Welcome back friends. This post is to let everyone know that there’s a new force to be reckoned with in the adventure racing world of the National Capital Region! Yup, the smiling people you see before you make up the new face of Hyper-Active for the coming year (at least). From left to right we are: Steve, Anne-Marie, Carl, and Steeve. Steeve and I have raced together throughout the past year, and have been looking to grow our partnership into a full-fledged team. This is actually something that I’ve been trying (more or less unsuccessfully) to do for a couple years now. The idea is to get a group of like-minded people to train and race together. That way, we can grow as a team, and get stronger as a unit.
Racing with different people all the time may be fun, but the problem is that it doesn’t really let you develop a team persona. By joining with a few other people, we’re hoping to lay the foundation for a team for years to come. Knowing each others’ strengths and weaknesses really helps bring you together. Steeve was really pounding the pavement, and found these two great people to sign up for the challenge 😉 Ultimately, we’re still on the lookout for a couple more people. The nice thing about having more than 4 of us is that it would allow us to race in more events. When one person can’t go, another could fill in. It would also give us the chance to (possibly) have a support crew built in to the team. To those ends, if anyone reading this is interested in signing on, let me know.
To get things kick-started, we’ve made a pact to start training as a team right away. Minimum of one session per month is in order, and preferably more than that. I’ve picked my training up again (finally) in the past few weeks, so I’m already on that. One of the things I’m signed up for is ‘Happytime’, which is a Sunday morning group where we do 1-2 hours running, followed by a solid 2-hour spinning class, all at the OAC. The funny part is that Carl was also signed up for that session, so we see each other every week.
Carl, Anne-Marie and Steeve also decided to do a little training this past Saturday (I had already made my own running / swimming plans). The chart you see on the right here is the results of their little training exercise. They actually ended up going out for about 6 hours! Awesome job, guys! They did a total of about 45km, including a mix of trail biking, then in the middle of the ride doing some trail running, then heading back on the bikes. All of this was in the hilly terrain of the Gatineau’s, as you can tell by the profile.
To get the racing spirit brewing early as well, it looks like all of us are signed up to do a winter adventure race in early January just outside of Toronto. It’ll be the traditional SAC Winter Race in Mansfield (it’s on the events calendar already). Sadly, this is a 3-person race only, so we couldn’t race as a full team. Lucky for me, I’ve already been recruited by a couple other local racers anyway (Sophia and James), so although I won’t race with the team, we’ll all be able to experience the race and dissect it after the fact. Anyway, wish us luck, we’re going to try to find some nice sponsors for the team as we go along as well. You might also see some new sections either added to this website, or an entirely new sub-site (whaddya think, Kev?)
