Training Log Archive: Bash

I did part of Rodney Yee's "Slow Burn" yoga DVD, which I'd borrowed from a friend. It was quite relaxing, but not compatible with my desire to be a slug today, so I stopped partway through. I'd like to try Leanimal's "Rodney Yee Power Yoga", since he has good form, and the DVD is well-produced. However, the "Slow Burn" routine was so easy and slow-moving that it didn't hold my attention well.

This wouldn't be news in most households, but 'Bent and I looked at a video on YouTube today, right in the comfort of our own living room!!! Yes, we now have rural "sort of high-speed" Internet here, and it's like coming out of the dark ages for me. At last I can follow Spike's blog, look at the Primal Quest videos and see what Route Gadget is all about - not to mention downloading some tunes for my cute new iPod Shuffle. Woo hoooooo!!!!! :-)

Yay, my iPod is working now, and I've bought my first 5 songs. :-)

Final vetting of the Tree Hugger Invitational race course. Much relief to discover that all 26 flags were still there after yesterday's course test. Temperature dropped below freezing, so the goopy mud was mostly gone. On the flip side, my feet got icy cold in the wet areas!

3rd Tree Hugger Invitational Race and Party.

'Bent and I are truly fortunate to know so many fun, interesting, talented and generous people. Everyone contributed to the event in some way, whether by donating prizes, making an appetizer, presenting a slide show, compiling race results, holding a baby, moving furniture, taking photos... the list goes on and on. We had an amazing list of 11 event sponsors, and almost all of them approached me without my asking. We even had an inflatable finish line brought by the ECCO-ESAR folks!

There were 46 race participants this year, up from 36 last year. Overall winner was Eugene, with Leanimal, Hansel and Zoolander finishing close together in 2nd, 3rd and 4th place respectively. I am SO proud of Leanimal for coming so close to winning the whole event overall in a field that included some top adventure athletes, male and female. Everyone did well though. Most of the orienteering was of moderate difficulty, and it definitely took a lot of skill and fitness to complete the entire course in 90 minutes.

Racers had to answer a question at each control, and these questions covered a wide range of topics. The question that most people got wrong concerned the order of the planets from the sun - and I even agreed to accept two different planet names because the wording of the question was ambiguous. It was interesting that a number of native Canadians had never noticed the word "érable" on their maple syrup bottles. The most fun answer to read was the one where people had to write a sentence using "PINES" as a verb.

'Bent and I had a great time today, although we were mostly too busy to chat for long with anyone until the end of the night, when just a few folks were left. We had a total of 60 adults and 17 kids, most of whom stayed for dinner and the slide show, so it was cozy in our living room! Great presentations by Hammer, Slice, BobTheNavigator and some non-APers, including a wonderful little girl who presented a Powerpoint on her first adventure race last spring at age 9. Teamed with her Dad, she finished 7th of 32 Coed teams in Storm The Trent, and she's eager to race again this year.

We raised over $850 for our two charitable causes, both of which mean a lot to us personally because they involve good friends from the AR community:

- AndyCam is cycling across Africa in the Tour d'Afrique and raising money to buy bikes for native healthcare professionals.
- Tree Huggers Gazelle and Gazette have moved to Tajikistan (boo hoo!) where they are working through a charity to run an adventure travel company and bring money into the very poor local economy.

Great to have so many people here, and fun to hear their stories from the 2006 AR season. Now the countdown begins... The 2007 AR season starts in less than 5 days.

'Bent and I went out to vet the Tree Hugger race course. We divided the controls between us and carried 2-way radios so that 'Bent could alert me if I needed to re-hang any controls. As it turns out, 5 flags were missing today - arggghhh! This is really strange - I wonder if I ended up with defective flagging tape. There was no overlap between these 5 flags and the 4 flags that were missing 18 hours after I first hung them, and you'd kind of expect that if a human was doing it. Also, we still had 3 of the 4 flags that are visible from the road, and you'd expect someone to rip those down if they were so inclined. We had some wind damage to our garden shed yesterday, so maybe it was enough to tear down all that flagging tape. Weird that I haven't found little pieces of shredded pink stuff anywhere in the woods though. Looks like we'll have to vet the course for a 3rd time tomorrow morning, shortly before the racers arrive. In past years, I've never lost a single flag. Strange...

Thursday training with the C3 gang started with an hour of coached running, where I got to test my brand new road running shoes. These were the ones that a talented fellow sold to me by saying, "I hesitate to ask you to try these on, because this is more shoe than you need when you do so little road running. The price point is a bit higher because of the extra technology." Technology!! He thinks I don't want Technology?!? Phatty, Leanimal and I all agreed that it was an awesome sales pitch, and sure enough, after testing all the shoes, I bought the Pricier Shoes With Technology. Also, they were the only ones that came in blue. :-)

There was a good turnout of Tree Huggers. As expected, 'Bent and Luscious came to their first session, and there was a surprise appearance by Hingo, who was celebrating his, um, 29th birthday today. We did hill intervals at 75% effort for half an hour. 'Bent was looking speedy out there, and thus attracted some "running style" critique from Barrie Shepley, who has coached at the Olympics. Useful stuff. Tonight we were all supposed to exaggerate our arms, since most runners don't use them enough.

Caron Shepley's Hard Core Conditioning class - mercifully shorter than the DVD.

Power Yoga class. I think different body parts will be fatigued this week. We decided to sign up for 4 months of Thursday Night Training, plus we bought 15-month C3 memberships as well.

After 'Bent vetted the Tree Hugger race course and failed to find 4 flags, I went out for an unplanned run to see if he had been in all the right places. We have 6 cm of snow, so I could see his frustrated footprints circling the area around every missing control location, and I also recognized the branches where I'd tied the flagging tape.

Very strange to lose so many flags just a few hours after putting up the course. I don't think I've lost any around here before, and I've often left the course up for a month or more. Three of the locations were places where I doubt anyone would have gone except for 'Bent and me, so unless someone was following my footprints in the snow (creepy!), I'm hoping that yesterday's wind ripped them away. All the same, we're going to need to vet the course once or twice more before Saturday afternoon, just because this is so weird.

Etoile, AdventureGirl! and I had a nice evening run down to the Bayfront Trail, with some interesting diversions like running form exercises, random speed and hill intervals, running with AG! riding me piggyback, and a mini-Pyramid of P&P on the York St. (?) stairs. We decided to avoid injury by going all the way up once and all the way down once, then we called it a day.

I put out all the flags in Palgrave West for the Tree Hugger party race. In a rare moment of mercy, I changed the course to avoid a large sector with heavy burrs. There are 2 controls where it's impossible to avoid getting ice water up to your ankles, so I will mention that in the instructions, and the people who want dry feet can skip them. (It's a Score-O, sort of.)

This year's race includes more skill testing questions than the races in past years, although we are using two nice new orienteering maps, so good navigation will be important as well. I know some racers will be reading this for clues, so be sure to brush up on your arithmetic, French, literature, astronomy, geology, biology and geography, just to name a few. Oh, and there are lots and lots of controls, heh heh.

This sure was a nice way to spend a snowy afternoon...

Went out into the cold, dark night (are the violins playing yet?) to put up 3 more controls, including one with an Anatomy question to make Leanimal happy.

Today's plan was to hang all the flags for the Tree Hugger race, but with 60 kph wind gusts ripping the screen door out of my hands, there was no way I was going out into the woods. We always see trees and branches down after weather like this, and sometimes big hunks of wood crash down much too close for comfort, even on moderately windy days. Setting the Tree Hugger race course is going to take me into some very quiet corners of Palgrave West, and it might take awhile for even 'Bent and Crash to find me lying somewhere with a concussion.