Training Log Archive: Bash

Thomass Greenwood - made a last minute decision to do this event late last night, and was lucky that they'd printed a few extra maps. I realized just as they handed out the maps that I felt very dehydrated from yesterday's race, in spite of all the water I'd been chugging this morning. And by the time you can tell you're dehydrated, you're usually pretty far along. Anyway, I started off behind the *real* runners as usual, but fortunately we came to a big steep, slippery descent into a valley just before the 1st control, and my kamikaze tendencies allowed me to pass a bunch of people there. But after that, my legs reminded me that I'd done a good amount of running yesterday, and they were a bit fatigued. My nav was OK, but there were 2 controls where I was slightly off and had to relocate. Total mistakes while navigating my chosen routes (ignoring the very likely possibility that my route choices were not optimum) probably totalled less than 2 minutes, and for someone at my level, it would be arrogant to complain about that. Mostly today, I was just slow, slow, slow.

Congrats to GHO's Marianna Weber for winning the race!

Leg strength exercises. Although my legs feel well-used (maybe even abused) after this weekend, I felt reasonably strong. It may be time to start adding weights to some of the exercises to up the ante.

My pre-Christmas knee damage seems to have settled down, and nothing feels like it's rattling around in there right now. My kneecap hurt while biking yesterday, and we only went about 18 km. I'm wondering if it's going to be biking that I have to cut down on, rather than running.

Salomon Adventure Challenge - Mansfield

FAR Winter Adventure Race at Mansfield.

Luckily, they had hired a minister as the course designer. Allthough we still had 50/50 grass and crunchy snow at 9 p.m. the night before the race, his prayers were answered after we went to bed, bringing a storm that dropped 20 cm of the white stuff. Woo hoo!

Tough call about which skis to use - and we'd brought a van load with all the skis we own! Until shortly before the race, we'd been told that skate skiing was banned on classic trails, plus we could see some off-trail routes that we wanted to follow.. So we went for classic, which was probably NOT the right choice, although Bent and I are new skate skiers, so it's hard to say. During the captains' briefing, they announced that skating would be allowed on classic trails after all, because they hadn't been track set. Not sure, but that might have changed our strategy. Anyway, since it was -0.5C before breakfast, I waxed purple for 0C, and took red along in case I needed more grip.

There was a Lemans start where we ran up a hill to CP1, then ran back down to put on our skis. We could have done this better in a couple of ways, but it was only a few minutes lost, so no biggie. Then we put on our skis and headed up the hill to the trails. Not sure if the temperature dropped after breakfast or if the elevation difference had an effect, but the new wet snow stuck like bricks to our skis. Yikes!! We stuck it out for 20 minutes, trying to wear down the wax, but finally had to dig out the scraper. Whatta waste of time! After that, we skated on our classic skis when we could, and they were better for the off-trail stuff we did.

The "ski scramble" section was fun, with 4 CPs to visit in any order. If you skied on a trail, then you had to ski in the designated direction, but you didn't have to ski on trails.

Because of all our problems, we were shocked to be in 8th place (out of about 50 teams) coming off the ski. I guess some teams must have had it even worse.

We transitioned to biking on very snowy roads, with occasional Close Encounters of the Scary Kind with SUVs, pick-up trucks, snowmobiles and snowplows. We got Bent towing TheMinister, who has been sick over the past month. There was a big climb where we gained elevation that took us from bottom to top of the nearby downhill ski resort. An all-male team had passed us at the bottom, and when I saw them walking their bikes, I couldn't resist pedalling past them all the way to the top. :-)

We dropped our bikes and started our trek by following a marked route up the escarpment - very steep and slippery. Then we headed a couple of km cross-country toward the highest hill in the area. At first, there were tracks going on my bearing, then they turned in a direction I didn't like, so I struck off on my own and broke trail, which probably slowed us down, but I hate not navigating in winter races! Bent had TheMinister on tow for the trekking section, and I was impressed at TheMinister''s ability (which I do not share) to be towed through tangled forest and down slippery hills.

After the first hilly trek, the next two portions of the trek became a run through the bush in well-worn tracks (although not always easy footing). We passed two teams in this section, then crossed into Mansfield and booted it to the finish. It wasn't our best winter race result, but considering TheMinister's recent injury and illness, it was better than expected. We finished 9th, just 3 minutes out of 7th. Most importantly, it was a beautiful winter day and we had a great time being outside in it! :-)

Big congrats to our friends Hammer, Tarno, Adidas PL&A, Tiny, Crash, Rocky, Gazelle and Gazette who all had awesome races!

Slippery trail run around Palgrave West. It's been awhile since I've tried to go fast, mostly because the pooches have found interesting things to investigate in the woods, and I've needed to track them down. However, BulletDog lived up to her name today, and I tried to run at what I imagine my 5K race pace might be, if I ever did 5K races.

So... you might ask whether I actually ran 5K, given that I was out there for 20 minutes. Well, that's not a polite question to ask a lady!

As, Bs and Cs around the yard and down to the mailbox (checking first to make sure that no cars were coming that might see me doing silly walks).

In packing for this weekend's adventure race, I stumbled across some gear that hasn't been used in some time, including the Camelbak that I used in the RTN Champs in September, still full of fluid. To get the lid unscrewed, I finally ended up in the workshop using a C-clamp and vice grips, after I'd tried several other methods without success. Then the weird thing was that it wasn't slimy inside. Apparently if you leave Camelbaks long enough, there is another stage BEYOND slimy. Very scary. I am sharing this information with Attackpointers as a cautionary tale.

Crunch, crunch. Ooofff!! Today I made it little farther in Caron Shepley's "Hard Core Conditioning" DVD. It's getting a bit more possible - which is a good thing, because I was developing some awesome upper abs (the early part of the DVD) and completely flabby lower abs (the later part of the DVD, some of which I still haven't seen). And really, when was the last time anyone walked up to somebody and said, "Wow, you have a really nice 2-pack!"

One of those adventurous days you can only have when you live in the boonies... Thanks to the freezing rain, it's a skating rink out there, and no vehicles can come down our dirt road. It's about 2 km to the nearest paved road. I tried to go out in my AWD Subaru Outback and did most of a 360 before I realized that I'd be doing well just to get back into our driveway. Which fortunately I did, plus I made it another 120 meters slightly uphill on ice to our garage. Ironically, I was going to town to pick up a pair of YakTrax Pros from the hardware store. They would be useful today.

So I called Bent at work and let him know that he was going to have to come home from work on foot, sick or not. He had worn street clothes, and didn't have his usual gear for jogging 4+ km cross-country in pouring rain at 0C. I offered to start jogging from this direction with my backpack full of Icebugs, toque, gloves, headlamp, etc.

We get power failures more often than in urban areas, so I did the usual prep before leaving - filled several big containers with drinking water (our well pump is electric) and turned up the furnace in anticipation of losing it. Then off into the rain with BulletDog.

We met Bent and ThunderDog in the forest halfway, and they were doing pretty well, although we were all extremely soggy. Now we've got the fire burning high, ready for a cozy evening at home, and we're just keeping our fingers crossed that we don't have to face the nastiest hardship that freezing rain causes country residents - the loss of our HD satellite signal.

Around Palgrave West with ThunderDog. I wanted to keep my Icebugs dry, so I wore regular trail running shoes. Just 100 meters from our house, I skidded down a steep, icy hill off-trail and stopped when the foot of my injured leg jammed against a rotten log. Twisted the leg, wrenched the shoulder and smashed down on my funny bone. Sometimes I think that I'm just an accident waiting to happen, except that wouldn't be accurate because accidents never wait very long to happen to me!!! After that, I felt pretty good running - other than the bruising, of course. Still lots of crunchy snow and ice on the trails.

After injuring myself in my attempt to keep my Icebugs dry, I remembered that I needed to try them out to see if they would fit into the pedal cages on my bike. (For winter AR, we take off the clipless pedals to save time and frostbite in transitions.) Because FAR has just removed the mandatory snowshoe requirement for this weekend's event, I want to race in Icebugs for sure, but I didn't know if I could slide the little spikes across the pedal platform while moving. Phew, it wasn't easy, but it did work.

I'd intended to give trail riding on snow/ice another shot, but I gave up after a few hundred meters and headed out onto our frozen-hard gravel roads. Riding conditions were excellent, and I tried to push hard. In previous years when I've used the bike in winter AR, I've felt awkward and out of shape. Now that I'm doing leg strength exercises for my knee injury (even if I am pathetic about doing them regularly), my cycling legs felt better than usual.