Training Log Archive: danfoster

Spend the morning washing the bike and gear, and then took the bike for a shakedown ride with Jess to enumerate its shortcomings prior to dropping it off at the bike shop for a tune-up. I miss it already.

Event: 2018 Billygoat XL
 

My first Goat race. I was originally planning to camp after the Sylvan 12 hr AR ended and then drive to the Billygoat the next morning, but given the rain, I gave up on the Goat and started driving for home. Made it to Newark and got a hotel room. Woke up feeling pretty good and saw the rain wasn't supposed to start until the second half of the race, and I still had a pair of dry socks buried somewhere in a car full of filthy gear.

When the race started, I was still debating whether to focus on navigating or whether to find out if I actually could run for more than 10 minutes at a time. I flipped the map, saw the crowd take off in two different directions, and spent the entire run to the first control trying to peek at other runners maps to make sure I wasn't following a pack of Pygmy Goats. A very startled deer blew past us in the opposite direction, which was a good omen.

The choice had been made for me - I was going to stick with this pack for as long as my lungs would allow, and concentrated on keeping myself from getting dropped off the back as our group of 20 or so Juniors and adults wound our way through the woods. Today, I was a Follower.

Finished in 2:12, which is about 2 hours longer than I typically run in a session (or season). Nice to know that my daily mountain biking is improving my running endurance - that will come in handy if I ever get chased by a really persistant bear. I have no doubt that if I had been moving at a speed where I could actually read and navigate the map (rather than just see that I still had it), my time
would have been significantly slower. Perhaps that will be my focus at next year's Goat, at least until the starting gun goes off.

Billy Goat - Splits

Event: Sylvan Adventure Race
 

Heavy rain moved in around 2AM, and it was still drizzling when we woke up. With the bike still in the car, I managed to squeeze into the passenger's seat and do most of my pre-race prep out of the rain.

We were bussed up to the Sterner Mill section of Nockamixon SP, and after a quick prologue we were off on the foot-O section. Our route was 14, 12, along a fishermen's shoreline trail with lots of poison ivy to M1, 8, 6, 4 (with Untamed NE), 3, 1 (searching with GOALS and others for a while), 2. At this point, we headed back along the stream with a number of teams, hoping to find an easy ford over to 5. We ran out of options when the stream turned into a large pond, and watched another team cross while we prepared to follow. When they started stumbling and going in over waist deep, we decided it was too early in the race to be that wet, and bailed out to the road. We picked up 9, 10, and 13 en-route to the boats.


Our plan for the second section was to quickly put Jason ashore on the south side of the lake, and let him pick up as much as he could in 2.5 hrs. In the meantime, Kate and I would take the boat to a cove between A and M3, and pick up A, F, E, D and M3 before paddling to N to regroup at 1:30PM. We saw a nice landing spot a little before our intended cove, and I wrapped my PFD around a tree on the trail to mark our canoe's spot on the shoreline. We found A, a small reentrant off a larger one, and my plan was to swing left (west) to intersect the trail heading north to F and E. But apparently our reentrant was already running west, and I swung us SE. We ended up right back at the trail we had left to get A, and headed for M3.

We found D along with Strong Machine, and when they took the bushwhack to E, we decided to loop around on the trail. That is, until we saw the old forest road running north, and foolishly followed this "shortcut", which quickly turned into a slow bushwhack. I knew we were behind schedule, since we had a 1hr paddle to get to N, but by this point the fastest way out was to keep pushing north. Our GPS track shows us crossing the lower Old Mill Trail to E, but I don't ever remember seeing this. We looped north, crossed the creek, and eventually came into E from the east side of the mill pond.

We needed to be paddling at this point, so we had to skip F and run 3.5K back to the boat, and then slog for an hour up to N. Jason had made fast work of his points on the south side of the lake, and had skipped P to make it back to our meeting spot, arriving 1 minute ahead of time. He got a nice rest until we pulled up 30 minutes late. From there it was another 30 minutes of paddling to bring us to the bike T/A.

The MTB trails at Nockamixon were a blast! My only issue on this section was that I started feeling really nausous about halfway through the singletrack. I think I may need to stop indulging in Rootstock's mid-race coffee shots. Trying to unscramble the twisty dashed lines on the map while riding twisty trails eventually proved too much, and Jason stepped up to confirm our nav while I tried to get my head and body back to normal.

Once that passed, the rest of the biking went smoothly, and we breezed past several teams on the dirt roads, trusting our odometers and counting reentrants to confirm that they were searching under the wrong bridges.

We rolled into the final T/A, having decided we wouldn't bother with any of the optional bike-O points in the dark and in the rain. But a quick glance at the map showed two "gimme" points, so back out we went. Kudos to teams that rode those rocky trails in the wet!

We picked up a final 5 points on foot, with Jason blasting off up reentrants to punch while Kate and I prepared for the next location. With 15 minutes to spare but nothing else within striking range, we celebrated our first race together and headed back to the finish.

I don't think any of us knew exactly what to expect heading into our first race as The Adventure Dogs!, but we all came out of it smiling, healthy, and confident in our team.

Thanks to Brian, Abby, and Brent and the rest of the Rootstock family and volunteers for an outstanding course and a great race experience!

C • Great work out there! 3

Rode Nox counter-clox before meeting up with The Adventure Dogs! back in camp. After training all winter and spring without a single mechanical issue, my rear derailleur cable came loose at the furthest possible point from the car. I got it shifting again and made it back to the car with enough daylight to set up camp and scarf down half of a gas station pizza.

Last ride of the season? The pre-season, that is. Off to the Sylvan AR in the morning.

Pre-breakfast ride to beat the heat. Waded into the pond to help a neighbor's dog return to shore with a stick many times larger than she was.

Short lap so we wouldn't get in the way of the Horses and Hounds club.

A windy paddle-board session around Lake Quannapowitt before a kayak-board meeting at REI. Upwind was tough - there's a lot of fetch on that lake! Calm and relaxing in the lee. Nice downwind run, and then a brutal cross-wind fight back to the car. Had the entire lake to myself, probably for good reason.