One down. Or "up", rather. #16 - The Grouse Grind

Alrighty... so I finally knocked one of the list. Today I hiked the Grouse Grind.
It's a very popular hike that I've wanted to do for years, but haven't as most of my friends aren't into "extreme" hikes and I didn't really want to do it alone. Fortunately for me, Claudia loves this hike (and just about all others) so we decided awhile ago to do it as soon as the it was open. This past Saturday was opening day, but I couldn't get out there due to work. Claudia did though, and she beat her old PR by a few seconds! Thursday (yesterday) was the first day we could BOTH make it, so that is exactly what we did.

We headed out of Surrey around 10:15 or so and got to Grouse at about 12:00. It was fairly cold and foggy, and the path was a bit slick in places, but that's just fine by me. I like it when the elements make things a bit more challenging.

The average walker does this in about 90 minutes (or so I've read), so my goal was to get under 50 minutes. As I was going up I saw a sign with the words "1/2 Mark yada yada" and checked my timer. I was at 17:30! I figured I should kick it into 5th gear and maybe I'd finish with one of those kick ass < 40min times. Unfortunately, I didn't read the sign properly and it was just notifying hikers that the rest of the hike is much steeper, AFTER the 1/2 mark. I was probably only about 1/3 of the way through at this point. I figured that out about 10 minutes later when I saw the real 1/2 marker. Lack of Reading Comprehension FTL.


I had burned myself out a bit, but got my 2nd wind at the 3/4 mark and finished with an OK time of 52:05. I will definitely beat that if/when I do the hike again.

 Though I'd hardly call this extreme, it's definitely difficult, but I think it had been built up to much for me. On a scale of 1-10, I'd give this about a 7.5.

We finished up and took the Gondola back down. We rewared our efforts with some awesome Ramen noodles and dark chocolate mochas. Then I went to work and got about 8 rounds of sparring in. After that, I met up with Dizzle again and we shared a beer (well, I drank a beer and she had a sip), some good tunes and some food.

All in all, a pretty awesome day!