Hello friends and fellow outdoor lovers. I’m happy to bring you another rapid race report on another of my recurring winter races. This time, I’m talking about the 35th annual Winterlude triathlon. This event is each year not only a challenge to participants, but also seemingly to the organizers, as the weather always seems to wreak havoc on what they have in store. This year was no different, as you will learn about shortly! For my part, I was once again covering the event for Get Out There, so I had cameras on hand, and filming duties. As such, I didn’t get too many actual race shots, but did manage to nab this sweet picture of Mike at the finish line. There’s something epic and so ‘Canadian’ about seeing a frozen beard at the end of a cold race, isn’t there? At any rate, check out the limited pictures I did take, the click through to read the rest of the story and see the video.
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!
Well, I’ve done it! I can honestly say now that I’m half a man! Well, half an iron-type man that is! This weekend marked the successful completion of my half iron distance triathlon right here in Ottawa. For those of you who might not be aware of what that means, or the distances, I’ll summarize it for you. For starters, you swim for 1.9km, then you hop on your bike and pedal for 90km, then to finish it (you) off, you put on your running shoes and plod through 21.1km of running. The full iron distance, in case you haven’t figured it out, is twice as far for every discipline 😉 I registered for this race way back in February, and at that time, I was torn betwen doing the full iron distance, or the half iron distance. In the end, sanity won that time, and I registered for the half. After all, I did the half marathon before tackling the full marathon as well. I guess that can only mean that next year, I’ll have to take on the full distance. But I digress (as I often do). This blog posting will be all about my race experience in “The Canadian 1/2 Iron Distance Triathlon”, put on by Somersault events, and raced out of Mooney’s Bay beach. The weather was great, I had a nice little contingent of supporters (Thanks Jody, Kev, Grant, Bonnie, Maya, Natasha, Dave and Meghan!). That kind of thing always makes things go better. To save everyone the trouble, the bottom line is that I did way better than I had hoped. My goal was to finish in 5hr 30mins., but I shattered that by finishing in 5:11:13!! Luckily, there’s also a good bunch of pictures that were taken by Kev and Jody, which you can check out in their folder on flickr. For the gory details, just read on!
Welcome back to another, and perhaps my final post on our adventures in Morocco. My apologies for the slight delay between posts. I was off to Toronto for a conference, and had other family obligations. At any rate, on the plus side, we now have all of our pictures put up on flickr. I’ve even added a folder of videos as well, with a few clips that I shot in various places. For this post, I’m going to take you on two unique journeys. The first will be a camelback ride out into the dunes of the Erg Chebbi, where we spent the night in a Berber camp. The second part of the story will be our exploration of the ancient Roman ruins of Volubilis, an expansive site which was one of the farthest trading posts of the Roman empire. Both of these little adventures was pretty amazing, and this was the first time that either of us had ventured by camel into a desert, and spend the night under the stars in the desert. Once you’ve had chance to peruse the desert pictures and Roman ruin pictures, hop on back and read the whole tale.
