Training Log Archive: Bash

Paddled out. Mmm, I love Algonquin Park.

After eating our food, the portage out was speedier - although it's amazing how much weight we still had left! (Not that we tried very hard. I even brought a hard cover book.)

We explored Louisa Lake, experiencing a wide variety of weather in the process. In addition to the paddling, we took the dogs on a hike along a different portage trail. Much nicer without the canoe and packs! We saw an enormous bull moose with a big rack at the end of one bay we paddled into.

ThunderDog continued her birthday celebration in style. She paddled.



She swam.



She took over 'Bent's Thermarest chair.



Then finished off with a good snooze.



The weather improved in the evening, and the sky was beautiful after dinner.

It's ThunderDog's 12th birthday on Wednesday, so even though the weather forecast for Algonquin Park was dubious, 'Bent and I really wanted to take the pooches canoeing, which they love (and so do we). We'd been thinking that ThunderDog might be getting too senior to go on future canoe trips, but she did so well this weekend that we seem to have been wrong about that. I certainly hope so.

We paddled down Rock Lake to the portage to Louisa Lake, then continued on to the best campsite on Louisa!



It had awesome views on all sides.



But unfortunately, waves of rain and thunderstorms kept rolling through all day.



On the bright side, we got lots of reading done.

This 2.9 km portage was unpleasant, but it didn't take as long as expected. The trail was great, but I was carrying a super-heavy pack (including such essentials as biscotti, smoked oysters and a Klean Kanteen full of wine), and the pooches were a little hard to wrangle due to the annoying deer flies (FDFs for my American friends).

I'm getting toward the end of "Fatal Tide", and here is another quote: "Adventure only occurs where there is the risk of death."

This isn't from the author, it's supposedly from a fellow who founded an adventure programs department at a B.C. university, led a climbing expedition to Everest and started a heli-skiing company.

He didn't say that the reverse was true, i.e. that having a risk of death is sufficient to make things adventurous. That's good, because otherwise we'd have to extend our definition of "adventure" to driving a car, having knee surgery or eating my cooking.

But he is saying that outdoor sports without the risk of death aren't adventures. That's a silly definition, because people have died while swimming in pools, using playground equipment or playing baseball. People have also died on guided outdoor trips, which is probably the kind of thing he is denouncing as unadventurous.

So maybe he's saying that we must truly *perceive* the risk of death in order to get enough of a rush from an activity to make it an adventure. Hmmm. This guy has some credentials, so I'm trying to give him a chance, but I'm not making much sense of this idea.

Leanimal, Goose, 'Bent and I met for the Wednesday morning ride, feeling a wee bit smug that the weather was supposed to turn to crap at 11 a.m., and we would already have completed our workout for the day.

Great plan, except the weather turned to crap about 20 minutes into our ride. At first we did the adventure athlete stiff upper lip thing. "The rain feels good after all that hot weather." "I love the challenge when those wet tree roots turn the trails into a skating rink." "It's been at least 3 minutes since we've seen any lightning. I say we go on."

That lasted until the second round of thunder and lightning when the rain started to get heavy again. Nobody argued about pulling the plug - it was just a bad day for damaging bikes, bodies and trails. Naturally, the weather turned sunny later, and I'm sure that lots of *other* people - the ones who didn't bother getting up early - had a great workout today!

I'm in the early chapters of "Fatal Tide", a book about the first fatality in North American adventure racing. As many of you know, it happened during a kayak section on the Bay of Fundy.

The author makes a comment about adventure racing attracting Type T personalities, which psychologists describe as a twist on the usual Type A personality. The result is a goal-oriented thrill seeker.

No argument that some - if not most - of the adventure racers I know are goal-oriented and competitive. But thrill-seeking? Not so much. Fun-loving? Absolutely. When I see a photo of Urthbuoy paddling big water or watch Crash ripping up the single track, I see people who seem to be having fun because they have developed the skills and confidence to *remove* many (although never all) of the elements of risk from what they are doing. (Maybe I'm wrong, and please jump in here if so.)

Maybe it's just semantics, but I think of "thrill-seeking" as looking for a jolt of fear or danger. It seems to me that most adventure racers want to master the skills so that the fear and danger component of their activities is made as small as possible. Not because they're wimps - they can deal with fear and danger when it arises - but because they're focused on being fast and efficient, and generally speaking, thrills take too much time!

"Thrill-seeking" also makes me think of artificial stuff like bungy jumping. When 'Bent and I were in the Queenstown area - the adventure sports capital of New Zealand - we avoided all the jet boats and zip lines in favour of plain old hiking and mountain biking in the spectacular scenery. The rest of that stuff seemed so contrived. You want a good scare? Try doing an overnight adventure race in grizzly bear country - especially if you're a bad navigator. It costs about the same, but the thrill lasts much, much longer.

Thoughts? Any thrill-seekers out there, or is the "Fatal Tide" author out to lunch?

To and from the post office to pay my corporate GST. Hot, hot, hot - and the poison ivy is *very* healthy this year. But it was great to get out.

My knee continues to bug me. It started around the time of a bad bike fall three weeks ago, which was also around the time that I began riding a new bike with different geometry. Let's hope it's the former and not the latter. Or it could be something else entirely, but it's feeling a little stiff and unstable. Time to get back to the stabilizing leg exercises. Coast Raid is only 3 weeks away!