Training Log Archive: Bash

Rodney Yee - Power Yoga for Flexibility

Lots of final UTMB prep today, given that I have to pack for the World Rogaining Champs and UTMB at the same time! Amongst other things, I selected the food I will carry and calculated its caffeine content. Note for comparison: a Starbucks grande latte is 150 mg.

I went over to Albion Hills to see Funderstorm and Graham at the 5 Peaks trail race. It turned out Simpy was there too and before you know it, we were all in Bolton eating Caruso's pizza and talking up a (funder)storm. Very nice! Big thanks to Graham for sneakily buying lunch for all of us. :)

Pre-dinner Tour de Palgrave West, keeping it short to avoid aggravating Ye Olde Stupid Toe too much. This would have been a good weekend for a Hockley Loop but my final "long run" before UTMB will have to be my 24-hr hike with Browner at the World Rogaining Champs.

Test run with my pretty new Ambit in a custom-configured Ultrarunning mode, i.e. reduced recording rate for longer battery life. The GPS track demonstrates the compromises of this mode. Distance recorded is shorter than it really was because the watch doesn't know about all the bends in the trail.

At UTMB last year, the numbers I looked at most of the time were Altitude and Time of Day. Distance was much less meaningful than the amount of climb remaining to the pass. Time of Day is important to me because I'm so close to the cut-offs.

Stupid baby toe blister - grr.

Throwback Thursday: Our first puppy Tobler (AP name ThunderDog) was born in the first week of August 1996. She's no longer with us but she can still make us smile.

Deliciously cool twilight run around Palgrave West fuelled by fresh raspberries during the warm-up and cooldown. Felt great except for my sore baby toe, which needs to get with the program tout de suite. So nice to run without a big pack for a change!

Running-specific. Just maintenance at this point. It's not the right time to try anything new and difficult!

Relaxing paddle at Island Lake with Goose, Coach LD and 'Bent. The summer is flying by so it was nice to squeeze in some time with friends on a perfect afternoon.

This was preceded by a cheese tasting at our place since we had some delicious Québecois souvenirs to share. :)

Home sweet home.

'Bent and I were really looking forward to today. As much as we enjoy training vacations, it's nice to have some R&R time too. Today was going to be that day - a 3-hour run in the morning followed by a sunny patio lunch with microbrewery beer and a couple of hours to explore Mont Tremblant at a leisurely pace - browse in shops, watch the unicycles, maybe visit the lake.

To add context, 'Bent's office is closed for 10 days of vacation but as The-Nicest-Brother-In-The-World, he agreed to spend 5 of those days in Toronto babysitting his 6- and 8-year-old nephew and niece while his brother and wife go on holiday. So with two driving days to and from Québec, our time was limited.

And... cue the nasty grinding noise in the same van that spewed clouds of pink steam on the way to the Doughtys' Robbie Burns Dinner in January. The van I'd suggested someone might want to replace before our next big road trip... So instead of running this morning, 'Bent spent some quality time with a really nice auto mechanic. We'd been hoping the guy would give his blessing to drive it home before getting it repaired but when he put it up on hoist, this is what he found. A brake had seized - a lot.



'Bent tried to rent a car from Discount and obtained the numbers of several taxi companies. The mechanic was so nice that he just offered the keys to his own truck. Wow. It had a clever security modification where you had to turn on an interior light in order to start the ignition. This will become important later in my story.

'Bent returned triumphantly to pick me up. I was all ready to go except that my shoes and trekking poles were still in the van. At the mechanic's. On the hoist.

OK fine, we started at noon. No patio lunch but maybe a microbrewery beer afterward. We climbed to the summit ski lodge via Caps and Sasquatch trails, mostly power hiking with a little running on flats. At the very top, I followed 'Bent in ducking under a low canopy tent and smashed my forehead on an unseen metal bar. Oi! We took an unscheduled break in the summit lodge while I waited to see how bad it would get.

After half an hour, when it seemed that I would live, we ran down on the Nansen road - a long novice ski trail in winter on the far left of this map. My focus for today was long, quad-pounding downhills rather than uphills. This fit the bill with a 650 m descent on gravel road although I could only feel my stupid sore baby toe. My quads seemed fine.



Near the bottom, 'Bent said casually, "Instead of going right back up, I'd like to check on the truck." I've been married long enough to feel an immediate sense of doom upon hearing such a statement. Turns out he wasn't sure if he'd turned off the interior light after starting the truck. Turns out he hadn't. Turns out the nice auto mechanic's truck wouldn't start. Well, crap.

We decided it could wait a little longer while we spent another hour climbing partway up the mountain on trails and running down on the road again. Then we watched 10 minutes of the unicycle world championship cross-country race. Unfortunately, we missed the elites but we got to see lots of racers. Both of us were unexpectedly reminded of an orienteering championship. There were competitors ranging from young children to grandparents, from novice to expert, and there was a sense of community - as if they knew each other from other events. It had a really low key feel. It was very common to see people bail and land on their feet. Competitors seemed supportive of one another, not annoyed that someone fell in front of them. Maybe the elites would have been more intense.









We would have loved to stay and cheer for a lot longer but we only had 45 minutes to get the truck started and take it back to St. Jovite to swap it for our van. No worries, the man is an auto mechanic so the truck will have booster cables, right? Wrong. Tough break but luckily, everyone carries booster cables so we'll just approach someone in the tourist parking lot... Another lesson learned. Apparently 'Bent and I are among the 2% of Canadians who keep booster cables in our vehicles. We must have smelled pretty bad post-run because some of the people I approached looked at me as if I'd proposed a drug deal. Certainly, a lot of people thought it was an unusual question.

And then I saw them - guys that looked like my engineering classmates, back in the day. "They'll have booster cables." And they did. And the truck started and the clouds parted and the angels sang and we got to the auto mechanic's place only 12 minutes after he closed. We are safe to drive home - phew!

And that is the story of our R&R day on this vacation. I think we need more practice!