fun Archives - ActiveSteve

White Knuckling it to Quebec City

Howdy folks! Well, as we hurtle towards the inevitable spring time change, and the warming temperatures, I’m going to take us back in time to just over a week ago, where we got that sudden dramatic snowstorm. You know. The one that dumped buckets of snow all over the area? Oh yes, the one and same that I had to drive through to get to Quebec City for the Pentahlon des Neiges. There is a well-known adage that goes ‘getting to the start line is the biggest challenge’. Well, it would certainly appear that was the case for this race. In fact, I’d probably rate this drive the worst in my life! The normally 4.5 hour drive took over 9 hours, and that was with only 2 short stops. One for a sandwich, and one for a washroom / nerve break. It was absolutely atrocious, with blowing heavy snow, uncleared roads, and darkness the entire way. Did that affect the race? The rest of the weekend? My sanity? Well, read on through my little post to get the answers to all those, and a few other questions. This’ll be the last race report for a while, so enjoy it my friends! As always, pictures have been posted, and I did a video review as well.

Fencing and ‘Festing for Fun

Good day friends. I bet you all thought you wouldn’t hear from me again until the winter race season started, right? Well, I’d hate to leave you all wondering just what it is that ActiveSteve does when he isn’t racing or training ;-). Hence this short little post to keep you all well informed. It’s not secret that I’m not really one to sit around eating bon-bons. If I’m not doing something, I get bored. So I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a homeowner, because there’s ALWAYS something to do when you own a house, even if it is a new house, as I’m learning. Also, given that my training and racing takes me away from home a lot, it also means that I don’t get to see some of my friends as much as I’d like, so this is also a chance to do a bit of catching up with some of my good friends, as well as spend more quality time with my best gal Deanna! This certainly won’t be a long post, so you should have no problem getting through the whole thing, as well as checking out my two sets of pictures, first being my fence re-building project, and the second being some pictures from this year’s Beau’s Oktoberfest in Vankleek Hill.

Race Reports

All Roads Lead to Relaxing

Good day my friends. I thought I’d take a quick moment and write a blog post where the subject wasn’t purely about racing or training. I say not purely because I just couldn’t help myself from at least a little training on the one weekend that I had more or less free all summer. However, in true ActiveSteve style, I managed to combine my relaxing with the training for a truly spectacular weekend out on the Madawaska River at Jim’s property near Calabogie. Of course, I’m talking about his annual Mad River Float, in which he invites a whole crew of friends out for the flotilla on the river. Everyone brings a floaty thing, and we put in 3-4 km upriver of his cabin and leisurely float back, with the aid of tasty beverages. Afterwards, there is a super-tasty barbecue put on by he and Ali, then a roaring fire to finish things off. As per usual, I took pictures of the whole event, and you can check them out on the folder on flickr. Click on to read the rest of my little story, which won’t be too long, I promise!

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!