Training Log Archive: Bash

Sentier de la Ligne d'Horizon and Lac Beauport with 'Bent, BulletDog and Knobless. If you look closely, you can see the 3 km skating loop on Lac Beauport. Too bad, we missed it by a week or so!

Awesome!!!! (Although Charles Hamelin has nothing to worry about.)

In case you ever wondered why the Quebecois win all those medals in short track, we saw why. At a large local shopping centre that includes a highly visible rink, several speed skating clubs presented a few hours of racing and opportunities to try the sport, with club information and registration booths set up outside a busy Imax theatre.

Sam, the 9-year-old daughter of our friends Jill and Jeannot, skates several times a week as part of a kids' racing program. The adult nearest to me in this photo is Francois-Olivier Roberge, a long track speed skater at the Vancouver Olympics.



The kids idolize their speed skating heroes. Sam has a poster on her bedroom door with photos of the Canadian Olympic short track team with all their signatures. Charles Hamelin is her sweetie.

Sam is 2nd from the right at the start.



She was faster than the skater who won (a boy) but couldn't get past him in the short race after he won the start. The kids race together according to their best times for certain distances - not according to gender, age or size.



They offered the public a chance to try the sport and Sam got permission to act as my coach. She took her role very seriously.





The skates feel sooooo different from the figure skates that I'm used to. They are angled to make it easier to go counterclockwise, which is all you ever need to do. I thought it would feel impossibly weird but actually it wasn't bad. Those skates *want* to go fast. Once I got comfortable, the biggest problem was avoiding other skaters, since there were a lot of little kids trying the sport for the first time and they did a lot of splats. One of the first things Sam did was take me over to the mattresses on the wall so I could feel what it would be like to skid out and hit the boards. Luckily I stayed upright.

Sam brought in reinforcements to help coach me, some of whom had more English than others. Apparently the ones with less English were skating up to her and giving her advice to pass along to me! She taught me to do crossovers, which were similar to figure skating as long as I remembered that my skates were super long and needed more space.



After Sam saw that I wasn't falling, she tried to teach me some technique - how to blast off the starting line (she won), how to swing my arms when pushing off with the skates. Looking at the photos, I see that I needed to bend over much farther from the waist. I thought I was bent over but I should have noticed that I wasn't dragging my fingertips on the ice. I was wearing the cool special gloves so that would have been fun.



So much fun!! I've always thought that I would have liked to be a long track speed skater (because I have big thighs!) and I still hope to try that one day, but this was an awesome first speed skating experience.



P.S. Notice that I am the only skater going so fast that 'Bent couldn't keep me in focus!

Camp Mercier with 'Bent and Knobless. Another gorgeous day - a little warmer this time, making our glide highly unpredictable as we moved from shade to sunshine on the trails. (Stop start stop start stop start stop start - repeat.)

Our friend Jill is the curator of the Quebec Aquarium and her husband Jeannot works there too. We got a fascinating backstage tour of this indoor/outdoor zoo that is involved in public education, research and animal rescue.



We got to go into the locked back room with the polar bear (behind bars with a red line half a meter from the bars that we weren't allowed to cross). Jeannot was showing us some of the polar bear's training. They don't train animals to provide public entertainment. The primary purpose is to enable the animals to get health-related tests and procedures with little or no sedation. I think this polar bear was one of the animals that would come up to the bars to let someone take a blood sample.



Apparently, their walruses are highly social with humans. (Not what I'd heard when we kayaked in the Arctic!) Their tusks are removed because they are easily broken and infected, leading to a huge root canal - or death when they live in the wild. This is what happens when Knobless spends a weekend away from home - first thing you know, he's snuggling with a Russian lady named Samka.

Most of this was snowshoeing but part of it should be logged as "trekking while carrying snowshoes". 'Bent, BulletDog and I headed up into the hills near Lac Beauport with a compass, no map and a rough idea of local geography.



We learned afterward that two people got lost last summer while following the very well-marked ridgeline trail, and helicopters were called in to search. Instead of following the well-marked trail, we wandered somewhat randomly wherever things looked nice. But I looked at my compass a lot and always had an escape-to-the-road plan. AR and orienteering experience make the outdoor world a lot more fun.

We found different-coloured paint on trees and followed different sets of markings for awhile. Some of them seemed like trails while others seemed more like suggested bushwhacking routes. We finally decided that the red markings were probably property boundaries. Here is part of the "orange" route (if you look hard).



We crossed the main road then climbed partway up the mountain we'd been admiring from our cottage. We hit a snowmobile trail and decided to follow it for awhile. Although there was deep snow on the north side of the mountain, the trail was a little different on the south side.



We veered away from the trail that probably travelled 200 km to Saguenay, reached the mountaintop, then found random snowmobile and snowshoe trails on the west side. We made compass guesses as we descended a beautiful route down to Lac Beauport, avoiding the neighbourhood of fancy mountainside homes. If we'd had a map, it would have been fun to go farther but we could have been stuck with a long road run back, so this would have to be enough outdoor adventure for the day. Part 2 of each day's adventures always involved a Quebecois meal that I wouldn't have wanted to record in my food diary.

On their brochure, the Mont Ste. Anne XC ski centre boasts that it is the top-ranked XC ski centre in Canada and 2nd ranked in North America. (Anyone know who is 1st in NA? Who does the ranking, anyway?) I'm always leery of XC ski centres linked to downhill ski resorts, since the XC skiing is less profitable and often gets a lot less attention. I got even more suspicious when we had to pay $23.70 per person at the main gate, $10 more per person than yesterday. But it was really nice, especially when we climbed up higher to the black diamond trails. I used waxless skis and gave up some speed for grip. 'Bent went with waxables and had a tough job keeping his skis grippy enough. Once again, his knee gave him grief. :-( There was a ton of snow, but nothing recent.

Is this place really the best in Canada? As a longtime classic skier, I love narrow, ungroomed trails like the ones at Kolapore, ON or Larch Hills, BC, so I'd probably give top Canadian ranking to a place like that. But if you're looking for a large, scenic network of wide groomed trails where you can do skate or classic, Mont Ste. Anne is great. Sovereign Lake, BC would be another contender, although I suspect their trail network is smaller if you exclude the Silver Star side of the mountain, which I don't like as much after an encounter with a kamikaze skier.

At Mont Ste. Anne, there are several cabins (Refuges) where you can stay and a small inn that holds 26 people. I'm told that you can also ski a backcountry route to Camp Mercier, which would be really pretty. In the same part of the world, 'Bent and I did the Charlevoix Traverse one time - another highly recommended backcountry ski route with huts and cabins to stay in. We took about 6 days - very challenging skiing with skins necessary in icy conditions - and barely saw anyone.

Note to Phatty: The Mont Ste. Anne ski shop had my favourite Momentum nordic pants for 25% off. I'm all set for next year!

'Bent and I drove 40 minutes north to Camp Mercier near Parc Jacques Cartier in the Reserve Faunique des Laurentides. This is one of those wildlife reserves where the wildlife are protected from many dangers; there's even a big fence lining both sides of the highway like the one in Banff. But if you want to come in and shoot yourself some wildlife, that's perfectly cool as long as you pay the government for a licence.

The elevation is a fair bit higher than Quebec City and there's a great trail network with some nice-looking trailside cabins to rent some day. 'Bent and I did a big loop following all the outermost trails in the network, enjoying some terrific views and stopping for lunch at a heated cabin at the far point. There's lots of snow but they could use some fresh stuff. I used violet wax and needed a lot of upper body to get around, but conditions were pretty decent for mid-March. A little clattery-icy at times with a few soft patches in the sun, but that's to be expected.











Whenever we come here, we always reminisce about our first trip to Camp Mercier together back in our romantic dating days. The night before, we'd gone out in Quebec City and shared one of those fondue dinners for two where you get cheese fondue appetizer, beef fondue main course (this was before 'Bent came out of the closet as a non-meat eater) and chocolate fondue dessert. I got the food poisoning first. When we ski at Camp Mercier now, we always point out landmarks: "Here's the cabin where I collapsed on a bench to try to get my head to stop spinning" and "This is the trail where you threw up into the forest." Ah, sweet memories.

We had to cut our ski short because 'Bent's knee was bothering him, so he was assigned to walk the older ThunderDog when we got back to the cottage. BulletDog and I headed up to the ridgeline trail and explored to the east until the trail began its descent to a road. This involved some running, some walking, some slapstick skidding around on ice, some hill climbing and some off-trail slogging in deep snow.

Heading up to the ridge, BulletDog spirited me off the trail to avoid an icy section, and I lost sight of it. So I kept the setting sun at my right shoulder with the plan to turn around and bail to the road if the light got too dim. It took 10 minutes of breaking through crust in knee-deep snow to hit the ridgeline trail. (Just me - BulletDog could float on top.) There was beautiful warm evening light on the hills and lake below.

Fantastic discovery! The small city park across the street from our cottage is actually the entrance to a large trail network. That explains the fit-looking group of people we saw wearing snowshoes in the parking lot yesterday. It's a long, slippery climb to the ridgeline - impossible without cleats or Yaktrax - but the walking, running and views of the hilly landscape are excellent once you get there. 'Bent, BulletDog and I did some preliminary exploring.

The local XC ski club, Sentiers du Moulin, had posted that half its trails were open with spring skiing conditions. However, the snow at the trailhead was mushy and tinted brown. 'Bent would have tried it but I couldn't bring myself to buy a pass.

We decided to drive around and explore the area instead, and we stumbled on another ski club - Ski de Fond Charlesbourg. It was just $8 because only a few trails were open. The snow at the trailhead was white, at least, so we headed out.



The first half of the ski was pretty miserable - a mix of ice and major trail debris because they'd been clearing branches and fallen trees with chainsaws.



Then we climbed up to a sunny hillside where several hundred meters of blue tubing connected all the maple trees. The skiing was pleasant enough that we did an extra loop, but we had pretty much exhausted the potential of the area in less than an hour. A month ago, there would have been enough trails to spend all day there.