Training Log Archive: Bash

Nice morning run in the Rouge Valley with Skidder and Shifty, who politely let me set the pace. Lots to discuss with so little time to get ready for Appalachian Extreme (AppX). Getting excited! Legs felt good but my lungs still haven't recovered fully from being sick. Today's wildlife: Great Blue Heron, several Mallards, Red-winged Blackbird and a Kingfisher (heard, not seen).

Upper Body weights while watching Just For Laughs.

Hiking with Bent's family and the pooches at Glen Haffy. Out for 90 minutes, but I'll call it 30. Still feeling like my head is full of cotton balls - hope I'm not coming down with something else. Not much wildlife today - just one wild turkey and an unidentified raptor. Lots of early wildflowers, especially trout lilies, blue cohosh and trilliums in bud. It's about time for spring to be sprung!

Today's weather in Caledon appears to be broken. Even the dog won't go outside. We had a heavy snowstorm around mid-morning. (Snow didn't stay.) Then we had pea-sized hail pelting down at lunchtime, then we had a repeat of that a few minutes ago. I hear that a few swarms of locusts are scheduled to arrive around 2 p.m. And then maybe I can finally go for my run...

Trail run around Palgrave East & West with BulletDog. Light head and heavy legs - a bad combination. Needed to take more walking breaks than usual. Threw in some aerobic intervals on rolling terrain to make Hammer happy. Intended to do 3 min., but holy crap, it turns out that's a long time for a non-runner to sprint, so I did 4 reps X 2 min. instead with 1 min. rests. It got easier each time - it'll probably go better another day. Today's wildlife: 2 white-tailed deer, 1 wild turkey.

So... I have been training to peak at a 36-hour race in late July. But now I find myself preparing for a 78-hour race in three weeks. Might need to change my strategy a bit, eh? Where to begin??

Last hydrospinning class of the season, so we'll be out on open water soon! :-) We'll miss Coach, but we won't miss the 4:20 a.m. alarm on Wednesdays. I sat behind Bent today, whose technique was really on - and whose high cadence was a challenge to keep up with. It's a good thing we never put him in the bow! More intervals and less drill than usual, so it was a tough workout. For the last post-class trip to Starbucks, I finally indulged in the Ultimate Blackout Cake with my latte. Mmmm... Unfortunately, a traffic accident at 427 & 401 resulted in a 3-hr trip home (it took 40 min. to get there) so all of our schedules are messed up - especially Thumbs-of-Death, who arrived 2 hours late for his first patient.

Haven't done much biking since winter, so it's time to get going even though it's too early to go on the wet trails. Our first spring adventure race is just 10 days away - eek!
Finnerty to Innis Lake Rd. Hill intervals on Innis Lake Rd. (6 reps X 40 sec uphill, 90-120 sec rest). Then south to the rail trail to Duffy's Lane, Finnerty and home.
Hill intervals felt a lot more natural than the ones I did on foot yesterday. Truth be told, I probably did more running up hills yesterday than I do in an average calendar year. (To save you the trouble of doing the math, that was 270 seconds.) I guess it's a lot harder to cheat on a bike, so I actually have learned how to ride up the odd hill. However, in a couple of weeks, K/O's plan calls for us to do 3 minute hill intervals, which will be much tougher. (The toughest part will be... where the heck will I find a 3-minute hill around here?)

Today's Wildlife Report along the roads and trails: A flock of 8 wild turkeys, a Pileated Woodpecker, and a baby porcupine crossing the road all alone. (I stopped to make sure he made it.) Oh, and then there was the quiet gentleman on a remote part of the rail trail, dressed in camouflage from head to toe, polishing his shotgun. I gave him my friendliest hello at the same time as I flicked into the big chain ring and got the heck out of there. Yikes.

Around Palgrave West and Hardwood Forest with ThunderDog. We finally have a few early spring flowers and wild onions, and the grass is greening up. Big twinge on the left side of my right knee today, so lots of stretching afterward.

Hill intervals. 6 reps X (45 sec. full-on followed by 90 sec. return to the bottom). Each time I got a little further up the hill in 45 seconds, which I guess is probably the idea. In an uncharacteristic show of loyalty, T-Dog accompanied me up and down the hill for all 6 intervals, although she did pause to roll her eyes at me each time we turned around.

Planned to get up early and do the upper body strength workout that I missed last night when I accidentally fell asleep at a reasonable hour for a change. But now it is too close to tomorrow's paddling class for any upper body work. So I will just have to race with strong teammates this year instead.

Yahoo, I'm finally starting to recover - slowly. Bent says that I no longer have a deep sexy voice, which in this case is a good thing. ThunderDog and I went for a gentle run/walk around Palgrave. Managed to find some snow for T-Dog to roll in, but the ground is almost entirely bare - finally. Trails are still too wet for bikes or horses, not that it's stopping people, so there is considerable damage and churned-up muck in places. Grrrrr. Yes, I'd like to be riding my bike on single track now too, but there's a good reason why the trails are still closed around here.

Continuing with this weekend's "48 Hours of Hypothermia" theme, I headed to Uxbridge on a chilly, damp morning for the TOC Mob Match. Still feeling rotten and hadn't gone running in the past 8 days, but I have a tough time resisting a Score-O. Nice course and terrain. Happy with my nav for the first 60 minutes - got 12 controls, no problems. I'd considered walking the racecourse today, so wasn't too concerned about my low speed. Unbelievably, I see now that I only got 2 controls in the final 30 minutes - which ought to have been darned near impossible on a course where the longest distance between controls was 500 meters. No good excuse. I lost contact with the map and with my brain - probably not in that order - and never made contact with my lungs during the race at all. Lucky to make it to the finish line before the time limit for a change - I usually get greedy and cut it far too close. For some inexplicable reason, I still had a great time! :-) The Minister came out and did really well at his first Score-O. Hopefully this will get him psyched to do the North Am Rogaine Champs.

In my first attempt to cure my bronchitis earlier this week, I did a 90-minute pre-dawn paddling class, sitting behind four other people and thus getting soaked from head to toe within the first few minutes. Today, in my next attempt at a cure, I pulled out the heavy artillery and agreed to help Bob Miller coach an adventure racing field navigation course in heavy, driving rain with gusty winds and temperature hovering around 6C. It remains to be seen whether this will do the trick, but at the moment, I'm afraid I'm not feeling much better. Too bad, because it looks like it's time to go back outside and build an ark. I think the O practice has helped, as several of the students told me that I "see a lot more on the map" than they do.

Another sick day. :-((((

Argghh, another beautiful sunny day and my lungs are still non-functional. Trying to be good in hopes of recovering for the weekend.

Core Strength - Balance ball and floor exercises while fending off two concerned dogs.
Getting extremely bored with no outdoor activities, but not feeling better yet.

Intervals. Our 6 a.m. hydrospinning class really wasn't the best way to cure my cold, but next week is the last class of the season, so I decided to go and take it easier than usual on the intervals.

Drills and Technique. Things to think about today:
1) Hip moves forward with the arm.
2) Don't lean away from the paddle in the water. The "hinge" in your body is in the shoulder closest to the paddle in the water - not the opposite shoulder. Rotate around spine, don't move from side to side.
3) Spine is straight, but I'm dropping my chin. Need to lift head up.

Believe it or not, I was actually looking forward to my first day of hill intervals, but my cold has gotten worse, so no aerobic exercise for me today. Rats. :-(((

Core Strength - balance ball. Speaking from personal experience, people who live with two enthusiastic Lab Retrievers get a more intense workout when attempting to use their balance balls.

Combined business with pleasure by riding to the Palgrave post office with my taxes. Easy ride to stretch the legs after yesterday - a bit of rail trail and gravel road on the way home. Trails in the woods are still too wet to ride (not that it stops the equestrians who have trashed the Bruce side trail in Palgrave West - grrrr).

Upper body workout. Need to do this more often.

Event: Paris to Ancaster
 

Paris to Ancaster bike race. Great weather and conditions except for one deep muddy section that seized up my wheels so that I had to carry the bike because I could no longer push it. This was my first real ride of the spring and it's clear that it will take more work to get my legs back into mid-season biking shape. For some weird reason, I passed a lot of people on uphills, then the same people would pass me on the flats, then I'd pass them again at the next hill. Bad technique on the flats? Slow bike? Not sure. Bent, The Minister and I tried to stay together as a team, which didn't work well in a crowd of 1000 people, since we were constantly losing somebody and needing to wait. We made a 5-minute Good Samaritan stop when a guy went into leg spasms and pitched onto his face in a gravel driveway. People were riding past him like he was roadkill! Bent helped detach him from his bike, fed him electrolytes, stretched his legs, then got him back on his feet. The final climb up the escarpment to the Ancaster Community Centre was an expected bit of cruelty, but it made the finish line that much sweeter. Fun way to start the biking season!

First day of new training program. Got off to an impressive start by ignoring the alarm for the 7 a.m. running group. At a more reasonable hour, I dragged Bent out to Palgrave for his second long run of the day. (He'd made it to the 7 a.m. run. Keener!) BulletDog and ThunderDog splashed through all the vernal pools, rolled in the remaining snow and generally had a wonderful time. Legs felt good. Tried running CP7-CP8 (from the GR Raid) at an average pace to see how long it would take if I didn't have to navigate. It took 73% of the time that it took us last weekend - and that leg had easy nav. I'm experimenting with this just for fun because I'm curious about what my fastest possible speed would be if someone else were doing the navigating. Has anyone else done similar experiments? As the slowest runner on the team, I'm definitely the Tree Huggers' limiting factor.

Core strength

Thanks for all the good advice. I decided to suck it up and do all that laundry, so once it is dry, I can go back and play in the mud some more.

K/O came by with the training program that she has put together for Bent and me, designed to peak for Raid The North Algonquin in late July. (We had to pick something.) She's letting us skip the Base Training phase, so now we are in the Strength and Endurance phase until late May. The final phase will be Speed. Woo hoo - Friday is a rest day! However, she had lots of ideas about how we should spend our time on the weekend - and then we start our hill intervals on Tuesday. Luckily, I think we have a hill in our yard that should be big enough.

Trail run in Palgrave West and Charlevoix with BulletDog and ThunderDog. Another perfect sunny day. Managed to turn my left ankle, so now the pain is symmetrical (I turned my right ankle in the first 2 minutes of the Giant's Rib Raid.) Dogs found a big marsh to swim in and really annoyed a couple of ducks who didn't want to share. After 2 months, BulletDog still smells of skunk when she gets wet - and still insists on lying beside me when I work on my laptop.

Biking on gravel roads (with occasional mud and ice) and rail trail. Just a short ride to shake out the cobwebs before Sunday's Paris-Ancaster race. And boy, were there a lot of cobwebs - both in me and the bike!
After six consecutive days in the woods plus a muddy mountain bike ride, I have come to a crossroads in my life where I face a difficult decision:
(a) Give up outdoor activities forever, or
(b) Do copious amounts of really filthy laundry and hose off all my mucky shoes.
I will give this matter some hard thought and make up my mind tomorrow.

Drills & Technique - Things to think about today:
1) Keep upper hand approximately the same distance from your chest as you rotate your body. That should give you room to extend as you go into position 4.
2) Plant the paddle and drive - like a pole vaulter.
3) Sit up straight, chin up, less side-to-side motion.
4) I should really get more than 4 hours sleep before a 6 a.m. paddling class.

Intervals. Coach fooled me by running the class past 7:30, so I pushed really hard during what I thought was the last interval. We did a minute of slow backward paddling, which I thought was the start of the cooldown. Mmmmm, cooldown... Then suddenly we were back doing another 10-minute interval. Eeek! As usual, my glutes are more sore than anything else.

Eliminator Sprint race at Spring Valley. I met a lost Sherpa around Control #5 (my partner for an upcoming rogaine and a recent grad of her 1st nav course). I decided to seize the teachable moment, so we stayed together until #10 while I explained different map symbols, what route I was choosing and why, what we could expect to see ahead, etc. I am totally NOT ready to be an O coach since I still have so much to learn myself, but I can already see that helping her to develop her skills is definitely going to help me with mine.

Skills course with the Sherpa. We were supposed to be doing the "golf" exercise where if you look at the map 3 times between controls, that's a par. Any more is a bogey, etc. Objective of exercise is to get into the habit of visualizing the terrain from the map, even though in a race situation, you would usually look at the map more often. We didn't do that this time - we spent our time identifying map features in the terrain, discussing merits of different routes, taking bearings, etc.

Picking up controls from the advanced section of the Giant's Rib Raid. (This was preceded by an hour of driving around to pay the bills for the Giant's Rib Raid, which was much less entertaining.) I made a point of choosing different routes between controls, trying to look at the map as if I knew nothing about the area. The route from 10E to 10C had a really nasty, tangled section. I'm glad we came from 10D in the race, but it was actually easier to find 10C approaching from 10E. It was another perfect sunny day. I found a couple of huge white pines that I could only wrap my arms halfway around. (Our team is called the Tree Huggers, after all.) A beautiful Mourning Cloak butterfly fluttered around watching me for awhile. ThunderDog swam in every mudhole she could find and took off whenever she smelled something interesting, which was often. I left a few controls for Bent's commute home, since he wanted some practice navigating.

Trekking cross-country around Albion Hills, picking up controls from the Giant's Rib Raid with The Pillar, BulletDog and Superfly George. Beautiful sunny day, great company, happy pooches, feet even muddier than yesterday...

Event: Giant's Rib Raid
 

Giant's Rib Raid Adventure Run. An awesome day in so many ways! We were lucky to get amazing spring weather - a frosty morning followed by bright, warm sun. After the race, people hung out on the deck in short sleeves for hours. We got to see dozens of AR and orienteering friends, and it was exciting to watch most of central Canada's best teams competing hard on the race course. Hammer's race course design was interesting and fun, and even though we live locally, there were surprises for us. I learned that there is a big difference between being familiar with a specific location and being able to choose a good route to get there quickly! And many of those routes took us through areas where we hadn't travelled before. It was our best adventure run ever, admittedly helped in part by local knowledge, but we also ran more and faster than we usually do. (A big thanks to Bent, who towed me on the road and the longer trail sections - and ignored my epithets as we hurtled together down icy hills.) Hingo, Bent and I have done so many events together that our teamwork is reasonably fine-tuned, which helps us move more quickly and makes the day more fun. My Flying Pig orienteering experience was very useful - great practice for making route decisions on the fly. We finished 9th, which was totally unexpected and completely blew us away. Several months ago, we'd set a goal of reaching the top ten, but we'd abandoned hope when we saw the strong field entered in this race. We're especially proud of the great performance of our 17-year-old junior Tree Hugger friend, Pate Neumann, and his team of Brittanys from the local high school.

Nice hike on a sunny day with Etoile and Adventure Girl.

An hour of excellent core and ab strength instruction with K/O - I'll call it 15 minutes of training. Now I need to build this into my regular schedule, since I only got a "fair" rating on core strength on my last fitness assessment. Rumour has it that having a muscle or two in the abs and back can be rather helpful in many athletic endeavours. I'm looking forward to finding out some day!

Around Palgrave with BulletDog. Some nice trail running and some slogging through snow. I went in thigh-deep at one point quite unexpectedly and hyper-extended my knee. More ice on the trails than I expected. I might be coming down with a cold right before the Giant's Rib Raid - rats! On the bright side, my legs had some spring in them - unlike yesterday's Legs O' Lead.

Hydrospinning Class - Drills and Technique. Classmates included Bent, The Minister, Thumbs of Death, and the Terranauts. I'm starting to get used to the routine of the 4:20 a.m. alarm on Wednesdays. When the class finishes next month, I'll keep the alarm set so I can go for a 5 a.m. long run every Wednesday. NOT!!!!

Hydrospinning Class - Intervals. Today we worked on stretching forward using the hip and shoulder to place the paddle in the water as far ahead as possible, while maintaining a position of strength. Coach called me The Wolverine because of my high cadence, so I switched to a bigger paddle. That slowed me down and also showed me that I am definitely a right-handed paddler, i.e. with the higher resistance of the bigger paddle, it's clear that my strokes are better on the left side. Must work on that. Also from the Coach:
1) Sit up straight and open your belly button up. Remind my teammates regularly because that will remind me.
2) With a bigger paddle, I started to teeter-totter. Must not do that.
3) Lean toward paddle in position #3, not away from it.

Around Palgrave West with ThunderDog. Conditions are changing rapidly. Many areas are bare, although it's still possible to find calf-deep snow without much trouble. I was sore from yesterday's crash landing, but the real problem was that my legs felt like lead. Not sure what that's all about. I didn't have much sleep, but I ran at the same time last Wednesday with the same short sleep and felt stronger than I have in weeks. Clearly, I need to increase my chocolate consumption leading up to the Giant's Rib Raid.

Albion Hills with BulletDog on a beautiful day. Some trail running and some slogging through deep snow. And slush. And ice-cold, ankle-deep water. Less snow than in Palgrave (lower elevation). Surprisingly, some of the deciduous forest was bare, dry and perfect for running. Going along the Humber River, I came to a bend with a high, steep bluff plunging directly into the icy, spring-swollen water. No problem. After the Flying Pig, I'm used to dragging myself up steep, muddy slopes using roots and saplings. I got about 5 meters up the bluff when both footholds gave way at the same time and my hand slid off the little sapling that I was clutching. I started slithering down the slimy bluff on my stomach, gathering speed quickly. This is it - I'm going into the river! I really shouldn't do crazy stuff like this in places where nobody would think to look for me! But just before I landed in the river, a log smashed into a body part that shall remain nameless, and stopped my slide. OUCH! After a moment or two to decide whether I was badly injured or just caught in an embarrassing position, I managed to get up and limp back to the car. Looks like I'll survive, but I may not be running too quickly for the next few days!

Hiked around Albion Hills with ThunderDog, checking out snow conditions for the Giant's Rib Raid. Snow depth was over the kneecap in a few places, but it was mostly ankle-deep. River is high and will get higher as the warm weather continues, so I took note of the bridge locations. Beee-ooo-ti-full day!

Flying Pig Classic Distance Course. Perfect day - sunny and cool, really fun to be out in the woods exploring a new area. Lots of mud left over from yesterday, but it wasn't as much of a factor. Went faster than yesterday, although the min/km was higher because I didn't always take a straight line between controls due to the long distances. Not many opportunities to use trails, so needed to concentrate all the time. Looked for one control about 50 m early in a different re-entrant, but otherwise found everything exactly where I expected. Made a really bad route choice to run a winding trail between #9 & 10 instead of having the confidence to strike out cross-country - was thinking like an adventure racer instead of an orienteer. Won my category and was less than 2 minutes behind the more experienced Gator women, who each won their respective categories. Overall, a fun weekend and a very good learning experience. I've got a better idea of the weaknesses that I need to work on. Very proud of the excellent performance of the GHO Canada GHO High Performance team - Hammer (two 1sts and a 2nd while injured), Sudden (4th in Classic), Hustler (2nd and two 3rds) and CPiller (ranking steadily improved with each race).

Flying Pig Middle Distance. Nasty, evil day with driving rain, high winds and temperature just above freezing. Ran through lots of standing water and ankle-slurping muck, and had quite a challenge to haul myself out of some steep-sided gullies. Overshot one control, but otherwise nav was OK. Felt really, really slow - just couldn't get my shoes moving in the mud. Highlight of the day was the post-race hot tub! Finished 3rd of 4 racers in my category. Several of us were close together, so I guess nobody was setting any speed records today.

Event: Flying Pig IX (US Team Trials)
 

Flying Pig Sprint - Fun course running trails, crossing muddy gullies and weaving between buildings at Camp Friedlander (Boy Scout camp). A bit psyched out by the formality of the A Meet procedures. Brain totally lost ability to match map to terrain at the moment I turned the map over - this happened on all 3 days of The Pig and wasted considerable time. Must find a way to work on that! Overshot one control and slowed down at one point when the map didn't seem to match the terrain, but otherwise pleased to do OK in the O format that least suits my abilities. Won my category - only 3 racers though.