Get Out There

13 posts

White Knuckling it to Quebec City

Stylish Skate

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.

Successful Skate Ski at the 34th Gatineau Loppet

Happy at Finish

Sorry for the delay in getting this post up everyone. In the past 10 weeks, I’ve done 8 races, and between the pictures, the videos, the training, the racing, the editing, the working, etc. etc, I just ran out of time to write my traditional post-race summary 🙂 However, I’m here tonight to rectify that and share with you all just a few thoughts from the Gatineau Loppet this year. I was particularly excited to take part in the event this year, as it would be my first time taking part in a longish race where I skate skied! Yes, this is still my first year on skate skis, so there is still a lot to learn, but it didn’t stop me from signing up to do the 31km (eventually classified as 27.5km) event at the Loppet. I was also there covering the event for Get Out There Magazine, so as has been the case quite frequently lately, I have a video review of the race for all to enjoy at the end of this post too. In addition to the video, I snapped a fair number of pictures over the weekend for you to check out. Click on to read the rest of my thoughts on the weekend, which I’ll keep on the brief side.

1st Race of the 2012 Season in the Books!

Carl Sizes up Competition

Howdy sports fans! Welcome to 2012 and my first race report of the new year. The race in question was the second of 4 snowshoe races in the Mad Trapper series at the Ark in Denholm Quebec. I’ve made a decision this year that I’m going to try and shorten my race reports somewhat, since I suspect not everyone is a fan of epically long reports to go through 🙂 Instead, I’ll try to add some additional race information that’s easier to digest by everyone, including quick course and stat overviews, and video race reviews where I’ve done them. This was one such race, so I’d invite you all to check out the embedded video review at the end of this post. However, one thing that won’t change is my continued visual logs of events in the form of pictures I’ll post on Flickr. So, as usual, I invite you to browse the pictures I posted, then catch up with the rest of the report.