Training Log Archive: Funderstormin

Saw a chiropractor for the first time today. Not surprisingly, he said to me, "we've got a lot of work to do..." Looking forward to addressing some non necessarily painful but still annoying issues that have been plaguing me for awhile now.

Lap 2 at Summer Solstice, taking place between the lovely hours of 1-2:30 am. The first 5km were a gong show for me as I politely pulled off and let scores of riders pass by anytime they wanted to. About a third of the way in, I found my cajones and was pleased with the rest of the lap. Found another female rider to chase which made me much more motivated.

Unfortunately, these were the only laps I got in as I had to report for horse braiding duty shortly afterwards. This was the first time I'd done this event but would definitely do it again.

Lap 1 at Summer Solstice. I was pretty tentative at the start of the lap, where most of the mucky, sticky stuff was.

Another pre-ride of the course at Albion with a couple of my teammates for this weekend. Lots of fun splashing through puddles.

C • Which site? 2

QT with Estelle at Hydrocut.

Pre-riding Summer Solstice course at Albion.

C • Waterloo Cycling 4

Wilderness Traverse part two...

I'm looking forward to reading everyone else's reports on this. Our team's story went something like this...

Arrived at CP1 in the middle of the pack, which was cool as I expected we'd be at the back right off the start. Made a small (5 minute) error en route to CP2, but by the time we got there, we were right at the back.

Paddle went fairly smoothly; we weren't killing ourselves, but not dawdling either. Since I wasn't humping a canoe, I really liked the opportunity to get out of the boat and stretch my legs :) Made one more costly navigation error that resulted in us doing an extra (as if there weren't enough!) portage. Think this cost us about 30-40 minutes and by the end of the paddle, we were second last.

Started the second trek around 9:30. We had anticipated doing this in the dark and made route selection based on this. We decided we didn't want to swim not to swim at night, which meant many looonnnggg detours around bodies of water. Found the bushwhacking painfully slow, and downright painful, but this may have been just our route choices.

Punched CP6 at around 2:00 - 2:30 am and CP7 at around 7:45-8:00. It had been raining for some time then. For some reason, I hadn't packed any extra clothes (in an effort to learn to race lighter) and when we stopped at CP7 to talk about route, etc., got ridiculously cold. I had been cold for some time but standing made things way worse. None of us had any dry clothes left. Long story short: we started out towards 8, went back to 7, called medics. By the time they got there I was much worse than before and they were talking about ambulances and cardiac arrest...yikes, I thought I was being a wimp and was just cold! After warming me up at the CP, they put me on a backboard (despite my protestations that I could walk just fine) and boated me back to CP8. Totally embarassing. Lesson learned: it is worth the weight to carry an extra shirt or jacket.

So that was the end of our race. My official stance is that Bob Miller made me hate nature in its entirety, but in reality, it was a wickedly challenging course and it was cool to be racing there in such great company.

When our team talked about the race highlights, we decided that Leanimal's CP5/TA2 was definitely our favorite part. Never been treated to homemade soup before!

Congrats to those that finished the full course...and even those that didn't.

C • Tough go! 10

Wilderness Traverse, part one...

Finally got my boat out for a little paddle which was cut short by an impending thunderstorm.