Training Log Archive: Bash

Random Thought #1 for a Friday morning: After last night's Walk The Line session, a high school boy asked me with great enthusiasm, "How often do you guys go out and do this?" And when I think about it, most people show that same joy and excitement after their first adventure race or orienteering adventure, once they've been reminded how much fun it is to play outdoors like little kids again. Why is it that we can't keep these people in our sports - and attract more people like them? No question, marketing needs to be improved, but I wonder if there is more. Developing a local community of outdoor adventure lovers can certainly help. Looking around at the group last night, everybody was connected to someone else in some other way - either they mountain bike together, or they do trail runs or adventure races, or they go to school together, or they follow each other's Attackpoint logs or whatever. We look to each other for ideas, inspiration and good old-fashioned fun - I think that is working well for us in Caledon.

Random Thought #2 - I've been dipping into different chapters of "The Lore of Running", a book that I've owned for a couple of years, but it looked so long and scary and running-specific that I kept putting it off. Surprisingly, I've found it to be a real page-turner. There are some very interesting ideas in there about all kinds of things - overtraining, speedwork, etc. One premise that underlies a lot of it is how some people are just genetically able to run faster, and you shouldn't delude yourself into believing that you can train yourself beyond the gifts that nature has given you. I've always known that I'm not a gifted athlete (outside of some capacity for endurance), and that there are limits I can't move beyond, but a lot of people like to "think positive" and pretend that anyone can become a great athlete through training. This book doesn't sugar-coat it. You can't. But because I've always believed this, it doesn't depress me. That's why I focus on the things that I *can* become good at without speedy athletic genes - like technical paddling skills or navigation. And that's why multi-sport is the sport for me. A lot of great athletes are great in one sport and only good in the others. Add in a bit of navigation, and we can always hope that the great athletes will run really fast in the wrong direction!! :-)