Valiant Effort at Champs

I can now say that I raced in the Canadian National snowshoe championships. In fact, I can also say that in my age category, I was the 3rd fastest racer in the Canadian National snowshoe championships! Yup, that’s right, I got third place. Sadly, the field wasn’t that huge, because truth be told, I had what I would consider a pretty mediocre race. Of course, I do have a valid excuse. It turns out that you really shouldn’t race hard for 7 hours the day before a race like this 😉 On the plus side, I dragged a camera along with me for the entire race to snap pics. If you’d like to see them, head on over to the flickr folder. But before you do that, why not read my little tale of pushing hard?

A Brick Work-out… AR Style

Winter is a great time of year, isn’t it? When else can you go from a balmy spring-like day to a massive snow dump in just under 24 hours? So began the weekend of double races for me! I had signed up quite a while ago for all three races in the Mad Trapper Snowshoe series, the last of which was to occur on March 6th. Luckily for me, the Raid Pulse Winter Adventure race was also scheduled for the same weekend, and I decided to go ahead and sign up for it as well. The idea of this race was to get in some good team dynamic building by racing as a team of 4 racers with my Hyper-Active team. Unfortunately, the race only accepted pairs of racers, so we signed up as a co-ed team of two (myself and Anne-Marie), and a male team (Steeve and Carl). The main goal was to see how we’d get along as a team racing together, in preparation for the longer summer races we’d like to race as a team. Anywho, this post will be about the first race of the weekend, the 6-8 hour winter AR race at Plaisance, Quebec, which is a town about an hour east of Ottawa on the Quebec side. Read on for more about that.

Poker Night in Calabogie

You know, winter wouldn’t be complete anymore without a hike down to Jim Doucette’s cabin for a good old-fashioned winter poker night in Calabogie! That’s exactly what we did the first weekend I was back from the Dominican Republic. The notice wasn’t totally last minute, but it was a bit rushed for me to make up my mind about going or not. As such, I decided this time around that I would only go out for supper and the games, and head back into town later the same night. After all, I had some pretty intense training to go to the next morning, and I knew that if I stayed over, it would mean only one thing… too much partying with the boys. So sets the stage for the second winter invitational poker tournament at the cabin. This post will give you a little colour around this fun event.

Sailing the Caribbean

My final excursion while in the Dominican Republic was a full day Catamaran excursion. Possibly the best part about this excursion was the fact that it departed from my resort’s beach, so I really didn’t have to displace myself too much in order to make it there on time at 8am. This was a good thing, because I was a little bit worn out from the Tuesday night activities. What were those activities you ask? Well, that was the night I met up with Penelope and Melissa at the beachside grill a la carte restaurant, after which I went to the casino night with Go Travel direct. That turned out to be pretty lame, so I ended up going back to the resort for the nightly show, which ended up being the light-bulb eating dude! That was a good call, and put me in the mood to have a few drinks while I watched. Anyway, long story short, I was definitely ready to hit the ocean the next morning, but not in the mood to join the ‘party’ aspect of the day. Yup, as might be expected, this was no ordinary catamaran. This was the party catamaran! Open bar all day long. However, I didn’t touch a drop till we were actually anchored back at our starting point late in the afternoon. I just couldn’t justify drinking all day. That and the fact that I didn’t know a single soul on the boat, since none of the people I’d met were on this excursion. However, it was still pretty cool. Read on for more.

Biking in the Dominican

Alright, so they said that I was a little out of my mind. They said that I had a high risk of getting seriously injured. They said that most people really don’t do what I wanted to. But as you have no doubt asked yourself many times, who exactly are “they”? Of course, I’m talking about the fact that I had decided to do some cycling while I was in the Dominican Republic. After all, I had gone to all the trouble of packing my bike in an airline flight box, dragged it to the resort (literally) and re-built it there the first day. I was staying at a place called Playa Dorado, which is not exactly in Puerto Plata, and just up the road from two places called Sosua and Cabarete. These are two places quite well known as being surf towns, and having great beaches. I didn’t feel like paying the $60+ USD that the organized excursions wanted to charge for going there. Plus, you were stuck on their schedule. Taxis were another option, and would have cost about a quarter that, but really, I was determined to experience at least a little of the Dominican on two wheels. And so I formulated my plan.