Apologies for the Delay

Well, it’s been a little bit since I popped a post online, so here we go. I’ve been pretty wrapped up with final preparations for the upcoming race season, which is actually well and truly upon us at this point. In the past couple weeks, I had my first adventure race of the summer, as well as my first ‘marquis’ event, which was the National Capital Marathon. I’ll leave that one for a post of its own, and stick to talking about my adventure race in this post. If you’d like to check out some pictures from this event, I’ve posted them over on flickr, as per usual. These were all pictures taken on the course by volunteers at various points, not me, so I’m not even in all of them, but they give you a bit of an idea of the race. The race took place on the May long weekend, specifically on the Saturday. This was slated to be a 5-8 hour race course, and unfortunately for me, we took the entire 8 hourse to complete it, due to some unfortunate errors, which I’ll get into soon. The entire weekend, as you may recall, was sort of miserable. There were frost warnings issued, and the temperatures stayed low, and the rain poured forth. The location of this race was in Quebec, in the Val de Monts region. Not far from Ottawa by any means, a mere 40 minute drive. The actual start and finish took place at Lafleche Aerial Parc. This is a real fun place which has all sorts of zip lines, aerial obstacle courses, as well as caves that can be explored. If you’re looking for an interesting way to spend an afternoon, this would be it!

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.

Howdy sports fans. As I write this post, I’m hurtling along the train tracks between Ottawa and Montreal. I’ve been in Montreal on business most of the week, and am only now finally getting a chance to write up a posting about the National Capital race weekend. Good thing I have a new computer, isn’t it? Hee hee. That’s another post in itself, but suffice it to say my mobility has greatly improved. Hmm, does that make me a yuppie again, since I’m young and upwardly mobile now? But I digress, this post is to fill you all in on how I managed to run a great half marathon, last weekend, and have a fun time doing it! Read on friends.

As most of you are aware, I’m now on my fifth year of running. I originally started running just to improve my performances in adventure races, but found out that running is something you have to stick to, and do a lot of, in order to improve. Without having an endurance base, it can take several years of training to get to a good place in terms of endurance. Luckily, I think I’ve finally found that place, and am now intent on capitalizing on my new running ability. As such, I like to take part in the National Capital Race weekend each May. I’ve also heard it’s the number one tourist weekend in Ottawa now. Crazy.