May 2007 - ActiveSteve

ActiveSteve Gets a New Toy!

Welcome back to another addition of “Just what the hell has Steve gone out an bought now?”. My co-workers are always commenting that I obviously don’t have any children, as coming back from a weekend, I’m always sharing stories of long days training, or hard nights drinking, or even on occasion of new toys purchased selfishly for myself. This post will be about just such a thing I suppose. True, having no children likely does afford me a certain amount of leeway in my purchases that others don’t have, but I’m okay with that 🙂 From a very young age, I was raised with the understanding that if I wanted something, I had to buy if for myself. I never got fancy gifts as a child, but was always encouraged to find ways to get the things I wanted. That’s never really left me, and here’s a little post about my latest acquisition that I’ve been lusting after for some time. Read on about my new UMPC!

Race Reports

A Great Day – A Great Race

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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.

Race Reports

A Tale of Perseverance – 3rd Place Solo at Raid Pulse

Race report and full blog posting to follow. Long story short, I had a long post written, but managed to delete it when formatting a hard drive! I’m not impressed, and haven’t had a chance to re-write it yet. I’ll do so while in Montreal this week. In the meantime, check out the links in my results section.

***UPDATE – HERE IT IS***

Howdy all, and welcome back to another extremely interesting chapter in the life of ActiveSteve! The first thing you might notice from the title of this post is that I came in 3rd, but in the SOLO category of this past weekend’s Raid Pulse spring Adventure Race, a 6-8 hour adventure race which took place in an area known as Notre Dame de la Salette. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, getting to the start line of a race is truly an accomplishment in itself. This race was no exception to that statement. This of course leads quite nicely into this posting. To start with, I’d like to point out that this story was one which I’ve actually written once already! I had a very long post written up, but then formatted the hard drive which contained it, without making a backup! How silly is that? At any rate, I’ll now try to duplicate this crazy tale. Read on…

Race Reports

Hyper-Active Does Some Race Prep

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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?

Life in General

When the Cat’s Away…

Welcome back everyone! As I write this blog post, I’ve been playing Bachelor for about two weeks now, with still another week to go. The biggest question I’ve been getting lately is ‘how are you enjoying the bachelor life?’ Well, I guess ths short answer is that I’m pretty much bored with it. I’ve been doing little chores around the house, got everything cleaned up, etc. etc. There’s only so many things I can do while I’m alone here 😉 Luckily, with the training, there’s not been any downtime to speak of. It turns out that nothing gets done if I don’t do it when I’m alone! However, not to fear, I haven’t been a total square the entire time. The older we get, the harder it seems to be for the boys to get together. So, in order to make up for that, I decided that I had better at least have one boys night while Jody was away. I decided that the best time to do that would be the same day that she left. This little blog post will fill you in on at least some of the details. Read on.