Training Log Archive: Bash

Laurentian Rogaine, midnight till Sun. 9 a.m.

Around 1 a.m., we found ourselves in another cemetery. The control was by a marsh, which involved walking through the forest from the back of the unlit cemetery. It's spooky enough walking through a dark cemetery into a dark forest, but it was a bit more spooky to find a couple of lit glow sticks hanging in the woods. They didn't lead to the control - it seemed that they were there to lead you back to the cemetery, perhaps to avoid private property issues.

Then we walked through St. Sauveur, which is full of trendy restaurants, art galleries, and bars with booming music. 'Bent was ready to stroll into a pub at 1:30 a.m. to order a cup of coffee, but I wasn't sure I was ready for the stares and comments of bar customers at that hour. We liked the village so much that we returned later in the day (after the race), hoping for a nice lunch at an Italian, Moroccan, Szechuan or Japanese restaurant - but we discovered that the locals are so worn out from Saturday night partying that there are only a couple of places open at mid-day Sunday, and they are serving breakfast at that hour. Oh well.

From midnight on, we had started adding unplanned controls to our route, realizing that our night nav was going well, and we were running out of ways to boost our points total as we approached the finish line. In the southeast quadrant, we climbed the Olympia ski hill for a few controls, then we were on the home stretch.

Around 4:30 a.m., we hit the one control that gave me trouble in the entire event - #56, a junction of two streams, where the attackpoint was a stream/trail junction on the edge of the control circle. It wasn't one I'd expected to be difficult, but Francis Falardeau has a complicated rating systems for his controls, so I should have guessed. Unlike most rogaines, the point value of a control equals the control number. So 56 is worth more than 52. The second digit indicates the degree of difficulty, and digits 5 and 6 are used for the most difficult controls. All of the "zero" controls, like 40, 50, 60, were located at buildings where you could obtain water. So I should have expected 56 to be difficult, I guess. The problem was that the streams mostly flowed underground. Eventually, with the help of another team wandering around the area, we stumbled on the control. although we never saw a stream junction, and we all agreed that it was farther from the trail than we'd expected. Probably 15 minutes lost there.

I've never visited a hash house during a rogaine, and it was quite a treat to stop in for a double espresso at 6:30 a.m. Other teams were there eating pasta with tomato sauce, but we decided to go out and do the controls we had skipped in the northeast quadrant, where we had started the race. This was truly inefficient, as we could have greatly reduced our distance travelled by including these controls in our first loop. Oh well, at this point, there wasn't anything else to do with our remaining time. The other controls we'd left off our original route were much too far away, and my feet felt like I was walking on broken glass, so there was no question of running.

So we took our time, finishing about 40 minutes early, and enjoying wonderful crepes with Quebec maple syrup. We ended up with 1779 of the 2025 available points. Bender and Billy were the winners, getting all the points before sunrise. Benoit L & Tanya M were second, finishing a couple of hours later. In all, I think four teams got all the controls. I'm not sure if we could have quite done it, but I certainly wish we had planned a route to include all controls, because it would have been really close. As it was, I think we finished 3rd Coed, and aside from our conservative route plan, things went as well as one could hope. We both felt good - until the end, when we both started coughing. The nav went well, and we worked well as a team. My feet are so blistered that I can barely walk now, but they'll be OK.

This was a well-organized rogaine in a beautiful area with a lot of character - definitely one that I would recommend. It's very much an orienteers' event, i.e. low cost, not fancy, no hype, good map. With Merrell as a sponsor, there were decent prizes, and most of them were given as draw prizes. Only the top team in each category was recognized, plus the top three overall, which is why I don't yet know how we did exactly.

Members of the GHO Rogaining e-mail list did very well, and I look forward to checking out the final results.

Laurentian Rogaine, Sat. 10 a.m. till midnight.

Well, the Bash Rogaine Partner Curse continues, but it took a different form in this event. I came down with a bad cold on Monday, passing it to 'Bent during the week. By this morning, I felt 85% recovered, but 'Bent was still coughing, plus he felt shaky and nauseated. So we reduced our planned "as the crow flies" distance to a 41 km main loop, with an optional 6-7 km extra loop near the end. Our planned points total was quite conservative.

We started off from the old Ste. Adele train station in cool, rainy weather, and 'Bent felt good enough to run a bit. An ultrarunner friend recently told me that she used to pace herself carefully in the early part of races, but now she has started going out hard. She has found that she gets tired and sore over time no matter how hard (or not hard) she goes at the beginning, so she'd rather push when she can. So with that in mind, we decided to push reasonably hard in the first 9.5 hours before the sun set - no resting, and some jogging on roads and good trails. It was nothing compared with the speed of Bender and Billy, whom we saw a couple of times on the course, but we did a lot more running than I've ever done in a rogaine. 'Bent's illness was not a factor at all, once we got going. Unfortunately, because it affected our route planning so much, it did affect our results - but I'm not sure what we could have done differently, since we didn't know how much the adrenaline was going to help him.

The area was quite different from the relatively uninhabited places I usually race in. The map was quite good by rogaining standards, with most trails accurately marked. The 10 meter contour interval meant that you had to stick to reading big features, as in an adventure race, but otherwise, it felt more like orienteering. Some controls were on cliffy mountain tops with fabulous views over the Laurentians. Others were attached to the porches of houses in town, with the hose left out for racers to refill water bottles. We passed by hundreds of gorgeous vacation homes, and came upon many locations where it would have been nice to just sit down with lunch and take a few photos - wooden bridges over rushing rivers, charming villages, a stunning waterfall at a control simply described as "End of trail".

One of the weird things about being in this area was that it was nearly impossible to avoid private property, and the map didn't have anything marked out of bounds, so you would sometimes end up in a situation where you had to emerge from the forest onto a road, and you had to pass through someone's back yard at 3 a.m. to do so. We did our best to take long detours around anything that looked like a problem spot, but even so, we were chastised by someone as we walked down a gravel road that looked like a major country road, but apparently was a very long driveway. We explained our confusion by telling her that we had just come onto it from a ski trail, which didn't help matters, because she said that all the ski trails in her village were supposed to be closed in the summer. Most people we encountered were very friendly, but I can't blame any locals who might have been disturbed by weird-looking, muddy strangers wandering around their area clutching maps.

In late afternoon, we met Earle and NevMom, accompanied by a friendly young retriever who had followed them for a couple of hours, far from his home. The pooch attached himself to us, and we started to worry. He had a tag with his name, Buster, and his phone number, so we tried to figure out how we could get him home. In a moment of pure serendipity, a woman walked up with three dogs off-leash, including a chocolate Lab like our two. In spite of a language barrier, we immediately bonded with this fellow dog lover, who understood the predicament and put Buster on a leash, taking him back to her house down the street so she could call his family.

In rogaines, we always push on the first day until the light is nearly gone, then stop to put on warmer clothes, get out our lights, and have a snack. This time, the light failed just as we reached a small cemetery outside of town. I'd hoped to pick up the control quickly, then go somewhere else to do our night preparations, but we couldn't see the control without our lights, so we had to take our evening break in the dark cemetery. It certainly made it easy not to get too relaxed and comfortable - I was ready to go again ASAP!

By this point, we were well ahead of schedule, and we debated the merits of adding a control or two from the southwest quadrant, which we had eliminated from our original, conservative plan. Unfortunately, adding a loop at this point would mean an inefficient route compared to what we would have done if we had included it in the first place. Looking ahead, we still had lots planned for the night - which doesn't always go smoothly - and we had two big ski hills to climb and descend. So we decided to save our energy to be sure that we didn't run out of time at the end.

By this point, we weren't running anymore. I often get one blister in a long race, but it's rarely a big deal. For unknown reasons, my feet started to disintegrate early in this race. I was wearing the same shoes I wore in the NA Rogaine Champs, and I'm accustomed to racing with wet feet. Argggh, I wish I knew why.

We ran into Bender and Billy around midnight, looking great and estimating that they would finish before sunrise (which they did). Meanwhile, we plodded up to the top of another ski lift.

Well, we're both still feeling like crap as we get ready to head out the door to Quebec. On the bright side, we're staying at a nice little inn tonight with the hope of a hearty Quebecois pre-race dinner. I'm not sure about racing though, let alone for 24 hours. At last the Bash Rogaine Partner Curse has turned around and struck me as well!

I think I may have hit bottom last night, and hopefully I'm on my way back toward good health. Not quite yet though, sniffle, sniffle. With 'Bent sick too, we may have to approach this weekend's rogaine in a non-competitive manner - returning to the campground at night to sleep, etc. We'll see.

Today is our 10th wedding anniversary, and for a romantic evening out, we are going to... "Spamalot". It was the only night we could get tickets before the show closed. I suppose that a shared appreciation of Monty Python is not a bad thing in a marriage. I've seen a lot of couples where only one partner likes MP, and that can be brutal!

Feeling worse today, so no training, but I do have a wildlife report. While I was driving to a meeting at 70 kph and accelerating, a young deer leapt in front of me, and I managed to slam on the brakes and miss her by about 2 meters. Phew! It's been less than a year since 'Bent brushed a deer with his van. (That deer apparently ran away, but left us $6000 of damage to remember him by.) Living in Caledon is great, as long as you stay alert.

Came home from Algonquin Park with a nasty upper respiratory infection. Not the best way to taper for a 24-hr rogaine this weekend.

Kayak paddling in a canoe with 'Bent. Went to the end of Little Joe Lake and up the river as far as we could.