Preamble
On the 30th May 2026 I ran the Run Comfy Numb 25km trail race in Whistler, BC, Canada.
It was a good race, hard, technical, different from anything I’ve ran before.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself even if I made a series of mistakes in my prep that had me coming in 20 minutes later than I should’ve been.
Discovery & Sign Up
Run Comfy Numb is a trail race, taking place over the “Comfortably Numb” black diamond mountain bike trail near Whistler, British Columbia. The trail is a highly technical mess of narrow paths, tree roots, sudden drops, exposed rock, and constantly undulating terrain.
No massive climbs, no suicidally steep descents, just 25 kilometres of things to trip over and break your nose on. As the race director put it in his brief, death by a thousand cuts.
There are two distances on offer, a 25km, which is composed of the entire Comfortably Numb trail and a few km of other simpler trails at the end, and a 50km race, which adds 25km of relatively1 simple trails at the start, before covering the 25km race course in its second half.
I became aware of the race a few years ago while looking for more interesting events than the road races I usually run. I had hoped to do the 50k ultra for my 30th birthday but between life changes and laziness my training wasn’t where it would have needed to be to have any hope of completing, so I didn’t sign up.
About a month ago an email from the race coordinators advertising a few last minute spots in both distances landed in my inbox, and with nothing better to do and nothing booked for the summer season yet I decided to sign up for the 25.
I am a fairly experienced runner, doing everything from casual urban runs to unsupported mountain courses in my free time, but my racing experience has almost entirely been large, high attendance road races, with a few forays into fell running and one or two cross country races in the last decade.
As any experienced runner will tell you, road racing is shit. It hurts, its lots of hard work, its monotonous, and its hell on your joints. Its type two fun2, and that’s all it’s ever going to be.
I love running, but I’m getting bored with pavement pounding. I want to branch out into more interesting events. This seemed like a good start.
Prep & Strategy
I was in fairly good shape at the start of May, having come off a lot of preparation for a couple half marathons earlier in the year, along with a fair bit of light hiking, and a lot of commuter cycling.
In summer I can run a half in about 1hr 48 mins pretty consistently, and can cut about 5 mins off of that if the weather’s cooperating. My last timed 5k was 20 minutes 30 seconds over a hilly course, and my recovery period is fairly short.
My main concerns for the race were my technical terrain skills, and mental toughness.
I’m not one for structured training, and I’m pretty uninterested in data. Any time I try and adopt a training plan I fail, so I kept it to broad strokes and mostly just did what worked with my other commitments.
As a result my training looked like tacking some more distance onto my regular running and spending more time running on the mountain bike trails near where I live. A little unfocused and probably suboptimal, but it was a plan I would actually follow, and that’s what really matters in my opinion.
Lots of long, dull, painful running as commuting, lots of evening runs through the woods, lots of hills, not a lot of looking at numbers, no hill sprints, no specific exercises, no work up events.
Hard training, not smart training.
My course knowledge prep came down to maybe 15-20 minutes looking at the gradient chart and course map, noting where the aid stations were, and trying to make a rough plan for pacing based on the elevation.
My lack of course specific research was a serious mistake.
My Pacing Strategy
Checking the elevation graph of the race, I decided to settle on a simple strategy: Slow and steady at 6:00m/km for 0-8km, then do a check over km 9, and if I felt good try and pace up to 05:30m/km for the next 8km of steady climbing, before upping again from 17-22km to about 04:50m/km then finishing around 05:30m/km for the last 3km.
The Day Before: Whistler, Food, Kit
I opted to go down the day before, Whistler is far enough from the Metro Vancouver area to make getting down the morning of a pain in the ass and the sea 2 sky highway is a great drive in of itself.
My better half didn’t need much convincing to come away for the weekend, so we piled into the car and were in Whistler for midday on the 29th.
There isn’t a great deal in Whistler village itself outside of the sporting activities it supports, but the art gallery and library were both worth visiting, we got in, went around both, got my race pack, lunch, then checked into our hotel and headed back out to fuel up on Italian food.
Back in for 10pm, I taped my feet up and got my gear laid out. Other than terrain appropriate shoes & a foil blanket I loaded the same as I would for a road race in hot weather; a light rain coat, a litre of fluid, and more food than I knew I’d actually need.
In bed for 11pm, I felt a little nervous, fairly sure I would get around the course without issue, but knowing that if something did go wrong getting off the hill would be a long and torturous process.
Morning Of
Getting up around 6.20am in Whistler my guts were definitely not looking forward to the day ahead, light breakfast, checked the tape on my feet, dressed, out.
My girlfriend dumped me at the start line about 20 minutes north of the village for 7am, and I stood with the other 25k runners as we watched the 50k pack peel out, heading in the opposite direction we were going to go in.
The 50k starts with a fast 25km in and out run along green bike trails back to the start line, then proceeds to the 25km Comfortably Numb Trail.
It was cold, it was grey, and I was struck by how small the pack was.
There couldn’t have been more than 200 people in my event, which felt tiny after the last few urban races I’d ran, where there were 10’s of thousands of participants in each distance and more than 100,000 people at the finish line.
After about 30 minutes of milling about and doing last minute kit checks, the race’s organiser and founder got on a milk crate, delivered the race brief through the world’s worst loud hailer, and we lined up to go.
The Race
1-5k: My first mistake, traffic jams, drop outs
Lining up I fell in at the back third of the pack. The 25k race was split into two starts, one at 7.50am, one at 7.53am, purely to alleviate a bottleneck at the trail head, 300m into the race. I had put myself in the second wave as I wasn’t feeling terribly competitive and per my pacing strategy I was to go fairly easy for the first 8km anyway.
This was the first mistake of the race, and the first time my lack of course research cost me time. I had not realised just how tight the bottleneck was. This was the first race I’ve ever ran where there was a literal traffic jam. After a short 300m jog we all slowed to a walk, then stood still, as people filtered one by one into the treeline onto single track.
2-3 minutes gone.
Once onto the track I found myself stuck at the back of a stick of very slow runners barely doing 11m/km. As we got underway on what would be the least complicated terrain for the next 20km I was practically going the slowest I would be for the rest of the race.
The slow stick in front of me combined with the narrowness of the track meant I spent a good 20 minutes crawling up the stick, waiting minutes between safe opportunities to overtake. As we got into the first real climbs and obstacles of the race it became clear that plenty of people hadn’t done any meaningful prep, and soon our little group was passing people stood bent over between trees and plodding up hills with their hands on their knees.3
Being stuck in the back probably cost me another 10 minutes.
The first 5k passed easy enough, and had a good mix of all the terrain features we were to see ahead, plenty of short sharp ascending and descending, rock work, tree limbs, and tricky cornering.
Average speed at this point was anywhere between 10:30 and 07:00/km
5-10k: What’s pacing?, finally break away, first aid station
Settling in now it became pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to rely on time to tell how I was doing. I was going much slower than I usually did for the same effort, and having to work much, much harder simply to stay upright. The MTB trails I’d ran in training hadn’t really been adequate for this course, which was less of a downhill blast, more of a very complicated cross country trail.
I was finding the obstacles all pretty easy to navigate, nothing too dodgy, no real scrambling required, & no leg breaking rabbit holes like the mountains I used to do in Donegal, just lots and lots and lots of careful thinking and foot placement required. Slow going.
Consistent pacing by time being pretty well impossible I stopped worrying about timing and decided to just listen to my body.
The track being narrower than my shoulder’s are wide at certain points, overtaking continued to be close and intermittently viable. Heading into the first aid station at 8km I was feeling good, and as I usually do I skipped it, taking the chance to break free of the people I was stuck behind.
8-15k: How am I still running?
Breaking past the end of the slow group I got a good 15-20 minutes clear on my own, between two larger groups in the race. I picked up the pace, and fortunately was practiced enough over rough ground to get away with doing that, as the terrain hadn’t really changed. A couple good shallow downhills and some clearish ground led onto a suspension bridge over a river canyon, I was feeling fast.
At this point I looked down at my watch and realised that I had been running for damn near 2 hours. I’d done half the distance I’d expect to in that time and the muscles in my abdomen were starting to ache.
This was going to be a long, long run. By my original pacing strategy I would have been near done by now.
The sun came out somewhere in here and the temperature rose appreciably, still quite pleasant, not hot at all, but I was glad of the sun screen I’d put on that morning.
16-17k: I get lost, mistakes number 2 & 3
Coming up onto the 2nd aid station I stopped briefly to refill on water.
The 2nd station was on a small hillock before a dive back into the treeline, from the elevation graph I knew that the course climbed steadily up to about 17km, then there was a section of about 4km that was mostly downhill, before a ramp right before the end of the course.
I was feeling good, tired, stomach slightly upset, but relatively fresh, heart rate under control, head in the right place. Leaving the aid station a series of short ups and downs but mostly downs led onto a twisty boggy section of trail with poor visibility, where I made the 2nd mistake of my run.
I missed a flag, and proceeded about 300m in the wrong direction, down the wrong trail, downhill. I didn’t realise this until I came to the very obviously wrong part of that trail. Turning back I had a steep, mucky crawl through a patch of skunk cabbage to get back on the right track. Less than a km later, I had to stop again to figure out which fork of a trail I was supposed to take.
Stopping in an endurance race is death. It breaks your flow state and makes it hard to get back in the right head space, and it also gives your body time to remember to hurt. I was stopped for a good five minutes deciding which trail to take.
These two mistakes together easily cost me 15-20 minutes.
17-21k: Downhill, by God, Downhill
Finally having chosen a fork, and being delighted to find it to be the right fork, I climbed the last 500 or so metres of km 16 and found myself in the back of a group heading into the slow sloping downhill from 17-21. Lots and lots of short, knee and arse jarring drops, interspersed with occasional climbs, exposed rock, dropping and turning.
Very technical, or “techy” as the people around me were saying.
This was really good fun, hard on the body, but good craic. It felt good to feel the pace pick up and to be in with a group at a similar skill level, good progress through here and no real complaints. Some fantastic views of the lake beside us and the first few glimmers of the town ahead.
There was pasta down there, and coffee, and soft seats.
Pleasantly surprised at this point to still not be in too much pain.
21-24k: Fast and Flowy, The Ramp
Juddering down through a couple kms of bare-ish rock we found ourselves emerging onto relatively friendly compacted dirt switch backs. Relatively few obstacles, and plenty of space between groups. I stretched my legs a bit and found I had plenty left in the tank.
This was the only section of the race where I did anything like normal running, and could afford to lengthen my stride and take my eyes of the ground for more than a few seconds at a time. I led a group of about 5 down the hill at about a 5:00m/km pace, through the last aid station at a brisk pace, and right into a brick wall of relatively long, relatively steep climbs.
On a normal run I’d fly up these kind of hills without dropping my pace by more than 15 seconds, but I was pretty spent now and my joints and hip flexors were starting to lock up. These hills shredded me and most of the people I was with. I kept running until all but the last one, when I had to slow to a plod, hands on knees, staggering up. This was the very end of the ramp I’d saw on the map.
It couldn’t have been more than 100m long, but it fucked me, at the very top of it, a women with a cowbell was marshalling and yelling encouragement, passing her I was on the last km, almost all downhill, right to the end.
25km: The last lunge & the last hill
Passing cowbell lady and a couple spectating mountain bikers I could hear the tannoy at the finish line and see the parking lot I knew meant the end. I dropped with one other through sparse woods and relatively easy trails, diagonally downhill. My backside was turning numb now and my left knee was beginning to stop cooperating.
I was really not feeling good at this point, the last km is always the hardest but I felt like absolute shit. Breaking out of the trees a hard right turn brought us onto a fire trail around the back of the sports hall that marked the end line. I pushed as hard as I could only to slow right down again at the very last, very tiny hill, then accelerated hard and around to push in for the finish line.
Crossing the line at a dead sprint, done, in about 3 hours and 30 minutes.
Finish Line
Dead, fucked, crippled, but happy.
A good race, coffee, burger, 2 cans of coke, pain killers. Dragged upright by my gf and pushed into the car, back into town for a shower and more Italian food before heading home.
Post Race
Surveying the damage in the changing room of the local athletics center I was pretty happy with my physical prep, my feet were in good shape, no sunburn, no serious injuries.
A palpable layer of dirt all over, a couple scratches, one small blister formed and burst on my left foot without me noticing.
I was suprised at how freely I was moving, usually after a long road race walking is a little bit fraught, I guess the course was a lot softer underfoot than it felt. I was exhausted, but I wasn’t in much pain. Other than thinking carefully about all the steps of sitting down I was moving slowly but freely.
I was able to spend the rest of the day on my feet walking around Whistler, drafting this report on a bench in the park, inhaling a good 4000 calories of spaghetti and bread, then drove back to Burnaby without issue.
Verdict
I had a huge amount of fun.
I said at the start that road racing is always type two fun, I think this event was type one. I had a fantastic time and I want to do something like this again, soon. I enjoyed the vibe at the event, I enjoyed the banter with the other people on the race on the way around, and I’m reasonably happy with my performance.
My strategy was conceptually correct but totally unrealistic in terms of pacing, if I’d tried to run at the pace I’d set myself I wouldn’t have finished. I finished solidly middle of the field, and am a bit annoyed at myself for getting lost. It cost me a top third finish and was totally avoidable with a little bit more prep.
Live and learn I suppose.
I need to do more strength training, I had plenty in the tank aerobically, but my musculoskeletal system couldn’t keep up.This morning my abdominal wall was feel pretty tense though my legs are almost back to normal.
I’ll be back next year for the 50km race.