steve's blog

The sun was beating down hard on my neck. My leg muscles were just on the edge of starting to cramp after over 7 hours of hard effort. A team up ahead had paused to debate the merits of taking one route over another at an intersection. With my head down and with determination, I blew past them and pedaled hard to the finish. Keeping a very short lead on them, I crossed the line as 4th solo male, and 6th team overall at the spring Frontier Adventure Challenge in Huntsville. In retrospect, had they made the turn, they would have had 1km shorter to travel, and would have beat me, but seeing me blow by made them change their minds and try to chase me down. I got lucky this time! Of course, dear friends, I’ve just revealed the punchline, the finish of the race. This was the first summer race of the season, and it was a great one. Read on for the full story, video, pictures, and all the good stuff!

Howdy folks! Well, as we hurtle towards the inevitable spring time change, and the warming temperatures, I'm going to take us back in time to just over a week ago, where we got that sudden dramatic snowstorm. You know. The one that dumped buckets of snow all over the area? Oh yes, the one and same that I had to drive through to get to Quebec City for the Pentahlon des Neiges. There is a well-known adage that goes 'getting to the start line is the biggest challenge'. Well, it would certainly appear that was the case for this race. In fact, I'd probably rate this drive the worst in my life! The normally 4.5 hour drive took over 9 hours, and that was with only 2 short stops. One for a sandwich, and one for a washroom / nerve break. It was absolutely atrocious, with blowing heavy snow, uncleared roads, and darkness the entire way. Did that affect the race? The rest of the weekend? My sanity? Well, read on through my little post to get the answers to all those, and a few other questions. This'll be the last race report for a while, so enjoy it my friends! As always, pictures have been posted, and I did a video review as well.

Sorry for the delay in getting this post up everyone. In the past 10 weeks, I've done 8 races, and between the pictures, the videos, the training, the racing, the editing, the working, etc. etc, I just ran out of time to write my traditional post-race summary :-) However, I'm here tonight to rectify that and share with you all just a few thoughts from the Gatineau Loppet this year. I was particularly excited to take part in the event this year, as it would be my first time taking part in a longish race where I skate skied! Yes, this is still my first year on skate skis, so there is still a lot to learn, but it didn't stop me from signing up to do the 31km (eventually classified as 27.5km) event at the Loppet. I was also there covering the event for Get Out There Magazine, so as has been the case quite frequently lately, I have a video review of the race for all to enjoy at the end of this post too. In addition to the video, I snapped a fair number of pictures over the weekend for you to check out. Click on to read the rest of my thoughts on the weekend, which I'll keep on the brief side.

A warm welcome back to you all. I'm back from another epic odyssey over the past weekend. Although the Canadian Ski Marathon is not a race, strictly speaking, I'm still putting under my 'race' cartegory. This is mainly due to the fact that there are strict time cut-offs, which mean many skiers don't actually complete the entire 160km distance. Ergo, it is a race against the clock in my mind :-). I also wish I got paid to race, because I would have gotten overtime. Over 20 hours outside in the bitter cold, and up at 3am and 4am! Seems like more 'work' than my job! At any rate, it was an amazing event, and I hope you'll all read on for my personal take of the entire event. I covered it for Get Out There Magazine as well (videos appended at end), and took a bunch of pictures. Should give any skiers out there a great idea and reason to try the CSM next year!

Good day, ActiveFriends! Another week, another race report to fill you in on. This time, I take you to the 29th annual Winterlude Triathlon. An event I've done several times now, and still look forward to it each year. This, to me, is pretty much 'the' quintessential winter race that conincides with Ottawa's winter festival, Winterlude every year. As with the past two years, we were lucky enough with the weather to actually have a full skate, ski, and run course laid out. This is pretty key to note, as for several years, they kept having weather issues forcing either no ski, or no skate, or only run, etc. Seeing as I was covering the event for Get Out There Magazine, it was great to be able to highlight the whole triathlon. Since I was doing full coverage this time, I can once again share lots of media with you all, starting with the folder of pictures on flick, as well as additional goodies found below. Click on through to read the full story, which I'll try to keep brief again!

Hello friends! I figured I had better get cracking on my latest race report. After all, another race is looming large in a day or so, and every weekend until March is booked with races, so I'm in peril of starting to fall behind once again! We can't let that happen, so here I am to fill you all in on the Bushtukah Mad Trapper Night Race. This is one of the funnest, social, yet hard races of the winter season that I always look forward to. As you have probably pieced together using your powers of deduction, this race takes place under the cover of darkness. As with all Mad Trapper races, we find ourselves out at the Ark. However, to pick our way along the race course, we all wear headlamps. Race start is slated for 6:30pm, and that's pitch black! As a result, this is one of the first races in a long time where I have absolutely no pictures or videos. Gets to be a lot of work to do that, so this race I was focusing on just racing hard. If you'd care to hear how that went for me (no spoilers this time in my teaser), click on past the link and read the full post.

Another week, and another race report for my loyal readers! This past weekend, I headed off towards Kingston (home of the Tragically Hip, in case you didn't get the title reference), for what I think was my shortest race ever, but a great time nonetheless. I was there to do a video race review for Get Out There Magazine of the Dion Snowshoes Frontenac Park Snowshoe Race. A mouthful, isn't it? I've done plenty of snowshoe races in our area as part of the Mad Trapper Snowshoe series each year, but this was the first time I ventured out of town to try my luck elsewhere. As it turns out, this race was also a qualifier for the Snowshoe Running World Championships for this year! That was part of my motivation to tackle this race. I secretly hoped I'd be in the top 3. Have a look at the pictures I posted on flickr, then click on past the link to read the rest of my thoughts on this well-run family-organized race.

Howdy sports fans! Welcome to 2012 and my first race report of the new year. The race in question was the second of 4 snowshoe races in the Mad Trapper series at the Ark in Denholm Quebec. I've made a decision this year that I'm going to try and shorten my race reports somewhat, since I suspect not everyone is a fan of epically long reports to go through :) Instead, I'll try to add some additional race information that's easier to digest by everyone, including quick course and stat overviews, and video race reviews where I've done them. This was one such race, so I'd invite you all to check out the embedded video review at the end of this post. However, one thing that won't change is my continued visual logs of events in the form of pictures I'll post on Flickr. So, as usual, I invite you to browse the pictures I posted, then catch up with the rest of the report.