Canada’s birthday has come and gone once again, and I hope that you all had a great day off to celebrate the birth of this great nation that we live in. Deanna and I started the day off fairly lazily, with a nice breakfast and some chores around the house. A week later, we’d be leaving on our Atlantic Canada tour, where we’d actually be visiting the birthplace of Confederation. However, first up was a nice long weekend of relaxing fun in the Ottawa area. Rather than battling the big crowds downtown as we’d done last year, we had hatched a plan to take our kayaks out on the water and do some paddling, including some geocaching along the Ottawa river and a picnic out there, capped with fireworks. We managed to snap a few picures during the day, which you can check out here. After you had a look a those, pop on back for a bit more about our day. I promise that I won’t be too verbose with this post!
kayaking
Howdy friends! Have you been missing my posts? Well, I guess I’ve been too focused on living life, training, racing, settling into my digs, and getting a year older lately rather than sitting down at the keyboard and spending hours trying to chronicle all the afore-mentioned things. However, I’ve decided that it’s well overdo that I fill you in on some of my latest exploits, so what I’m going to attempt to do is polish off four blog posts in fairly short order, with various degrees of detail. The point of this post will be to fill you in on a crazy little training weekend that I spend a few weeks back up at Mont Tremblant in preparation for Ultimate XC. After spending the weekend previewing both the paddle and the bike, I can definitively say this will, by far, be the hardest solo endurance race I have ever undertaken. 60+km of kayaking including whitewater, 60+km of trail running with EXTREME altitude gain/loss, and 100km of intense mountain biking with more of the same altitude gain an loss. Honestly, I’m pretty daunted by the task, but also very much anxious to try it out. I’ve posted pictures from the weekend, as well as tried to throw together some custom maps of the bike and paddle (GPS died during day 2). Read on for a little more insight into the weekend.