June 21, 2006 - ActiveSteve

Podium Finish in Kayak Triathlon!

Hello Friends! Well, as the title implies, I managed to pull off a podium finish in the Ottawa Riverkeeper Kayak Triathlon this past weekend. Now mind you, there weren’t thousands of racers in my category as there are in other races, but I still feel very happy about coming in 2nd place a mere 2min. 16sec. behind my friend Mike Caldwell. The kayak triathlon consisted of a 5km paddle, followed by a 20km bike, finished off with a 5km run. Now this is by no means as gruelling as the 240+km race I’m doing this weekend, but nonetheless I definitely had to push myself. I actually don’t like really short races. Generally speaking, the people that enter them are really friggin’ fast. I’m not. I prefer a race where you have to use your head, and pace yourself better. For that reason, I’m looking forward to the half ironman triathlon I’ll be doing later this year. 2.5km swim, 90km bike, and 21.1k run. At least there you have to pace yourself and not just go flat out! However, in this case, I did go flat out, and it paid off for me. My weakest part was unfortunately the paddling part. I was set up in my little red plastic kayak, which is definitely not known for its speed. Conversely, Mike was in a wooden kayak that had been raced in the 1976 Olympics! You just know that one is made to go fast. Not only that, but at the start line, a canoe paddled by an inexperienced team cut me off badly by accident, causing me to run into them. When I tried to push off them to get back on track, I managed to spin myself further off course. By the time I got clear, a lot of the kayak field was well ahead of me. So, had I been in a faster boat, and not had that snafu, I’m pretty confident I would have won first place! As it turned out, the records have me as the 6th kayak off the water, but then I was in 1st place for both the bike and the run! Pretty sweet. I think a lot of it had to do with my very quick transitions, where others may have dawdled. I’ve learned my lesson from other races.

Life in General

Official Nanaimo Bar Wetting..

So, a couple weeks back we finally had the official Nanaimo Bar wetting party. This was a combination grand opening of the bar that I built, along with a birthday party for me. Yup, I’m another year older. 31 years old and it turns out I still know how to party! Good for me, right? Hee hee. At any rate, it was great to finally have a party with the fully renovated basement, and what a great excuse to invite people over, and see some people that I haven’t hung out with in a long time. I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who made it out at various points in the evening, and a special thanks to those who brought some tasty additions to the liquor cabinet! It was totally unexpected but highly appreciated. I started the night off a little grumpy, as my sister will attest. I was very hungry, and had been training earlier in the day, and suddenly felt rushed to get everything set up for the party. Luckily, after a couple hot dogs and some gin, I settled down quite handily. From that point on, I pretty much moved to behind the bar, which you can see in the picture to the right. If you’d like to see more shots of the party, they’re all over on Flickr (as per usual). If you go through the pictures, you’ll probably recognize some faces from long ago, and you might even notice some eerie differences between this party and parties past. Yup, it’s true, we’re all getting a little older, and it seems the invasion of the little people is upon us all! The first half of the celebration night was happily punctuated by several of our friends’ babies, including my own niece Helena. At one point, I looked around and asked myself what happened to the raging keggers, throwing forks at rare earth magnets on the fridge, while dressed in crazy outfits. Now, it’s all about toddlers pulling themselves across the floor, and laughing at the older ones who are now already getting lippy with us 😉 Crazy stuff. As a result, we had to keep Jonah off by himself till the latter portion of the party, which was the appropriate time to release the ‘party animal’. You know when that is of course. It’s when Matt and Rob started throwing random beer and liquor in the blender, expecting to come out with a delicious drink! Such was not the case. However, it did prompt the transformation to the type of party I’m more used to.