Training Log Archive: Bash

15C and sunshine! Although I'd love to be skiing on March 10, I guess it's time to embrace spring. 'Bent wanted to test his mountain bike before Moab but the trails here are too icy/muddy to ride without damaging them (or ourselves). He proposed a ride down the trail that runs beside the Humber River in Toronto - a rare urban adventure. I checked the maps quickly but didn't bring them along. I figured we couldn't get too lost, even though there are a few places where the trail spits you out onto the road and you need to find your way back onto it in a different park. I figured we'd be able to navigate visually using the river valley, the location of the sun and (if we got really uncertain) my iPhone.

The northwest terminus of the Humber Trail is on the northeast corner of the Hwy 427 Finch exit, across the highway from Claireville Conservation Area but not connected to it. We couldn't park at the very end so we parked in a nearby subdivision and headed into the valley.

We rode some very mucky trails in the outer reaches of the Humber Arboretum - best avoided by bikes as there is a more direct and better maintained route to the bike trail that we took on our way back. Once we got to the main paved trail, the riding was excellent - a few pedestrians, dogs and other cyclists but plenty of space to ride at a good speed and admire the scenery. We made a wrong turn for a few blocks at a place where the southbound river turns north but otherwise it was straightforward.



South of the 401 and Weston Rd., the trail sent us out onto the road. A few blocks later, we found ourselves at the top of a tall steel staircase that plunged into the valley. We asked a man who had just come up whether the bike trail was at the bottom of the stairs. He was very friendly but English wasn't his first language and I wasn't sure whether the trail at the bottom of the stairs was merely muddy or if it failed to go where we wanted to go. In any case, he urged us to take Weston Rd. for a few blocks until we hit a major cycling trail turn-off.

This section of Weston Road was pretty much the opposite of everything I enjoy about outdoor activity. Two lanes of heavy traffic going in each direction, narrow lanes, no shoulder, buses, noisy, smells of exhaust... We weren't going far so we just stayed on the narrow sidewalk. We could see a police officer and car with flashing lights so we walked our bikes like good citizens. The area was dingy and we passed a few unsavoury-looking characters whose facial expressions did not suggest a love of bikes. I got out my iPhone to make sure we were heading the right direction. Yup, almost there.

I wanted to sneak back onto our bikes on the sidewalk so I looked back where the police officer had been. No sign of him but I did a double take when out of the grit and blowing garbage in the distance emerged The Perfect Runner, looking as out of place here as we felt. Excellent running form, good posture, snappy cadence, no wasted motion, tons of energy... Even his outfit was perfectly matched, including Salomon pack and S-Lab XT Wings. Hmm, that's weird... so this guy on this busy urban road is a trail runner - and obviously a good one. If I ask his name, I bet I'll recognize it. Funny, he kinda looks like STORM. Oh! That's because it *is* STORM. And Heather B on a bike pacing him.

It was about the craziest and most unlikely place for us all to run into one other but it was fun to have good company and conversation as we escorted STORM on the last 10K of his 46K long run. (He is also training for the Death Race - a whole lot better than I am!)



Heather B lives near the south end of the Humber Trail so she led us through a couple of places where trail discontinuities could have led us astray.



The farther south we went, the more crowded the trails got and the smaller the dogs became. We had started in the Lab/German Shepherd part of town and made it down to Pomeranian/Shih Tzu Land. It was a treat to arrive at Lake Ontario where STORM's run ended.





If you look really closely, the CN Tower is sticking out of the top of STORM's hat.



This was only our halfway point so we didn't linger. Our ride back in the warm evening light was great - except when 'Bent's chain broke. Glad we got that out of the way before Moab.



We didn't go directly home. It felt like the first day of spring so we had to stop at the DQ on Weston Rd. (Missed you, Harps.)



We rode to the end of the trail just to map it with GPS. It was getting kinda late - a perfect evening to pick up Caruso's Pizza in Bolton. Fun day of urban exploration! :)

Even though I went a decent distance, this felt like a long run fail. I went south into Albion Hills because when I drove past it this morning, the terrain appeared mostly brown and grassy. Unfortunately, it turned out that most of the trails were glare ice. I moved to a few different parts of the park but things didn't get better. I finally gave up and headed for home, taking a detour through the village of Palgrave, across the Reddington golf course (trespass!) and through the conservation land of Palgrave East and West.

Running on ice has been our primary winter sport over the past couple of months, sadly. If you've done much ice running, you've probably had the experience of losing traction on an icy downhill and suddenly finding yourself hurtling downward at the mercy of gravity, running with your legs spinning like The Roadrunner and praying that the slope will level out before you get flung high into the air and splattered on the ground. That happened to me a few times today (the loss of control, not the splattering on the ground). For those familiar with Albion Hills, you can imagine what it was like when this happened near the top of the Green Monster hill. I was only saved from disaster because years of orienteering have honed my ability to grab and cling to passing saplings, even at high speed.

Because so much of the run involved tap dancing across scary-slippery surfaces, it felt that I never really warmed up nor got into a rhythm, which is sort of the point of a 2.5 hour run. I did enjoy the podcasts though. One was a Spark (CBC) podcast talking about new roles for libraries. Examples included libraries that are offering workshop space, power tools and soldering stations. My favourite was a library where you can check out the librarian's dog for a few hours of companionship.

Smile of the Day:
Blog with hundreds of very short video clips showing animals acting like, um, jerks.

'Bent and I did the Rides: Hill Country DVD - a longer ride through rolling Indiana countryside near the Ohio River. These structured bike workouts really make us sweat! There were lots of climbs but we also had to work on high cadence recovery on the descents (which I noticed the cycling team onscreen did not do!)

The DVD was 1:20 plus I did some extra warmup/cooldown. For the DVD:
Ave Watts: 162
Max Watts: 258
Ave Speed: 25.1 kph
Ave Cadence: 77

Run off the bike while listening to an "Under the Influence" podcast about Steve Jobs.

This is what world class trail ultrarunner Kilian Jornet is doing for training today... a little tour of the Mer de Glace near Chamonix. Wish I could do the same!

Not a good day. Just found out my parents were in a car accident on their 2nd last day of vacation in Florida. Lots of damage to both cars but after 7 hours of testing and observation in hospital, they seem to be OK other than aches and pains. :(

I'm not sure how to categorize this but I guess it's strength training. There has been talk on the Death Race Facebook page about people training for downhills by setting the treadmill incline on max, then walking backwards, so of course I had to try it. For the first minute, I didn't feel it at all, then it seemed like work - especially when I added a couple of inches of squatting to make the quads work harder. All the same, I have enough real hills around here that I will probably not do a lot of this. Interesting idea for people who live in flat areas though.

Hard Core Live with Caron

C3 class

It's official. UTMB has rejected the Sulphur Springs 50-miler as a qualifier because it consists of several loops (which doesn't always bother them) and has "many refreshment points", which was the concern I expected. So those of us looking for spring points will be travelling. :(

OK, I think I'm ready to take the plunge...

New e-mail ID: BarbJCampbell at Gmail dot com

This was going to be a few 500 m Bash&Crash intervals without Crash, but the forest was too windy (lots of debris down from the weekend), the slush was too slushy, the ice was too icy and the mud was too muddy. I tried a few different locations, then finally gave up and did an indirect run home via Duffy's Lane (very icy and muddy south of Finnerty) and Finnerty Sideroad. Great day to be out. First time wearing capris outside since California!

BazingaDog and I went for a trail run in Palgrave East and West. Not to name any names, but one of us needed to focus more on running and less on peeing on stuff to mark territory. It was a great day to be out; no one else was in the forest. We ran on the usual energy-sucking surfaces that we've had here for the past two months - glare ice, crust-covered snow and slush. With the coming of spring, we also enjoyed some sections with soft mud and large pools of water hidden by a thin layer of ice. Fun way to finish off the day!

More Daily Show

As we continue to hover between seasons, as we have been for the past 4 months, here are a couple of summertime dreams in spectacular landscapes.

Hiking in Norwegian fjord country (except let's not do that thumbs-up thing, OK?)

Racing The Planet - Iceland trail running stage race, August 2013 (Maybe a back-up plan if the UTMB lottery doesn't work out?)

A few of us were discussing Canadian adventurer Will Gadd today on T. Rex's log. I mentioned a podcast where he talked about a recent change in his attitude toward risk in mountain sports. It's interesting stuff coming from a Red Bull athlete with several X Games gold medals, the world record in distance paragliding and dozens of kayaking first descents.

Here's an article he wrote for Explore magazine entitled The Grand Delusion where he touches on the same topic. If you'd like to hear him go into more detail on the podcast, it was on CBC's Ontario Today program on Jan. 31 and can be downloaded for free from iTunes.

Technically a day off from ultra training so I didn't want to do any kind of Suffer-orama DVD.

- 15 min easy warmup/cooldown (115-140W)
- 35 min holding steady at 150-160W, throwing in three 1-min intervals of 200-220W for kicks

While watching a couple of Daily Shows.

For those considering Vasaloppet 2014, you may enjoy Boris' report from 2011.