Training Log Archive: Bash

Urthbuoy is hosting a Spring Photo Contest where we've been asked to show our usual haunts. About 25 minutes northwest of our place, the Bruce Trail and a couple of its side trails form a 21 km loop that travels along both sides of the Hockley River Valley and crosses the river at each end. By southern Ontario standards, there's a lot of elevation gain and some sections of trail are quite steep. Ultrarunners in the Toronto area like to come up here to train close to home for mountain races. Tough runners like Dee will do more than one "Hockley" as a long training day.



For bonus points, this photo from one of the trail's high points shows a couple of the regulars in my log - 'Bent and BulletDog (aka "Mocha" in her non-Attackpoint life). She likes to drink from our water bottles - very handy.

'Bent and I wanted to test his knee since we're only a month away from our mountain marathon. At this point, we're expecting to drop to a shorter course but we're not even sure if he should do it at all. So we picked some very steep sections of the Hockley Loop trail and hiked them with trekking poles. He wore his mountain marathon pack with full load. So far tonight he's feeling OK but we'll see how he feels in the morning.

STORM The Trent at Golden Beach Resort. First full adventure race for 2-Min, PhattyJR's better half. She got bitten by the bug after a couple of off-road multi-sport events last year.

We started with a 14 km paddle along Rice Lake to Bewdley, which would normally be a pleasant, scenic 2-hour canoe trip. But today the wind was blowing like a banshee at 45-60 degrees to our direction of travel. Occasional gusts and areas of choppy, disorganized water added to the challenge.

We took advantage of 2-Min's long canoe instruction experience by putting her in the stern with canoe and kayak paddles available. It was a hard effort for 3 hours as the boat bounced in the waves and water sloshed over the side. We saw a team flip along the shore and we made frequent direction changes relative to the wind to avoid being swamped. We're both quite comfortable in a canoe, so in the midst of this maelstrom, we spent 3 hours enjoyably immersed in "getting to know you" girl talk. Fun!





It was nice to see the friendly faces of Phatty and Goose at the TA. We had been fine while paddling but got chilled quickly in our wet clothes as we prepared for a 2 km trek to our bikes. It took quite awhile to feel warm again. This was the last time all day we would see our transition bags, so we needed to take everything from here. We would drop our bikes in two places to do trekking sections, then we'd make our way back to Golden Beach Resort. I opted to just wear my AR bike shoes (the ones with running shoe tread) for the entire race, and I also wore my bike helmet for most of the day. 2-Min doesn't use bike shoes, so it worked out perfectly with neither of us needing to change shoes.





The terrain around Rice Lake is so varied, hilly and scenic. The roads are curvy and interesting - always climbing or descending. We saw some great views and got a good workout on our way to TA3.





It was great to see M&M at the TA. We had a long trail section where we needed to pick up 4 CPs in a county forest. STORM was using SI timing - cool! 2-Min is nursing a longtime knee problem so we hiked instead of running to avoid any further injury. We were at this TA with a couple of our rivals in the female team division, Leanimal and Gosling, but this was our last sighting of them for the rest of the day. Congrats on trouncing us, ladies!



Back on our bikes, we rode to the natural area across from the resort and headed in on foot to find 3 more CPs. 2-Min proved herself to be a true adventure racer by plunging into some thick bushwhacking and swampy ground without complaint.



She was doing so well that I didn't take her seriously at first when she got stuck in knee-deep mud and her shoe threatened to come off! Not so much fun with a bad knee either.





She extracted herself and we finished the trek, then hopped back on our bikes for the short ride to the finish line. After completing the STORM Trek Elite course, 2-Min is officially an adventure racer now!! :-)



Oh, and so is PhattyJR, of course. We had a fun day out there - lots of laughs and good conversation. Thanks for teaming up with me, 2-Min!

One of the great things about this weekend was the chance to see so many friends. Speaking of which... Running Free was the top team overall. Congrats Dee, Relentless, Harps and PhattyJR!



And thanks as always to STORM for working so hard to put on a fun, well-organized and safe event.

Believe it or not... I'm getting my gear ready to race for the 4th weekend straight! A bunch of us are at Golden Beach Resort on Rice Lake ready to STORM The Trent tomorrow. My energy level is a little on the low side but this event is too good to miss! Thanks to Leanimal for cooking a great pre-race dinner.

Ever since the rogaine, I've been eating like a ravenous teenager! Hammer is well aware of this after politely watching me wolf down three times as many calories as he did at lunch yesterday. Not sure if rogaining is good for the health!

Rocky set up a fun mountain bike orienteering course for us at Palgrave - and then the heavens opened! I got to most of the controls, then decided to come back so I'd have time to dry out my bike gear before leaving for STORM The Trent tomorrow. Poison ivy is out and it's very, very healthy! No more shorts in Palgrave until the first frost of autumn. :-( Time includes the ride to and from Palgrave.

Dakota Rogaining Champs report is up - finally.

Met up with Hammer for some coaching on proper thumb compass technique. It takes some getting used to, but I can see how it could work really well. I felt very spoiled to have a 3-time North American O champion friend teaching me the basics. Thanks, Hammer!

I don't suppose any of my tech/map/GPS-savvy friends downloaded our GPS data in some format like .GPX before I stupidly, accidentally deleted the data just now for the final 4 3/4 hours of our rogaine? :-( Here's the part I kept.
http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view/?trip_id=1...

Dakota Rogaining Champs results are up. Team Barbs placed 3rd overall of 18 teams, finishing ahead of all the Coed teams - woot! :-) That was the dream result we had joked about. Report still to come. (Real life has intervened.)

Jim Waddington's beautiful South Dakota photos with a few of mine sprinkled in.

Barb Bryant's fun Dakota Rogaine movies. Phatty and Harper make appearances!

Part 1 - pre-rogaine (8 min)



Part 2 including scary pre-race instructions, route planning and getting ready to go. (9 min)



Part 3, doing the rogaine (10 min)



Part 4, short post-rogaine clips (1 min)