Merry Christmas and best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous holiday season. I haven’t got the time to write up a big post right away, but wanted to send out Season’s Greetings to all my virtual and real friends throughout the world. Here’s wishing you and yours a great Christmas. I’ll write more later. I promise. Till then, you can check out some of the pictures of my Christmas thus far, with more to come 😉
The invitation came exactly 11 days before the big event. I got an innocent-enough sounding message asking if I was interested in joining a U.S. team to race at Untamed New England, a well-known American adventure race. I was immediately interested, but also scared. Untamed is traditionally a multi-day race, and although I’d always wanted to tackle it, I wasn’t sure 11 days was enough prep time! However, this year, the race was actually being run as a 24-hour event instead of multi-day. For that reason, it didn’t take me long to respond in the affirmative that I’d join the roster! I was to be a last-minute replacement for an injured team-mate, and was recruited on James Galipeau’s recommendation (ironically, he was another replacement racer). All I knew was that I’d be racing on THE Untamed New England team (there were 2), and it would be a fast team looking to podium! What follows is the tale of that race, a tale of struggle, suffering, and success. Read on!
Howdy folks! I’m sure if you’re reading this post, you’re expecting me to be writing about my latest race result, right? Well, much as I’d like to jump the gun and get right to it, I’m still a couple posts behind, so rather than just skip them, I’m forcing myself to at least write a few paragraphs on a couple things that happened before this weekend 🙂 As you’re no doubt aware, I’ve been doing a lot of training lately in preparation for my Iron distance triathlon. However, in the last few weeks of training for any big event, you’re supposed to do what’s called a taper, which is when you reduce you’re training volume. So this post and the next are about what I did during that taper. It’s important to make sure that you take some time to recover and get yourself mentally prepared for the big race! Read on to hear about what I did a few weeks back.
Hello there loyal readers. My sincerest apologies for the delay in posting any additional tales of intrigue on our recent trip to Cuba. I had to fact-check all of my information for fear that the Somking Gun might find me to be a fraud as they claim to have found Jim Frey’s book “A Million Little Pieces” to be :-). But seriously folks, I’ve just been pre-occupied with welcoming in 2006, and figuring out just what the hell I plan to do with it! At any rate, allow me now to magically transport you back to Cuba. Picture it: Cuba. 2005. December. One of the things that you may read about Cuba is that you really shouldn’t try to drive there. Cars are unreliable, and drivers don’t have that Canadian sensibility (hunh? what? Last I checked, there were plenty of idiots on the road here too!). Well, after our full day of Jeep safari in Cuba, I will concur. However, the drivers you really have to worry about are the damn tourists. And in our case, the crazy drunk Russian tourists (ed. note: this is not an anti-Russian post, just an anti-Russian-that-was-on-our-jeep-safari post.) Read on.
Yup, you read right. I’m mad about winter. But in a good way 🙂 I know it’s been a little while since I updated my blog, so I figured I’d do a 2 for 1 race report in this post, seeing as both races form part of the Mad Trapper Snowshoe Race series. The first one occurred way back in early December, and the 2nd took place a little earlier in January. Both races were quite unique, and ironically, both races saw me finish in 5th place overall in the 10km race category. In a departure from most race reports of late though, I carried no cameras, and took no photos or video. My focus was purely on the races and the camaraderie, so you’ll just have to re-live the events through my words, and a little video clip put together by Dave McMahon further below. In spite of the lack of visual stimuli, I promise the story will still paint the picture for you. Now read on and learn about both of these fun races!
