Training Log Archive: markg

Did nothing and slept a lot.

Inner Limits 12hr Adventure Race
With Tomas Navratil and Palo Chalupa, finished 3rd in about 8hrs but relegated to 4th after 10min penalty. Amusingly, we were the first all-male team. It was a pretty good result for some debutants. I think we could easily have made 3rd place with out our big mistake but even if we had kept up with the leaders then, we would have faded later.

The race started at 7am at the base of the Calgary Tower with a word puzzle. We got the first part of the puzzle really quickly but struggled with the second for about 5min and were amongst the last starting the run (or walk) up the Tower's fire stair. We passed 3 teams on the way up but with very lactic legs, then had to wait a long time for an elevator to take us back down. Back at the bottom, as we started the first cycling leg, we were about 7min off the leaders.

Immediately I discovered that the cycling was going to kill me today. Palo took off at high speed with Tomas not far behind and I struggled to stay on their wheels. I knuckled down and held on to them, even setting the pace for a few minutes. I think we picked a reasonable route and guess we made up a couple of minutes. Route

The cycling finished at Shouldice Park on the Bow River and the first canoe stage. We started this at the same time as another team and they immediately dropped us, taking a 100m gap. They had a smaller, lighter canoe and the guy sitting in the front was using a kayak paddle. Don't know if that helps much but Tomas and I with our weak runners' shoulders couldn't match the pace. Route

This 2.3km leg canoe finished at Edworthy Park for an orienteering stage. Tomas taking the navigation, we ran down 2 teams, then wasted 5 minutes looking for number 2, which was misplaced. I took the navigation after this and we took a nice lead over the next team into the second paddle.

The second paddle was tedious but mostly uneventful with the team behind us catching up by the end. A portage of about 200m to the curling club car park followed. Route

The next leg was MTB geocaching. Turned out Tomas hadn't learnt to use his GPS so we spent about 10min at the transition area working it out. Turned out the cache was ENE of the top of Nose Hill, Palo picked a clean route and when we got into the vicinity of the cache had the luck to be led into it by the first two teams who had both made mistakes.

A surprise MTB stage on Nose Hill awaited then — we had to visit 5 of the car parks around the park. We decided on an order and took off in 2nd place. Up to Nose Hill we slowly hauled in the 1st place team (Alaric and co), reaching the Berkeley car park first. We swapped the lead with them through the next 2 car parks, but then we made our fatal mistake. Forgetting the instructions for this leg, we mistakenly thought we needed to go to a sixth car park at 19th St. We decided to do this last, and rode straight over Nose Hill to the 64 St car park, then up to Lover's Leap and then over and around to 19th St, where we discovered our mistake and pushed off back to the transition area, now out of touch with the leaders. This ended up being a really long leg and I very nearly broke climbing the last hill on 19th St. Route

A puzzle/running leg on Princes Island followed. We lost a few minutes here missing clues and then struggled to solve the puzzle. We then ran to MEC to climb the overhanging indoor wall there. Palo and I both got up pretty quick (I knew quick was the only way I would manage it) but Tomas fatigued while trying unclip the rope from a couple of intermediate caribiners and didn't make it. This incurred the 10 min time penalty that dropped us to 4th overall. We then ran back to the transition area at the carpark. The C-Train gave us a little much needed rest on both the way to and from MEC.

From the transition area we headed straight into a Score-O above Sunnyside in which both the navigation and route planning was easy.

Another MTB/geocache followed and then a cycle to the final transition area. I had actually recovered my cycling legs somewhat at this point and did much more pace setting and less dropping off Palo's wheel. We arrived at the transition area in equal 3rd place. Route

A final MTB out and back leg (Route) was next and it was pretty uneventful. It was followed by a foot geocache which was cleverly hidden below the Glenmore dam wall — we wasted a couple of minutes checking on top. We dropped the other 3rd placed team at the start of the previous MTB leg and now crossed paths with them as we were climbing back up around the dam wall and they were climbing down. We needed to beat them back by more than 10 min to take 3rd but we were really starting to fade and they came back with 6 min to spare. Route

The best bit of the day followed when I won the adventure racing kit door prize including a swish Gregory Iso pack with bladder and a bunch of other bits and pieces, including a Gerber Clutch multi-tool. I'm pretty damn happy with that!

The times below are educated guesses.

C • AR 6

A run to invigorate the legs … a warm up followed by 4 Osmond's then a couple of other drills, then by 4 downhill run-throughs and a warm down.

Getting some rest before Inner Limits adventure race on Saturday, because I've had such a tough week …

FWOC Middle distance grand prix. This was a bad night: short O-pants, some very spiky terrain, a terribly out-of-date map and some poor navigation.

Planned to go out at a comfortable pace and really concentrate on planning a route and following it through. Well … threw that away at the first control making a small parallel error. I discovered the error pretty quick but lost maybe 45 seconds for extra distance and climb. Lost another minute on the 3rd getting stuck in some green and then not being sure of my location on the other side. Then on 4 I got led astray by a vehicle track that wasn't mapped, did a stack of extra climb and lost maybe 6 min. By this stage I was very scratched up, pretty annoyed, Bill had passed me, and Jonathan was just behind so I put my foot down, managing to lose the latter and overtake the former before the end. A run to forget.

Running distance: 6.72km

I'm still tired from the weekend and legs were really heavy during this run. Wasn't interested in pushing myself at all so stopped and walked a couple of times. Started getting a stitch later on — another remnant from the weekend where I had a semi-permanent stitch as time went on — and had to walk for that too. The only positive was that it is a bumper day today: 17 deg, sunny and almost no wind.

Really tired and feeling pretty poor today.