August 2011 - ActiveSteve

Can’t Stop the Rush

It is my great pleasure to bring you another race report. This time, I’ll be covering my part in a 30-hour Adventure Race known as Wilderness Traverse. Yup, the very same race that I did last year. However, I’m sure this time the weather will be much better, right? Not so much, but you’ll have to read the whole thing to hear more about that. I had been planning on re-doing this race since last year’s DNF, but two weeks prior to the event, I still had no team lined up! Lucky for me, some last minute cancellations presented me with a couple options to explore, and I found myself on a great team to undertake the experience. Not to name drop or anything, but I would have two Mount Everest Summitters on my team in Adam and Laura, as well as a veteran racer who designs and builds map boards for navigation on mountain bikes! How cool is that? It was a pretty amazing race, and I can’t wait to share all the details with you all. Have a look at the various pictures that I took on course, as well as some from Deanna (who was volunteering), then come back and read the whole story!

Race Reports

Towing Troubles Thwart a Team Triumph

Good day to you all! Time for another race report. This one is from a 4-hour sprint Adventure Race put on by the fine folks at Raid Pulse. Normally, I wouldn’t be interested in doing an adventure race this short, but seeing as I was cleared to cover it for Get Out There Magazine, I figured why not? It’s quite surprising to look back on all my races this year. I have done a surprising number of them with Deanna! Some as team-mates, some in different events, but either way, we’ve toed the line together quite a few times together. Each race, she gets a little stronger and a little more skilled. This race was another example of that, but unfortunately, the outcome wasn’t a podium or anything. We were just happy to clear the whole course! You’ll have to read the rest of my post to find out what I mean by that. Before reading it all though, I invite you to check out some pictures from the event that I’ve posted, as well as view my quick 3 minute video race review. That’ll give you an idea of the race, then you can read my whole tale.

Race Reports Race Review Videos

Triathlon Tune-Up in Nation’s Capital

Welcome to another race report from me in this glorious summer weather that we’re having. As is often the case during the summer months, it becomes a bit challenging to keep things current on my website. There are a number of reasons for that. Firstly, it’s summer! I’d rather be outside doing stuff than trying to write great prose on my keyboard. Second, being summer, I have a lot of races and ‘stuff’ going on. Again, this limits my time to get things documented. And finally, this year, some of my races also have me acting as a race reporter, which adds to my post-race duties by producing and editing videos of the events. Getting tons of footage down to a 2 minute clip is actually quite challenging I’ve found, and takes a fair bit of time! At any rate, enough whining. I’m trying to catch up by writing up my race report for this year’s National Capital Triathlon that I just competed in. It was my 6th time competing in this event, and 4th doing the Olympic Tri distance (the other two times I did the Kayak Tri). Looking back, it turns out I haven’t done a proper Tri in almost 2 years, and it sort of showed in my results. I’ve swam about 3 times in that time, so I didn’t have very high hopes. However, with a looming Iron-distance triathlon, I knew I needed a little tune-up, so this event, a month before the Iron, seemed a good idea! Read on for a bit more on my race, and don’t forget to check out some pictures Deanna snapped!

Race Reports Race Review Videos

A Little Urban Adventuring

By now, I’m sure most of you have heard of the Amazing Race, and that most of your are familiar with adventure racing, and that you’ve perhaps also heard of City Chase, a race series that sort of (loosely) combines elements of both AR and the Amazing Race. In a word, they call City Chase an urban adventure challenge. Well this post will give you a taste of how the City Chase actually works, as Deanna and I recently competed in the Ottawa installment. Like the Spartan Race a few weeks back, I was taking part in the race to provide a video race review for Get Out There Magazine. If you’d like to see the video I put together (it’s kind of frantic), have a look at the YouTube video. I actually had no idea how the race would actually play out, as I only knew roughly what it was about, which is that you race around the city using public transit to complete ‘Chase Points’. First team of 2 that does 10 of them and returns to the finish wins. Plain and simple. Well, as we learned, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. For our first time, we were actually pretty happy to finish in 172nd place in a time of 5hrs 26mins out of over 500 teams that started out. Besides the little video review I put together, you can also check out the photos that I snapped and posted on flickr. As I was focused on the video and racing, there aren’t too many I liked. When you’ve had a peek at those, pop on back and read about the race!