Training Log Archive: Bash

Early Thanksgiving weekend with my parents. Lots of autumn leaves and good food. No training. I dragged the whole family along on a drive to see the colours, and they patiently waited while I hung MTBO posters in Palgrave and Albion. Big score of the day was meeting the Albion Hills superintendent, who offered to hang posters in places where It wouldn't be legit for me to do it. Nice. Now to see how adventurous the regular mountain bikers are!

If you're planning to attend the Star Tracks MTB-O on Sun. Oct. 19, don't forget to pre-register to help us with our planning. Thanks!
http://stars.whyjustrun.ca/events/view/1603

What I learned about iPhones today - in case it might help someone else:

Remember my hard drive crash? Last night I realized that I haven't been able to synch music between my iPhone and my Mac since getting the new hard drive. Here's something I didn't know (and hence didn't do the appropriate back-up)... If your computer dies, you can't just load the music from your iPhone onto a new computer. You can only transfer the songs you purchased from the iTunes Store. If you loaded music into iTunes from MP3s or CDs, and you no longer have access to your old computer, Apple expects you to restore from an iTunes Library back-up (so be sure to do that!) or else feed in all those CDs again. Oops.

Thank you, Google... An app called Senuti will copy music from your iPhone to your computer. If you need less than 1,000 songs, you can use the trial version for free but even the paid version is only $20. It hasn't been the most exciting Friday night, and there are some glitches but maybe I've finished resolving my Great Computer Crash of 2014. (Famous last words...)

It's that time of year again... Hard Core with Caron.

C3 class. Personal Best (the company owned by Sheldon Persad and Caron & Barrie Shepley) plans to open a yoga studio in Caledon East, conveniently located right next to the liquor store. It will include the only Yoga Wall in Canada to date. Here's what that looks like.
http://yogamelanyc.com/yoga-wall-class

Back to Albion Hills on a warm morning to hang ribbons for Harps' planned test of the Star Tracks race course after work. (Thank you, Harps!) The gorgeous autumn scenery was more than a little distracting but I got all the ribbons up. I parked in a different place and did the controls in a different order to avoid getting into a rut. (Although on a few trails, I got into actual ruts.) I chatted briefly with Coach LD when she rode by, then took evasive action to prevent her from learning anything about the course; she is a podium threat. Some GPS adjustments since I got some of my on/offs backwards as usual.

Star Tracks Mountain Bike Orienteering
Sun. Oct. 19
Albion Hills
Be there or... be somewhere else less fun.
http://stars.whyjustrun.ca/events/view/1603

In Brantford helping my parents today.

The Salomon Toronto store closed on Sunday night for renovations that will last until November. As the closing date approached, I thought about whether I should make a trip down to the city but I couldn't think of anything I needed. Given my extensive outdoor gear collection, it was almost laughable to think about *needing* anything more.

Right on cue, an hour before the store closed, when I was hopelessly out of range in Milton, the eyelet broke on my precious Fellcross shoes so I can't tighten them properly. These are my orienteering shoes and the North American Orienteering Championships are two weeks away. Aacckk!! On the bright side, I guess it's good to have an excuse prepared for my NAOC results.

General Running Strength Conditioning #1, plus some extras. Hoo boy, it's been awhile. It's hard to feel strong with only one good shoulder.

After Saturday's ride, I revised the Star Tracks MTBO course to add a little distance and make it less likely that riders will choose road routes for a couple of legs. I'm done now. I think the Regular Course will be enough for a lot of people but there is an Advanced Option and I'm also thinking about a Super Duper Insanely Advanced option - you know, in case Bob comes.

I rode most of the Regular Course today with some stops to check out trail changes that may affect route choice. Mick and I will still have a few more map updates but it's in pretty good shape.

Now I just have to finalize the Novice Long and Novice Short courses. Novice Long is proving to be a tricky concept. My intended target demographic was a person with good mountain biking skills and limited nav skills. The thing about MTBO is that navigation isn't all that tricky because flags are on trails. The hard thing is understanding the map. So maybe Novice Long will do the same course but get extra info plus an introduction to O maps from a friendly volunteer. Still thinking about that.

I need to print off an event flyer since I am constantly meeting riders who are interested in what I'm doing. Chivalry is not dead. When I've been course testing at Albion, at least once every 30 minutes some gentleman has stopped to make sure I'm not lost. I guess it is alarming to see someone stopped on the side of a bike trail staring at a big, colourful map.

I added a few photos in Saturday's log to highlight the Big Event Of The Weekend - the wedding of Matt Wong, son of our original, longtime AR teammate, The Minister (Ming). My first memory of Matt is an enthusiastic 6-year-old joining us for mountain bike rides in Palgrave. He's now a project manager with a Waterloo engineering degree and - as of Saturday - an athletic, witty, animal-loving wife, Rachel. They have done two DontGetLost Raids so far, and several speeches mentioned "adventure running" so I suspect we will all see them again.