Training Log Archive: Bash

First baby step back toward a normal training program after 6 weird weeks with bouts of illness and injury, interspersed with lots of racing. Today was supposed to be a gentle trail run with ThunderDog, but she decided that we would spend a lot of our time off-trail. Sprained ankle was crunchy-sore, but otherwise felt great - legs were strong and lungs felt bottomless. Apparently, there is nothing like a 30-hr trek to train me up for a 30-minute jog.

My ankle needs more help from Thumbs-of-Death tomorrow. He used some ancient torture device to put the joint back in place yesterday, and it was looking pretty good after the appointment. Then somehow BulletDog managed to kick me, bone-on-bone, while I was watching TV last night. As I watched in disbelief, a brand new goose egg sprouted on the front left of my ankle. I've been icing it on and off and waiting for T-o-D's opinion when he gets back tomorrow.

I've actually been injured for 10 days but have been too busy racing to think of myself that way. Went to see Thumbs-of-Death (my chiropractor and occasional teammate) today to get treatment for my sprained ankle and forearm tendinitis. It was pretty funny - the patient before me was Luscious, my ESAR teammate, and the patient after me was Hound Dog, my AppX teammate. If it weren't for me and my adventure racing teams, I doubt there would be enough sports injuries in Caledon to keep Thumbs-of-Death busy all day! ;-)

The closest thing to training today was a trip to MEC to shop for outdoor gear. Why is it so impossible to ever have "enough" outdoor gear?

ESAR Adventure Race, Caledon

Emergency Services Adventure Race (ESAR) in Caledon - teams from Police, Fire, Paramedic, Hospitals and 15 civilian teams, including us. The big news is that Bent's open male team, the Tree Huggers from Mars, came 1st of 79 teams! I'm so proud of those guys!! After the race, Bent got the usual questions when people saw his recumbent (hence the nickname "Bent") mountain bike, since yesterday's race course had lots of trail riding. For the first time, he was able to say, "Yeah, it worked OK out there. Actually, we won." :-))

My open female team, the Tree Huggers from Venus, included Luscious and Gorgeous, who had never raced before. Thanks to Appalachian Extreme, I was wearing an arm splint and apparently I sprained my ankle in a strange place last weekend (which I didn't find out until after ESAR - my chiropractor raced with Bent and noticed it as we were sitting together). So... let's just say that we went out there with every intention of being a fun team.

It was fun to race close to home. We started out in Forks of the Credit with a nav section, then mountain biking mostly on trails, then canoeing on the Credit River, then back to trail running and nav on the Bruce Trail and in Terra Cotta CA, then to the finish line biking on roads. There were a few special tasks, e.g. climbing across a rope bridge, carrying a stack of stretchers, climbing a 3 meter wall, and carrying a team member on a stretcher across the finish line.

At the first CP, I thought I heard the volunteer say we were 55th, which seemed OK for a fun-oriented female team in a field of 79 teams. But I must have heard wrong, because we were 13th at the next CP! I've got to hand it to Luscious and Gorgeous. As new racers, they did a lot of running during the day and were lightning fast in TAs. Because of my arm injury, they had to contribute more, e.g. taking the canoe at the portage and carrying me in the stretcher over the finish line. They kept the mood light all day and never complained, even when I was leading them through nasty, rotten fallen trees in a foot-sucking marsh. They especially never complained as we were climbing the escarpment to Devil's Pulpit right behind two teams of young policemen dressed in shorts (who eventually asked us to lead the way). ;-)

End result - we were 1st of 11 female teams in the race - yahoo! Unfortunately, because we were civilians, we didn't qualify for the female category, so the female team of emergency services personnel who finished half an hour behind us got all the great prizes. We were 4th of the 15 civilian teams though, which was still good for a medal and a gift certificate at Running Free. We were somewhere around 12th-15th of 79 teams overall, which I wouldn't have believed possible if someone had suggested it beforehand.

So hats off to Luscious and Gorgeous for kicking some butt in their first adventure race! :-)

It was really cold on the descent from the fire tower, and a couple of team members got mild hypothermia. We couldn't decide if our driving rain had turned into driving snow, but it was definitely a toss-up. Shifty even attempted to break into a locked outhouse so we could get shelter inside. We made a couple of stops, including a puppy pile nap in a tarp which actually restored us to consciousness in just 30 minutes.

The next section mostly took place on high mountain summits and ridges, covered with soft, thigh-deep snow and icy bogs. We had a couple of good CPs and were thrilled to learn at CP20 that we were in 5th place in the elite coed category. Every team ahead of us was well-known as a great team - what a strange feeling to be in their company. In the ensuing excitement, we drifted off bearing and lost time on the last CP before the TA. There was a 3:30 p.m. cut-off to start the paddling section and we only had two hours left, so we needed to make decent time. We wouldn't have time for a long TA, but there was plenty of time to do a 1.5 km steep downhill bushwhack, followed by 1.5 km on roads. Or so we thought... We came out on a road that wasn't marked on our map - but we didn't know that and both our altimeters were giving inaccurate readings unbeknownst to us, so we spent far too much time looking for the TA.

In the end, we missed the paddling cut-off after trekking for almost 30 hours. We could have moved forward to the final mountain bike section, which would have given us a reasonably good race ranking, but we all felt that we only wanted to cross the finish line if we'd done the entire course. So we retired from the race, both pleased and disappointed with how we'd done. An amazing experience overall, for me.

After midnight, as we continued riding down the slimy road in pouring rain, I noticed that I didn't have rear brakes on my bike anymore. Aieeeee. We had to stop to refill our Camelbaks at a creek (adding water purification drops), and Hound Dog dug out his tools to ensure that I wouldn't kill myself without brakes on the speedy paved road section.

We arrived at the bike drop around 1 a.m. and continued on foot to the top of the rappel. We met a couple of teams who had comments along the lines of "...the scariest thing I've ever done in my life...". In other words, exactly NOT the sort of thing you want to hear on your way to a 200' rappel site in pitch blackness on a stormy night. We hiked up and found the ropes people. Bad luck - there were two rappel ropes and we were assigned to the one that ended 10 feet above the bottom of the cliff. (Not that we realized that until we got down there!) The rappel would have been really beautiful in daylight, but at night I just focused on not kicking any of the loose rock onto my teammate below. When I got to the bottom of the rappel rope, the cliff didn't end and there was a knot in the rope. I had to climb up to detach myself, then Shifty helped me from below so that I didn't go sailing off the slippery cliff into oblivion. It was a poor excuse for a rappel rope - it cost us 45 minutes compared to what it would have taken on the other rappel rope - the one that went all the way to the ground. Luckily, nobody got hurt.

After a steep bushwhack down the hill and a brief road hike, we were back at our bikes. The next section was more snowmobile and ATV trails, then we arrived at the TA after 21 hours and 125 km of biking, definitely ready for a nap and some hot food. It was a great TA location in a state park, complete with laundry and overheated restrooms. Our support crew had hot ravioli, coffee and hot chocolate for us, amongst other things. Absolute heaven!

After a restless nap, we headed out on our trek. At last a chance to relax a bit and enjoy each other's company. After a short bushwhack, we were on a road that we could follow for a long time. We jogged, we walked, we chatted, we told jokes. Oh, and we walked 4 km out of our way before we met a team who told us they'd left the TA just twelve minutes ago. We'd been out for two hours - aaaack. We snapped back into attentiveness and retraced our steps. The next couple of CPs went well, then we had a nasty, steep bushwhack up the side of a big mountain with a fire tower. There were medics and race volunteers camped up there in the rain, and we learned that we'd dropped a couple of places. There was a road nearby and a trail to the top, so most teams had missed out on the tiring bushwhack that had taken so much out of us. It was now just after midnight. Rats.

I'm not sure if it's fair to enter an expedition adventure race into Attackpoint, but WOW it sure felt like a lot of training, so here goes...

Appalachian Extreme is a 78-hr, 200-mile adventure race that travels through northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. I raced with the Terranauts, a team we've known since we started adventure racing. Their regular female teammate had surgery and they needed a sub. When they first talked to me, I suggested several other women, i.e. faster ones. Eventually it became clear that the serious female athletes were all busy that weekend, so it was back to me and I finally agreed to do it - with more than a little trepidation. I needn't have worried as much as I did. Skidder, Shifty and Hound Dog were great fun to race with, and they took excellent care of me out there.

The race started at 8 a.m. with teams running to the Connecticut River with heavy canoes and kayak paddles. We jumped in for a 4-hr whitewater paddle. Our Trayling-trained team was passing people on the straight stretches and holding our own in the whitewater. I kept waiting for the rock that would finally tip us, but luckily we just kept sliding over them. After a couple of hours in the stern, I got a sharp pain in my forearm which I now know is Intersection Syndrome. It's a tendon inflammation that comes from turning your wrist down and in, which doesn't happen in normal kayak paddling, but I did that when I steered the canoe around river bends and into rapids, which took a lot of my strength. This may turn into a big problem because I'm supposed to keep it immobilized for several weeks, but I have two adventure races in that time. :-(( For now, I'll keep my fingers crossed - or at least I would, if I could move my right hand without intense pain.

We got off the water 11 minutes behind the leaders and had a reasonably efficient 20-minute transition to biking. We were heading out to spend the night in bad weather on a maze of ATV and snowmobile trails, so we needed to be sure that our food, lights and clothing layers were all in our packs. Our awesome support crew (Bent and two partners of other teammates) had things well-organized and booted us out of there as quickly as they could.

The rain started almost immediately - and continued for most of the next 3 days. Not that there wasn't any variety in the weather - sometimes it was windy, sometimes it was cold, sometimes it was $%&*!# cold, etc. We headed into the poorly-mapped network of ATV trails. At first they were gravel tracks, but they eventually deteriorated into the usual deep muck with rocks. There was plenty of bike pushing and carrying, interspersed with a few pleasant bouts of actually sitting on the seat and turning the pedals. What a concept!

The good news is that Skidder aced the nav in this section, so we were on track to get out near roads by dark. Yahoo! One of the final CPs before the road was at the top of a windy mountain pass and we made the mistake of changing into our extra layers there, which made us cold before a long descent. On the positive side, the steep rocky mud on the trail down was scary enough to keep our hearts pumping faster, which warmed us up some. At midnight on Saturday, we were riding in driving rain on a slimy dirt road, eternally grateful to the blessed inventors of Goretex and fleece.

Appalachian Extreme 4-day expedition adventure race

Final test of my bike before Appalachian Extreme. The new Geax Mezcal semi-slick tires climb hills pretty well but slip around more, so it takes more effort. However, a couple of times when I thought that a particular hill was much harder to do with these tires, I reached the top, then noticed that I hadn't changed into the small chain ring. So the tires should be fine for the race.

As perhaps the only cyclist on earth who has completed more engineering degrees than successful bike repairs, I was very proud to get my new bike seat installed and transfer my old seat bag over. It's a tricky balance to get the seat tilted just right - somewhere between "oh no, all my weight is on the handlebars" and "yikes, over 4 days, that position is really going to cause friction on my, um, anatomy".

A long "to do" list today! That's OK, I needed the rest.

Gator Cup farsta. Ran F-Elite again and this time felt like I did a decent job. My nav was OK - not great and not terrible. A number of times I navigated to, say, a depression that was 20 m away from the depression I really should have been at, but from watching the other folks in the woods, I don't think I was the only one. I found this map difficult to read quickly and simplify, so I relied on my compass more than I have in a year. (Oh, if I had only done that yesterday!!) The problem is, I have to stop completely for at least 2 seconds to get an accurate bearing on this compass. Still waiting anxiously for my new Brunton to arrive.

The best news is that I felt great running. For me, this was fast. And I haven't felt good running in a long time. In honour of the occasion, I am taking myself off the sick list. From now on, I am a healthy person who just happens to have a really nasty cough that sounds like pneumonia.

Event: Gator Cup
 

Gator Cup Classic Course. Tried F-Elite for the first time, thinking that it will feel much easier when I run my age group in the Canadian O Champs. My goal for this meet was to have good starts, since I wasted too much time getting a feel for the maps at the Flying Pig. Using that criterion, I guess this race was a success, because I started running almost immediately and did fairly well for the first six controls. And then I lost my mind. I haven't had a chance to figure out where I went, but it took me 44 minutes to go between two controls that were 800 meters apart and not at all complicated. My mistake was that I kept going when it didn't feel right and ended up so far gone that it's a miracle it only took 44 minutes to get back to where I was supposed to be. The map was difficult - many trails were hard to see in the terrain and there were lots of early season marshes and ponds that didn't appear on the map. So once I was lost, there wasn't much to help me find myself. Because I'm still sick, I considered dropping out of the race since I knew that no one would fault me for it. But then I decided that my new goal would be mental training - to find that stupid control and make myself finish the race even though my result would be at the bottom of the list. The rest of the controls went fairly smoothly and believe it or not, I'm glad that I did the longer F-Elite course.

Paddling practice at Island Lake with the Terranauts and Bent. Shifty and I tried out our strokes and standard communications for Appalachian Extreme. Since our entire team is Trayling-trained, paddling should be a great discipline for us.

Out for a quick ride with Skidder and Shifty to test our bike towing system. Looks like it should work well. It's going to be great to have these young guys pulling me through the Appalachians!

Cool new gear update: With the new solar panels, our hydro meter was running backwards this morning before 10:30 a.m.!

Just a quick test of my freshly-tuned bike with its new Geax Mezcal semi-slick tires (or semi-knob, depending on whom you ask). I bought them for Appalachian Extreme to put a little less drag on the tow line and look a little more like a speedy Terranaut. They're just fine in dry conditions, and I don't have to work much harder on hard-packed trails. Climbing loose gravel hills was slippier than usual and I felt a bit less in control than usual when I descended on gravel. That's OK - I'll just get my youthful teammates to pull me up the biggest hills. ;-)

Cool new gear of the day: Our new 1.3 kW solar panels! Had to wait for months because the Germans are buying so many panels. Just got them hooked up late today and at 6:30 p.m. in cloudy weather, we're getting 22 W. Hydro One thinks we have the first grid intertie system in Caledon, and we are the first house in Canada to have the latest Xantrex inverter. This is going to be fun!

Cool new gear of the day: Our new 1.3 kW solar panels! Had to wait for months because the Germans are buying them all up. Just got them hooked up late today and at 6:30 p.m. in cloudy weather, we're getting 22 W. Hydro One believes we have the first grid intertie system in Caledon, and we are the first house in Canada with this Xantrex inverter. Sure hope the sun comes out tomorrow so we can see what these things will do!

Trail run with ThunderDog along the Hardwood Forest - Charlevoix Figure 8 route. Beautiful, cool sunny day! Didn't go too badly, but would like to trade in my lungs for a better model. Still coughing. :-(

Got back and tested all my shoes for possible use in Appalachian Extreme. I am the Imelda Marcos of trail running shoes and it is always hard to make decisions - especially since I have a blister right now and I'm looking for shoes that don't put pressure on it.

Wildlife du Jour: White-tailed Deer
Vegetation du Jour: Ferns
Gear du Jour: Sugoi Arm Warmers

Didn't see my race time, so I'll take a guess and fix it later. I'm pleased to say that tonight my running was better than my navigation. Since I haven't been able to do much running over the past while, that's a good sign that I'm finally on the road to recovery. It took 80 frustrating minutes to drive through rush hour traffic from Oakville (which is already a long way from home) and I arrived when people were already finishing the race. Argghh. So... it took me a couple of controls to relax and get my focus. After that, things went pretty well. I'm not as ready for the Gator Cup as I'd like, but this is way better than Sunday when I felt too weak to walk from the car to the house.

Line Orienteering exercise. This was fun - I've never done anything like it before.
No wildlife sightings today but on the drive home there was an intensely bright rainbow against a navy blue sky. The pot of gold appeared to be in Brampton which, frankly, must have been a mistake.
In the absence of wildlife, how about new gear reviews?
1) Bright blue Brooks trail running shoes that BobTheNavigator talked me into: They are starting to grow on me for runs in soft terrain like this, but they are still ugly!
2) Genuine Swedish orienteering pants purchased from Sudden: These are awesome!
3) Suunto compass: Totally useless. Points 90 degrees off the bearing if I run instead of walking. Can't wait until my cool new Brunton arrives.

Gentle trail ride around Palgrave, mostly twisty single track. It was SO nice to go biking in the woods for the first time this year. I guess I'm a bad adventure racer because this is the kind of riding I really enjoy - not mucky snowmobile trails or back roads. I did the Salty Steven single track section, but walked up and down the most heroic hills since I'm still not able to breathe too deeply. Like yesterday, it's good to see that the legs still work, even though the lungs are still kinda pathetic.
Wildlife Watch: 3 deer, 1 wild turkey

Inspired because I can now walk up stairs without getting dizzy, I tried a light jog around Short Bruce Loop with ThunderDog. It was too soon! Oh well... I was encouraged that my legs still feel strong, even though I can't breathe very well. All this inactivity is driving me crazy!

Other people have seen more wildlife than I have lately, but I will report two mallards and a skidder. Not Skidder the speedy adventure racer, but an actual skidder doing logging in the conservation area.

Feeling much worse today - weak and light-headed, so went to the doc on the way home from Bon Echo. Starting on Vitamin V (Vibramycin) to replace Vitamin X (Amoxicillin). Asked him if it's unusual to feel this bad with an upper respiratory bug and he peered at me over his glasses and said, "Well, you're not twenty anymore, you know." Gee, thanks.

Event: Bon Echo SAC Race
 

Sprint adventure race rules state that 3 team members must begin a race. Then if one member drops out, officials may or may not grant permission to the other two to continue unranked. So... there wasn't much choice for me at the Bon Echo Salomon Adventure Challenge. No matter how rotten I felt (and boy, did I feel rotten!), I had to be at the starting line - even if I only walked across it, collapsed in a limp heap, then withdrew from the race.

However, it was an ideal course design for the Tree Huggers (much canoeing and off-road navigation, minimal biking), so I decided to go as far as I could without raising my heart rate significantly. We began with a Lemans start, travelling on foot about 1.5 km on roads to the canoes. Our team walked at first (oooh, it was SO hard not to run with 100 teams charging out), then did some light jogging with me on tow, arriving at the boats well back in the pack, as intended. We paddled the beautiful Kishkebus canoe loop with several portages (one > 1 km), passing beneath the stunning cliffs of Bon Echo as we returned to the campground 2.5 hours later.

On the last long portage, I realized that my race was over. Even walking up small hills, my lungs felt like I was at altitude - nowhere near enough oxygen. My cough had become much worse as I got soaked in cold water from paddling and wading up to waist-deep on a breezy day. To keep going would probably mean being sick for an extra week. So for the first time ever, I dropped out of a race and sent my teammates on alone, unranked. :-( Amazingly, we were still in the upper half of teams at that point - really hard to believe. Our paddling classes have helped so much - we sailed past a lot of teams on the water, even though we kept reminding each other that we weren't racing today.

The good news - actually, it's great news - is that my teammates did really well without me. Bent, who claims that he can't navigate, took the maps that I'd prepared and led the way through a challenging trekking section, travelling with confidence and speed. The Minister offered his considered opinions upon request and stayed right on Bent's heels. Even with our deliberately slow start to the race, the Tree Huggers were one of the earlier teams to finish the regular course - unranked, naturally. I'm *very* proud of my teammates!

Really feel awful today - no voice, no lungs. At the moment it's looking unlikely that I can race at Bon Echo tomorrow. It's the first summer adventure race of the season and it's sold out with 100 teams, so should be a blast. We will drive up there and camp for the weekend and figure out what to do from there. Maybe Bent and The Minister can race as a 2-man unranked team and I can volunteer. Or maybe we will just walk part of the course. :-(((((((

Another perfect sunny day and I still feel like I've been hit by a truck. Since it worked so quickly for Bent, I've started on Vitamin X (amoxicillin) in hopes that Saturday's race will not literally be a walk in the Park for our team.

At last... a beautiful day with no snow or ice pellets in the forecast. So naturally, I am sick again. So much for the long bike ride I've been planning. :-( I guess I will be tapering for Bon Echo after all. This is our first Wednesday in a long time without a 6 a.m. paddling class, so at least we got to sleep in.

I decided that if I kept clinging to my old-fashioned, princessy notion that snowstorms and biking are mutually exclusive, I would never get out for a ride this spring. I went looking for a hilly, muddy, poorly-maintained country road to give my legs a workout. Luckily, my search was brief because I happen to live on such a road, and it connects to a network of similar roads. So I did an out-and-back to the intersection of Glen Haffy Road and Hwy 9, and got spattered with muck from head to toe. Wore a 15-lb AR pack to make the experience even more pleasant. Wildlife Watch: Two white-tailed deer and a dozen pick-up truck drivers who stared at me like I was insane.

Transitioned immediately to trail running, mostly to keep BulletDog happy, since she was annoyed that I went road biking without her. Kept the pack on. Legs did not feel bouncy today. Unfortunately, either my bronchitis is coming back or I'm catching whatever Bent has.

After the 6th ice pellet storm of the day, I decided to be a princess and wimp out of today's outdoor bike ride. I used Bent's indoor trainer in lieu of getting pummelled with hailstones along the road, and pedalled hard to get it over with quickly! I always find it boring to bike indoors, but today's session was made considerably more bearable by watching part of "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl". That was/is SUCH good stuff.

Woo hoo! The sun came out just long enough to create the illusion that the nasty weather forecast was incorrect, so ThunderDog and I made a break for it. Trail run around Palgrave West and Hardwood Forest. Icy chill in the air. Legs felt bouncy (how 'bout that, Skidder?) but the rest of me is still feeling the bug that I'm not quite over after 2 weeks. Got back to the house just as the heavy rain and hail were starting yet again - phew!

Trying to figure out how to change my training plan for the week. Was going to taper for Bon Echo sprint race, but now the race will double as a long training day for AppX. Will move activities earlier in the week, I guess, but won't take as much time off as planned.

Around Albion Hills with Luscious using Giant's Rib Raid map. Luscious did all the navigating and it's clear that she paid good attention in her nav clinic. Hingo and Bent also went out with the GRR map, practising their team dynamics (I guess) for the upcoming North Am Rogaine Champs.
Followed up with brunch and a much-needed bike repair seminar at Hingo & Luscious' place. We had another heavy hailstorm this afternoon. Will spring ever come??

Training Hours for April 2005: 48.5
(First full month of logging in Attackpoint)