Racing

G’day mates! Cheerio from the land of cold weather! If you look outside your window at this moment (provided it’s daytime), you’ll probably say to yourself that winter is on the way out. Officially, we’ve passed the first day of spring, so this posting finds itself just a touch too late. My tale this time is all about the final race of my winter racing season. It was the fourth and final snowshoe race of the season. I’ve pushed particularly hard this winter in these races, as it was the first time in well over a year that I was able to run again, and I wanted to see if I was still able to push hard. The attempts have paid off, with my fastest foot races ever as far as pacing and effort. So yes, kudos to me :-). In this particular race, it resulted in a 3rd place finish, and clinching 4th place overall in the series. Before reading a little more about the race, you can head over to flickr to look at the pictures taken by a volunteer. Also, you can check out all his pictures here. Once you’ve looked at those, click on back and read the rest of my story.

Hey gang, sorry for the delay in posting any new stories to you all. I’ve been pretty wrapped up with the kitchen renovations and work, but fear not, the job is [finally] done, so I can get back to the business of entertaining you all with my fun stories. This will be another tale of a winter race that I took part in a few weeks back. In fact, it was my only Winter Adventure Race of the season, so I was pretty psyched about it. Admittedly, finding motivation to stay on top of my training has become rather tricky, so at a bare minimum, I figured that signing up for the whole snowshoe race series, as well as a winter adventure race would at least keep me in some sort of winter shape, rather than hibernating. To peruse the pictures that were snapped at this race, head over to the appropriate flickr folder, then come on back and read the story. I didn’t have my camera with me, as it was in the shop, but at least there were a couple cameras on course to capture some of the fun. I had my GPS on (with permission), but it somehow got stopped part way through the first section, so the map isn’t very interesting. However, read on for a brief synopsis of my fun race.

Well folks, I’m behind on my posts once again. In fact, I’m about 2 posts behind to be exact. Things have been pretty busy around the old homestead, and I just couldn’t seem to find the time to get my thoughts in order. So, you’ll have to bear with me as I turn the clock back to last weekend first, then get to this weekend and fill you in on that. Both weekends saw me putting in some time in the great outdoors, not only training, but racing hard. Last weekend was the Canadian National Snowshoe champs, and this past weekend was the Raid Pulse winter adventure race. Both were great events, so they each get their own blog post. Now, recently, I’ve also been accused of basically writing War and Peace every time I try to put up a blog post, so I’m going to do my very best to be concise and to the point, rather than writing out the minutiae of the events. No promises though. Last weekend was also a poker night out of town at Adam’s in Embrun, so I’ll put that in this post as well. In the meantime, feel free to check out the pictures of the snowshoe race, and pictures of the poker night. Then read on for some details about both and see how I fared. Since you’ve all been so patient for the story, I’ve also pulled together a bonus map with some pro pictures from the race. Enjoy 🙂

Welcome back, sports fans! I’m happy to report that ActiveSteve has had another successful racing weekend out in the snowy hills in Quebec. Yup, this was the second of four snowshoe races that form the Mad Trapper snowshoe series. This time, I was racing the “hilly” course, which was about 10km of pristine trails with lots of ups and downs. The weather once again was pretty much ideal for a race in the snow, albeit a bit cold. For those who don’t care to read the entire post, my results were pretty much exactly as they were last time, with me coming in 5th place overall, although at least this time I didn’t have to run it out with a competitor at the last second. I brought my camera out, but sadly, the batteries weren’t charged up, and I only got one shot of me at the finish. Luckily, my friend Andrew had his too, so I managed to steal a few of his shots to add them to a folder of winter pictures that I put up on flickr. In order to make up for it, I created a map with my GPS. Of course, it’s not quite as dramatic as when I make the map with pictures, but at least you can see where I did the race, and get an idea of the terrain. Once you’re done getting through that stuff, read on for the whole story.