Racing

Hello all out there! I figure it’s time to update you on the progress of Team Hyper-Active, as well as my personal training and athletic pursuits for the coming months. WIth the addition of my handy-dandy new Garmin Forerunner 305, I’ve been able to basically track all my workouts, and then review the stats. No, I’m not going to bore you with the reams of data that I’m now collecting 😉 Suffice it to say, it’s an engineering geek turned athlete’s dream come true. Even when spinning indoors, I’ve been at least able to log my heart rate data and time of workouts; and when I trained on my tri bike, I was also able to track virtual distance and cadence data as well. I tells ya, it’s absolutely sweet! Now, when I’m not training, I feel bad, because the calendar has a blank spot. But I digress. Of course I’m not always out training, but I’ve been doing my damndest to get out there as much as possible with everything else. During the week, I try to get out running at lunchtime at least 3 times a week. Then in the evenings, it’s been all about biking, swimming, paddling, and whatever else I can squeeze in. Weekends? Well, they’re all about the long-time endurance stuff. That’s what this is all about. Read on, if you’re curious. If not, sorry for boring you 😉

Howdy all! Hope everyone is doing well on this first official day of spring! So, do you think that spring has truly sprung? Personally, I would say yes, on account of all the fine weather we’ve already had, plus the fact that we’ve changed all the damn clocks already. For a night owl, I much prefer the fall back than the spring ahead, but that’s a totally different story, isn’t it? I also know that spring has truly sprung because I’m realizing that I have to get more serious about my training again. I have a bit of a lull between races at the moment, so that’s as good a time as any to re-organize my training schedule and get things back on track. That generally means picking up my 5 times a week running plan again, and making sure I do as much biking and swimming as I can as well. In the past, I’ve generally done all of my training solo, utilizing my trusty Suunto heart rate monitor, and Gmaps Pedometer to get things going. It’s been a pretty successful plan, and luckily I have enough motivation to keep it up. However, over the winter months, I started doing a bit more group training. Specifically, I’ve been going to 2-3 spin classes a week, and running Sundays with a group of triathlete-types at what is affectionately known as ‘Happytime’ (1.5 – 2.5 hours running followed directly by 2 hours spinning). That’s gotten me a bit used to having some training partners. As such, I decided maybe I should buddy up with someone. As you have probably guessed by the picture already, this buddy now comes in electronic format! Perfect for a techie guy like me. So just what is this huge watch? Well, read the whole post to find out!

I can now say that I raced in the Canadian National snowshoe championships. In fact, I can also say that in my age category, I was the 3rd fastest racer in the Canadian National snowshoe championships! Yup, that’s right, I got third place. Sadly, the field wasn’t that huge, because truth be told, I had what I would consider a pretty mediocre race. Of course, I do have a valid excuse. It turns out that you really shouldn’t race hard for 7 hours the day before a race like this 😉 On the plus side, I dragged a camera along with me for the entire race to snap pics. If you’d like to see them, head on over to the flickr folder. But before you do that, why not read my little tale of pushing hard?

Winter is a great time of year, isn’t it? When else can you go from a balmy spring-like day to a massive snow dump in just under 24 hours? So began the weekend of double races for me! I had signed up quite a while ago for all three races in the Mad Trapper Snowshoe series, the last of which was to occur on March 6th. Luckily for me, the Raid Pulse Winter Adventure race was also scheduled for the same weekend, and I decided to go ahead and sign up for it as well. The idea of this race was to get in some good team dynamic building by racing as a team of 4 racers with my Hyper-Active team. Unfortunately, the race only accepted pairs of racers, so we signed up as a co-ed team of two (myself and Anne-Marie), and a male team (Steeve and Carl). The main goal was to see how we’d get along as a team racing together, in preparation for the longer summer races we’d like to race as a team. Anywho, this post will be about the first race of the weekend, the 6-8 hour winter AR race at Plaisance, Quebec, which is a town about an hour east of Ottawa on the Quebec side. Read on for more about that.