And now on Saturday, September 9, it was time for the ostensible reason I was in Toronto: the Spartan Ontario Beast! Since the race was in the afternoon, I decided to fuel up that morning by having a generous helping of oatmeal with breakfast, and then followed that up with some pastries and doughnuts that I normally avoid. But finding the place turned out to be a challenge. I drove up to the town of Barrie (pronounced like the name "Barry") and then spent too much time driving in circles looking for Highlands Nordic. Since, as always, I had data roaming on my phone turned off, I couldn't just take out my phone and look it up on Google Maps. I actually had to stop and ask a few people for directions. But, I eventually found the place.
So, being in a *Nordic* (cross-country) ski area and not a mountain, the terrain was more or less flat, unlike the mountain I was racing on a year earlier in Québec. The obstacles were the usual sort you'd expect from a Spartan, that is, climbing walls, mud pits, rope climb (which I still couldn't do), barb wire crawl, vertical cargo net, etc. It was 22 km (~13.7 miles) and most of the hard ones were packed in the beginning and the end, so most of the last half was just a long trail run. Think about this for a moment: a year earlier it took me all of 7:14:23 to do a mere 9km/5.4 miles on Owl's Head, a ski mountain. Here, I blazed through 22km/13.7 miles in 4:55:50 because it was all flat and I could run through most of the space between obstacles. To date this is still my best Beast time.
I doubtless had lunch there after the race, since they always serve up something tasty for a post-race meal at Spartans. After that it was an uneventful drive back to Toronto. Not much else happened that day, since I was pretty tired. I think I hung around the Yonge-Eglinton Centre (the shopping mall on top the Eglinton subway station) for a while and likely had dinner there at some point. There was, however, one thing on my list of places to check out on this trip that I had to hit up that night.
There was one place I found earlier on WikiTravel that I wanted to check out: a bar in the Parkdale neighborhood called The Rhino, which had a selection of no less than 280 beers! Parkdale was a little out of the way compared to most places in the city I was visiting, and so I had to spend some time on a bus for the first and only time during my visit.
Like I said, they really did have 280 beers available to drink at the Rhino. I couldn't exactly drink them all, unfortunately, but I did have two, including a Henderson Amber Ale. Quite delicious.
While walking back to the bus stop I found an eye-catching sign in the window of the Parkdale Community Health Centre. I couldn't walk past it without getting a picture:
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