Training Log Archive: Bash

Sadly, Mocha's health declined steadily after her seizures last Sunday. We made the tough decision yesterday and spent the weekend spoiling her with hikes, cuddles and steak, then she left us peacefully tonight. We miss our sweet girl with all our hearts, and our house is full of tears. However, we're grateful that we had time to say goodbye, and we're relieved that she is now free from cancer.

Bolton Fall Fifty, time deducted for stops and for the singing of "Oh Canada". This is Coach LD's annual birthday event - always a great time. Even though we weren't able to attend the full event, we enjoyed joining the group for a trail run from our place into the Palgrave forest. We gave Coach LD a satellite map with hidden treasure marked on it (turned out to be chocolate chip shortbread cookies). She did a great job getting us there so we had to take a more circuitous route home to ensure the group got their required distance. (Age = Kilometers at this birthday party.)

Ran around Palgrave East trails in cold rain. Along the way, I checked out the nav challenge for Coach LD's Bolton Fall Fifty party on Sunday, hence I can't make my GPS track public. The distance should work out perfectly, which is important for this event, although nav errors could lead to higher distance than the Coach's age warrants. Oh well. :)

I'm trying my HRM again since we'd like to look into 'Bent's crazy-high HR to see if it's related to his stomach problems in long races. I might as well get familiar with my numbers again. Looks like this was mostly a Maffetone-paced run, which is fine.

Throwback Thursday

Hard Core Live with Caron

'Bent and I brought Mocha to class tonight since we didn't think she was feeling well enough to stay alone that long. All the excitement perked her right up for a little while. There was another dog, Jackson, but our regular class dog, Betty, was away. There are a few poses that my shoulder cannot do right now but I was able to keep up for the most part.

Learned something new today. You can watch Facebook popularity wax and wane in real time. When I first saw this, there had been 16,000 "unlikes" in the past 24 hours. It takes a little while to get completely set up.
https://www.quintly.com/facebook-live-statistics/j...

Not sure this is the race for me.

If you encounter an alligator on the trail, it's because the alligator is trying to warm up, not because it is looking for food. If you are running past the alligator simply move to the other side of the trail. If the alligator is across the trail run behind the tail end of the alligator. If the alligator gets spooked it will try to return to the water. Don't put yourself in the position between the water and the alligator. We will have park staff and volunteers on the trail to deal with alligator issues during the race.

In case anyone is still thinking about UTMB, they have delegated the rating of their qualifying races to ITRA (International Trail Running Association). The good news is that more consistency will be introduced into the race rating process. The bad news is that no North American races have chosen to join ITRA at this point. So there are currently no UTMB qualifiers in North America in 2015.

I wrote UTMB to comment on this out of interest (I'm not trying to qualify!); they aren't sure why this has happened but the ball is in the court of North American race directors. It is no longer possible for racers to contact UTMB directly to request that a race be added. Most of the races in North America that are tough enough to be qualifiers are ones that regularly sell out so it's not likely a high priority for them to buy an ITRA membership and go through the evaluation process. I would guess that the North Face Endurance Challenge Series events might still get points since they share their title sponsor with UTMB - but technically, they're not supposed to.

At least *something* positive is coming from climate change.
http://news.discovery.com/history/century-old-note...

Two weeks since we removed the tick and 'Bent has no Lyme symptoms so far. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, be careful.

Rest day, unless you count about 500,000 e-mails and a few phone calls. Great to get out for a forest hike with Mocha. She's fine today - at least she *was* fine until our stupid propane gas detector had a false alarm and traumatized the pooches for an hour. Eventually, she settled down to watch TV.

Gotta love democracy but don't have to love the results. Caledon elected several good people today but there was some dirty campaigning that worked. This will not be our most productive Council.

Congrats to former Tree Hugger teammate Brittany Webster on winning her age group at the XTERRA World Championship in Maui and finishing as the top amateur woman overall! Time to get back to her XC ski training; she has a big race season coming up.