August 2006 - ActiveSteve

Trail Running Triumph (2nd Place!)

Well, another weekend has passed by, and sadly, it’s starting to feel like the summer is waning! Damn! However, I can’t really complain, as I’ve had a great summer. Although I didn’t really take any vacation, I did find lots of time to get out there and do the things I love to do. This has been my most active summer to date, from a racing and training standpoint. I definitely think I’m well on my way to achieving some of my larger life goals now. I’ve never yet put them on any sort of list, and I don’t think I will. Dreams are personal, so until they will be realized, might as well keep them to myself, or at least keep them in until the ‘ole dark rum gets a hold on me, and I spill my guts! Ha ha. Of course, the obvious short-term goal is my trip to New Zealand for next year. In case you weren’t aware, I’m in the planning stages of my 6 month bike tour of New Zealand. The target dates for this are Oct 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008. That way, I get the tax break over two years; I get to spend the time in ‘summer’ NZ, while avoiding ‘winter’ Canada; and get to spend Christmas with Jody in Australia, visiting some of her relatives! While I’m down there, I’m also planning to do some racing. I’m not talking about little bitty races either. The short list of three dream NZ races are the Southern Traverse (5+ day adventure race, committed to this already); Speight’s Coast to Coast “Longest Day” Challenge (140km bike, 36km run, 67km kayaking, 1 day) from west coast to east coast of Southern Island, crossing the Southern Alps en route; and Ironman New Zealand (3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42.2km run, 1 day). Of those three, the Southern Traverse was my original reason for going next year. I’ve been dreaming about this race, and it’s time to shit or get off the pot! Anyway, back to the blog at hand. I was trying to talk about my last weekend, but got distracted by my dreams, silly things, aren’t they? Make them come true. The day you’re born, you start dying, make the most of life and have no regrets! Whew, where’d that come from? Now, onto my tales of Trail Running….

Travelogue

Toronto Weekend Fun…

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Jody and I had plans to go see Monty Python’s Spamalot at the theatre in Toronto on August 12th, along with Alix, Matt, and Andrew Raven. The tickets were bought months ago, and the time was finally approaching. Well, rather than simply go see the show, Jody and I decided we’d make a long weekend of it and hit Paramount Canada’s Wonderland for some serious thrill-ride action! We took the Friday off, so we could hit the park outside of the crazy weekend window. I think it was a good plan. Even though we did end up waiting an hour for one of the rollercoasters at mid-day (Top Gun, if you’re interested), most of the waits were much more reasonable. We also got to do a lot of front seat rides, and multiple trips on our favourites. There are a lot of rides at the park. We had some faves, and some not so good. The thing that sucks on some of the rides is the beating your body takes. They have a new ‘flying’ coaster, called Tomb Raider, and we really didn’t enjoy the bone rattling that went with it. As usual, our favourite was the old-school woodies. Wooden Coasters are just more thrilling. Sure, they don’t do inverted loops or anything, but they feel rickety, and you only have a little lap bar holding you in while you whiz around at top speed! We like them so much that we capped off our visit with seven consecutive runs of the Wild Beast, without even getting off the coaster. It was pretty quiet late at night, so the ride attendants said we could just stay on. It was crazy! When we finally went to bed that night, I still felt like i was riding a coaster! If you’d like to check out some pictures of that day, check out the folder on Flickr.

Race Reports

First Sub 2h30min Olympic Triathlon – New PB!

Well, I’m happy to report that I’m still improving a bit! This past weekend marked my return to racing, after taking a whole month off! It was not intentional, but that’s just the way things worked out. I was slated to race in a 36 hour Raid the North adventure race mid-July, but at the last minute, that race was cancelled, and I opted to not race in the shorter Salomon Adventure Challenge race on that same weekend. Instead, I decided to relax, enjoy summer a bit, and chill out at the Ottawa Bluesfest, as you have probably already read about. I’ve been slowly getting back into running regularly, and also been doing weekly rides in Gatineau Park with Grant and Kevin, generally doing about 70km each time. I’ve had to start kicking my own ass a bit in order to properly train for my upcoming 1/2 Iron Distance Triathlon. As of the date of this posting, I’m a mere 3.5 weeks away from that event, and not too prepared yet. For that event, I’ll be swimming 2km, biking 90km, and running 21km. In order to do a check-up as to where I was in my fitness level, I participated in the National Capital Triathlon, an Olympic-distance event. For that one, I had to swim 1.5km, bike 40km, and run 10km. I’m happy to say that in spite of perhaps not having trained quite hard enough, I did cough up a personal best for it! My first sub 2hr. 30min Olympic Triathlon! Huzzah. My most worrying event was the swim, since I’ve only gone out for a few open-water swims in the past few months. Luckily, I pulled it off strong, shaving several minutes from my time last year in the same event! If you’d like to check out a few pictures of the event, as usual, we’ve got a folder on flickr with all the pics. Now, for the detail-oriented, let’s have a look how the race broke down statistics-wise.