engine is the thing.

Seven weeks out, the math gets real in a way it isn’t at twelve weeks.

FatDog is 120 miles — nearly 200 kilometres — through the mountains of Manning Park, with somewhere around 29,000 feet of climbing. There is no version of this where I am fully, comfortably ready. Nobody toes the line at a race like this feeling rested and certain. You toe the line having done the work, trusting that the work was enough, and then you find out.

What I have left is the heaviest stretch of all of it — a couple more big vert weeks, the longest long runs of the whole plan, and then the part I often find the hardest: the taper. The weeks where you do less, and your brain screams that you’re losing everything you built. I’ll write about that when I get there, because I always find it harder than the training itself.

For now, it’s the loud part of the song. Big weeks. Tired legs. Strength work that finally stuck. A mountain seven weeks out that doesn’t care how I feel about any of it.

Whoa-oh. Halfway there and then some.

Take my hand. We’ll make it, I swear.