Race Reports

Howdy everyone. In the spirit of trying to keep my racing section up to date with the latest information, I decided that I’d write a post about my recent training weekend up at Calabogie at Jim’s cabin. Since Jody is still away, and the weather has been pretty co-operative, I decided to set up a little team training to simulate some race-type conditions. Since we’ve got races coming up soon, this was a good opportunity to do some training as a group, as well as address any concerns each of us might have in the longer races. The plan was to head up to Calabogie on a Saturday morning, and stay over until Sunday, so that we could do both daytime training as well as some night training. Read on for some stats and info about how it all went.

The good news was that everyone was available for the training. However, Carl was only going to stay up until the early evening, since he was heading out to Asia on Monday, and had some stuff to take care of on the home front before taking off. Also, Steeve (and therefore Anne-Marie as well, since they were car-pooling), decided that he’d rather not stay over, and planned to head back after doing a little bit of night training. Boo is what I say. In the end, it was to be only myself that stayed overnight with Jim. Not only that, but he wasn’t really in the mood to do any hard core night training, so I was either on my own for that, or I was to cut it back to just having a few beers in the cabin with Jim before turning in. Oh well, when in Rome, right?

Hello all out there! I figure it’s time to update you on the progress of Team Hyper-Active, as well as my personal training and athletic pursuits for the coming months. WIth the addition of my handy-dandy new Garmin Forerunner 305, I’ve been able to basically track all my workouts, and then review the stats. No, I’m not going to bore you with the reams of data that I’m now collecting 😉 Suffice it to say, it’s an engineering geek turned athlete’s dream come true. Even when spinning indoors, I’ve been at least able to log my heart rate data and time of workouts; and when I trained on my tri bike, I was also able to track virtual distance and cadence data as well. I tells ya, it’s absolutely sweet! Now, when I’m not training, I feel bad, because the calendar has a blank spot. But I digress. Of course I’m not always out training, but I’ve been doing my damndest to get out there as much as possible with everything else. During the week, I try to get out running at lunchtime at least 3 times a week. Then in the evenings, it’s been all about biking, swimming, paddling, and whatever else I can squeeze in. Weekends? Well, they’re all about the long-time endurance stuff. That’s what this is all about. Read on, if you’re curious. If not, sorry for boring you 😉

Howdy all! Hope everyone is doing well on this first official day of spring! So, do you think that spring has truly sprung? Personally, I would say yes, on account of all the fine weather we’ve already had, plus the fact that we’ve changed all the damn clocks already. For a night owl, I much prefer the fall back than the spring ahead, but that’s a totally different story, isn’t it? I also know that spring has truly sprung because I’m realizing that I have to get more serious about my training again. I have a bit of a lull between races at the moment, so that’s as good a time as any to re-organize my training schedule and get things back on track. That generally means picking up my 5 times a week running plan again, and making sure I do as much biking and swimming as I can as well. In the past, I’ve generally done all of my training solo, utilizing my trusty Suunto heart rate monitor, and Gmaps Pedometer to get things going. It’s been a pretty successful plan, and luckily I have enough motivation to keep it up. However, over the winter months, I started doing a bit more group training. Specifically, I’ve been going to 2-3 spin classes a week, and running Sundays with a group of triathlete-types at what is affectionately known as ‘Happytime’ (1.5 – 2.5 hours running followed directly by 2 hours spinning). That’s gotten me a bit used to having some training partners. As such, I decided maybe I should buddy up with someone. As you have probably guessed by the picture already, this buddy now comes in electronic format! Perfect for a techie guy like me. So just what is this huge watch? Well, read the whole post to find out!

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?