Racing

Well, I’m happy to report that I’m still improving a bit! This past weekend marked my return to racing, after taking a whole month off! It was not intentional, but that’s just the way things worked out. I was slated to race in a 36 hour Raid the North adventure race mid-July, but at the last minute, that race was cancelled, and I opted to not race in the shorter Salomon Adventure Challenge race on that same weekend. Instead, I decided to relax, enjoy summer a bit, and chill out at the Ottawa Bluesfest, as you have probably already read about. I’ve been slowly getting back into running regularly, and also been doing weekly rides in Gatineau Park with Grant and Kevin, generally doing about 70km each time. I’ve had to start kicking my own ass a bit in order to properly train for my upcoming 1/2 Iron Distance Triathlon. As of the date of this posting, I’m a mere 3.5 weeks away from that event, and not too prepared yet. For that event, I’ll be swimming 2km, biking 90km, and running 21km. In order to do a check-up as to where I was in my fitness level, I participated in the National Capital Triathlon, an Olympic-distance event. For that one, I had to swim 1.5km, bike 40km, and run 10km. I’m happy to say that in spite of perhaps not having trained quite hard enough, I did cough up a personal best for it! My first sub 2hr. 30min Olympic Triathlon! Huzzah. My most worrying event was the swim, since I’ve only gone out for a few open-water swims in the past few months. Luckily, I pulled it off strong, shaving several minutes from my time last year in the same event! If you’d like to check out a few pictures of the event, as usual, we’ve got a folder on flickr with all the pics. Now, for the detail-oriented, let’s have a look how the race broke down statistics-wise.

Howdy all! Well, the Quest for a Cure is behind us now! I was the captain of my 2-member team (Hyper-Active / Camp de Base), and we raced in the 48-hour full race. The race was phenomenal, so I plan to write a nice full race report here. I’ve decided to split the race report into two sections. The first section will be for those with ADD, or those who don’t want to hear all the gory details. I’ll summarize the race and my results here. After that, I’ll get into a section by section break-down of the race. To kick things off, I now know that I’m capable of staying awake for 52 hours, 44 of those hours spent racing hard, on only 40 minutes of sleep! Crazy. I also had to be able to make critical decisions and keep us moving in the right direction all the time. If you’d like to view the full race results, head over to the Quest website For the record, they’re a bit confusing. Also, I’ve put up a bunch of pictures taken by our support crew on the Flickr site. I’m also hoping to augment those with pictures put up by the professional photographers that were on the race course, but I can’t guarantee that those will be up anytime soon! Now on with the story!

Hello Friends! Well, as the title implies, I managed to pull off a podium finish in the Ottawa Riverkeeper Kayak Triathlon this past weekend. Now mind you, there weren’t thousands of racers in my category as there are in other races, but I still feel very happy about coming in 2nd place a mere 2min. 16sec. behind my friend Mike Caldwell. The kayak triathlon consisted of a 5km paddle, followed by a 20km bike, finished off with a 5km run. Now this is by no means as gruelling as the 240+km race I’m doing this weekend, but nonetheless I definitely had to push myself. I actually don’t like really short races. Generally speaking, the people that enter them are really friggin’ fast. I’m not. I prefer a race where you have to use your head, and pace yourself better. For that reason, I’m looking forward to the half ironman triathlon I’ll be doing later this year. 2.5km swim, 90km bike, and 21.1k run. At least there you have to pace yourself and not just go flat out! However, in this case, I did go flat out, and it paid off for me. My weakest part was unfortunately the paddling part. I was set up in my little red plastic kayak, which is definitely not known for its speed. Conversely, Mike was in a wooden kayak that had been raced in the 1976 Olympics! You just know that one is made to go fast. Not only that, but at the start line, a canoe paddled by an inexperienced team cut me off badly by accident, causing me to run into them. When I tried to push off them to get back on track, I managed to spin myself further off course. By the time I got clear, a lot of the kayak field was well ahead of me. So, had I been in a faster boat, and not had that snafu, I’m pretty confident I would have won first place! As it turned out, the records have me as the 6th kayak off the water, but then I was in 1st place for both the bike and the run! Pretty sweet. I think a lot of it had to do with my very quick transitions, where others may have dawdled. I’ve learned my lesson from other races.

Hello all out there! Well, as the title and the picture to the left implies, I recently participated in, and successfully completed, my third marathon! As usual, it was Ottawa’s own ING National Capital Marathon that I ran. Apparently, this has become the largest marathon in Canada. Can you imagine that? Thousands upon thousands of flailing legs attempting to transport their owners over a distance of 42,200 meters. This is both quite a sight to see, as well as be a part of. Each year, I swear it will be my last marathon, as I don’t purport to be all that fond of running. However, each year, as the fall drags on, I get the post-racing season blues. My final racing events are usually in September or October, then I start worrying that I’ll stagnate, so I get it in my head that it would be a good idea to sign up for the marathon for the next year, thereby forcing myself to start actual training sometime in January. Well, this past year was no different, and I found myself starting the long journey to the start line in the cold, windy days of winter. Of course, I don’t have ready access to a treadmill, so virtually all my training runs are outdoors. This year, I bumped myself up to an ‘Intermediate II’ level in Hal Higdons’ marathon training programs. This meant a bump up in the distances as well as intensity that I ran. In the end, I ran 5 days a week for 18 weeks, and also sprinkled in some winter races, swim training, and spinning classes. This of course was all to aid my on-going quest to become a stronger adventure racer, but also to help me get my goal in this year’s marathon. 3 hours and 20 minutes (yes, I spoke of 3h 15min., but that was my ‘unofficial’ goal). As a result of my dedication to the program, I pulled off a 3 hr, 18min, 15 second run. This was of course a personal best for me. My first two results being 3:47 and 3:30 respectively. I certainly can’t say that I was disapointed with that 🙂 !

Well, it’s been a little bit since I popped a post online, so here we go. I’ve been pretty wrapped up with final preparations for the upcoming race season, which is actually well and truly upon us at this point. In the past couple weeks, I had my first adventure race of the summer, as well as my first ‘marquis’ event, which was the National Capital Marathon. I’ll leave that one for a post of its own, and stick to talking about my adventure race in this post. If you’d like to check out some pictures from this event, I’ve posted them over on flickr, as per usual. These were all pictures taken on the course by volunteers at various points, not me, so I’m not even in all of them, but they give you a bit of an idea of the race. The race took place on the May long weekend, specifically on the Saturday. This was slated to be a 5-8 hour race course, and unfortunately for me, we took the entire 8 hourse to complete it, due to some unfortunate errors, which I’ll get into soon. The entire weekend, as you may recall, was sort of miserable. There were frost warnings issued, and the temperatures stayed low, and the rain poured forth. The location of this race was in Quebec, in the Val de Monts region. Not far from Ottawa by any means, a mere 40 minute drive. The actual start and finish took place at Lafleche Aerial Parc. This is a real fun place which has all sorts of zip lines, aerial obstacle courses, as well as caves that can be explored. If you’re looking for an interesting way to spend an afternoon, this would be it!