Training Log Archive: Bash

Thomass Chase at Rattlesnake Point.
(Time is approximate until results are posted, since I don't really know.)

Nice snowy day and an excellent turn-out for the 2nd Thomass winter O race of the season. From comparing routes with others afterward, it looks like I probably ran a few too many straight lines between controls today. It would have been worth considering using trails and roads more often to get better traction in the snow and avoid thick, foot-grabbing weeds. I also did an abysmal job of marking my place on my map with my thumb, resulting in considerable confusion at control #9 when I somehow started reading the map at #6 (upside down) and lost 15+ seconds agonizing over where the big field beside me had disappeared to. Finally I noticed that my "#9" was connected to #5. Oops. Other than that, things went surprisingly smoothly today, and I hit all the controls pretty well.

Luckily, it was an age/gender handicapped event, so I was given a 4-minute head start over the M-elites and got to skip 4 controls as well. This proved to be enough of an advantage to get my first Thomass win! :-)) GHO Canada GHO members took 1st through 4th place - possibly more, not sure what happened after that. Good work, team!

Started with a loop around the Charlevoix trail with Bent and pooches. My brain felt - and still feels - utterly disconnected from my body, probably the result of interrupted sleep, since ThunderDog needed a couple of treatments in the middle of the night after her attempt at Death By Chocolate. (See comment on yesterday's log.) Fortunately, it seems that we made it to the vet quickly enough, as it is now past the time when any post-chocolate toxic effects would appear. Yikes.

We dropped the dogs off at home, then skied to the town of Palgrave for lunch. I was imagining what it must have been like in the early 1900s when the train line ended at Palgrave. Tourists would come up from Toronto and stay in one of two hotels on the main street, one of which is now Bent's dental office. People would hire guides to go out into the wilderness, travelling across the Palgrave Conservation Area and past where our house is today. David Milne, an associate of the Group of Seven, lived in Palgrave for awhile and painted the surrounding countryside. Driving around here by car today, it's hard to picture all this, but on days when we travel cross-country through forests and fields and arrive near the old train station, the old stories come alive.

And back to the present... we had absolutely awesome fresh snow conditions. What a great day! Now if only my stupid cold would go away after 3.5 weeks. I miss having my real voice and my real lungs.

Ski around Palgrave West with BulletDog and ThunderDog, breaking trail through 15 cm of new snow. Nice!

Tomorrow we've got a skate-skiing session at Hardwood Hills with Coach Ming, so I will have new sore muscles shortly. Skate-skiing is the only activity that makes me acutely aware of the muscles on my shins, whatever the heck they are called.

Leg strength exercises

First attempt at silly walks and strides, much to the confusion of the pooches. More effort than I had expected - these drills definitely work muscles that I seldom use when running. I also noticed that my right leg (the problem one) seems less flexible or less strong or something.

Snowy trail run through Palgrave West on a sunny winter day. ThunderDog and BulletDog were crazy-happy, bounding up and down hills, and stopping to make dog angels in the snow. Halfway around, I hit a leg-wrenching object under the snow and realized that I'd forgotten my knee brace for the first time in several months. It actually wasn't too bad, although I don't think I'll make it a habit. I've stopped using the arch support, and my knee hasn't had that "rattling around" feeling lately. So even though the damaged cartilage can't heal, it seems that the sports doc was right that the pain would probably diminish. :-)

Today I focused on extending the back leg, pushing off, then kicking the leg up. In the running clinic. one common mistake was for people to do a "bum kick" too early, thus missing the chance for a good back leg extension and push-off.

I'm trying to think of posture all the time, not just while running, because it needs to become more natural. It's nothing fancy, just the old trick of pretending that a string is pulling your head up, plus thinking about your back shoulder blades being pulled closer together. Barrie recommended a weight machine exercise as well, which I must figure out how to do here.

Last but not least, it's TNT hill interval day. We actually have a pretty good hill circuit on our property, so today I did loops that included our hilliest terrain. Traction wasn't the greatest, but it was excellent practice for the Thomass winter O series.

Christmas Shopping speed/strength intervals at intensity level 5. Four hours of $30 on, 15 minutes off. Total distance about 5 km around downtown Toronto without a vehicle. Plenty of upper body strength work, especially by the time I got to the later intervals.

Perhaps it was because of the extended Wallet Warmup - or maybe I was just tired of walking all day, but I purchased a car on the way home.

TNT comes to Palgrave again! After starting my parallel TNT last Tuesday, I made the mistake of skipping the TNT hill training on Thursday - and boy, did I hear about it. So today was speed interval day once again. I decided to move to shorter intervals so that I could do more of them, and hopefully keep up a faster pace. Speed *really* isn't my thing, so if the intervals get too long, I cheat and ease off, which is missing the point. So I'll have to work my way up to what the GHO Canada GHO team is doing.

Today was 6 intervals of 2 min. with 90 s off in between. I'm wondering if I should do speedwork on the road (more traction), or at least on a flatter trail. On a snowy day in the hilly Oak Ridges Moraine, parts of my speed workout were more like a strength workout.

The rest of my trail run. ThunderDog accompanied me on the part before dark, then I dropped her off at the house. I tried to keep my shoulders back and use my arms properly. For some reason, I had a recurrence of the stupid hip pain that, before today, had only ever happened at the 2005 Raid The Hammer. I don't think it was caused by improving my posture. Apparently, hip tightness in long runs can result from the opposite arm moving too far across the body - but I don't think I do that.

This was the first good field test of my new Princeton Tec Apex headlamp. I can see why Bent has been raving about it.
www.princetontec.com/products/index.php?id=2&type=...

Leg strength exercises while watching Jeopardy.

Libreville is the capital of what country? (I didn't get this one.)