What The Fob?!

My Seek the Peak training has continued to go well.  Nothing hurts, my appetite continues to be insatiable and I am sleeping like a baby!  With the Grouse Grind officially opening over the weekend, we decided to tackle it ourselves yesterday.

Even with the HOV lanes, this morning’s traffic was a gong show (I so appreciate my commute to work).  We arrived at the base of the mountain shortly after 10am, and got our trek underway quickly.  Although cool temperatures and low cloud are less than ideal at this time of the year, they make perfect grinding conditions (and also keeps the trail quiet).

Within 5 minutes I was breathing heavy and in a bit of a sweat.  My plan was to keep a steady pace and not completely kill myself in the process.  The trail was in great shape until just past the ¾ mark, from here on up there was snow at the sides of the trail and in the spots where there weren’t steps it was quite muddy and slippery.  I made it almost all the way to the top without having to touch a rope or the handrails (yes, even when grinding I am a bit of a germ freak, eww sweat, snot and random DNA, and then you wipe the sweat from your brow with the hand that has held the rope…).  The rocks were so slick that I slipped and had to catch myself with one of the ropes, I guess a little foreign matter on my glove was better than smashing my knee.

Grind timer to grind timer, I made it in 50:37:94 (yes every second, and tenth of a second counts), 34 kills, I was killed once (very close to twice, hence my scramble and slip on the rock).  I was pretty happy with my first attempt this year, next week my goal is a sub 50, but I cannot imagine doing it in a few weeks having already run 10km up hill and still have another 3km to go after the grind.

Everyone seemed very happy with their times, Conny, Susa and Amanda all had PB’s and you would never have known that Soraiya had run her third marathon in 6 weeks on Sunday…good for her!

We all started to cool off very quickly so we bought our gondola tickets and headed back down the mountain, and then the drama started.  I pride myself on being organized, always.  I don’t like to leave anything to chance (yes, I have control issues), and yesterday was no exception.  Packs leak, they also get sweaty and they also get wet in the rain, so I always put my phone, car key, and ID and lip gloss in a plastic baggy inside my pack, it keeps everything together and dry.

After I had finished the grind I had pulled my phone out of my baggy, I had also used my debit card to pay for my gondola ticket.  We were half way back down on the gondola when I noticed my car key was no longer in my baggy.  We frantically tore my pack apart, and still no car key…OMG! I distinctly remembered locking my car and putting my key behind my phone in the baggy so that it wouldn’t pocket dial and hadn’t opened my pack again until the top of the mountain.  So it had to be up there somewhere, right?

I must have had sheer panic on my face when I told the gondola attendant what had happened.  He assured me that somebody would have turned my key fob in and that he would call the top of the mountain once we were at the base.

I wish the news had been better, but nobody had found my key, so the trip back up the gondola to retrace my steps was among some of the longest minutes of my life, not to mention the coldest.  In my mind I had already gone through the two scenarios of how I was going to get my spare key from Maple Ridge to North Vancouver, I was either going to have to suffer the wrath from my husband or my Dad, sigh…

As the doors finally opened Conny, Soraiya and I made our way through the masses in search of the missing fob.  The plan: to find it quickly so that we could go back down on the same gondola.

Conny and Soraiya hit the store and the ticket counter and came up with nothing.  I headed outside to the veranda where we stood and stretched, to find nothing.  I went down to the lower level to the covered area where we waited, still nothing.  By this point I am ready to lose it.  I headed out onto the rocks to the grind timer and the spot where I originally opened my pack for the first time, I looked down and there it was, one soaking wet, lonely and beautiful key fob!

Too cold and just too emotionally spent to do a happy dance I found the girls and we squeezed back on the gondola and headed down to warm, dry clothes and a well-deserved Starbucks.

I guess I could laugh about it now, but I won’t, it wasn’t funny, but I did learn a lesson, that this will never happen again.