Training Log Archive: Leanimal

Great training day with Gosling in Albion Hills....Phatty and Goose put together and awesome attackpoint session and Coach LD bailed me out huge with the post activity treats! Gosling picked some stellar routes.....

With Goose and Phatty back from Albion....my legs felt like sh*t.

For those trail runners out there check this out...it would probably be fun, especially the hot tub at night.

http://www.runaroundthegorge.com

Mark Lattanzi is putting it on.

With Coach LD and Gosling on the country roads. Absolutely balmy out and we solved the mystery of the huge dead bird hanging in the tree. Coach LD poked around until she found the birds head and we could see that it was a Canada Goose....ewwwww.

Out with CoachLD for a great afternoon ride in the sunshine. Saw Bash as she drove by us (probably wondering why I was in the middle of the road).

C • Not wondering 2

Power yoga session with Mark. I went for the wheel pose today and managed to do it twice for about 5 seconds each time. This is huge for me since I didn't take gymnastics as a kid and can hardly bend backward at all.

C • Wheel Pose 2

Out with the running group....beauty night.

We didn't have to worry about the weather as the sun was out but we still had to carry our sleeping bag and bivvy and we always bring our waterproof jackets just in case. I had borrowed some very lightweight gear for this race and despite that my bag still looked quite large. When we saw a team run by us like they were just starting a 10km race I thought two things, either we are in big trouble here or these guys are going waaay too fast for this race. I tried not to think about it too much since we knew this was going to be hard for us. We also passed some "adventure" course teams and one stopped us to tell us the trail we were on, that we had planned on taking to the next CP, was a dead-end up ahead. I couldn't figure out how that was the case since we hadn't seen any other team return except for them. We conversed for a bit and when I told them we were going to continue one of the guys said "NO" and re-iterated what he had said. After some broken conversation we continued, to the next CP, and had no idea where they would have gone.

At the next CP we were greeted by one of the cute climbing dudes who went on and on about Montreal and Quebec and once we figured that that is where he thought we were from Nicky discouraged us from crushing the illusion since he was obviously fond of Quebecers. We didnt' ever end up telling them in the end.....why bother, they loved us!

We bought a Coke on the side of the road here and continued on into more cloudforest before coming into a TA to bike. Night was falling and Belen and Raul had an awesome set-up for us here. Luis Moreira got a great shot of us transitioning here that I hope gets published somewhere, it looks like we are in the rainforest.

More to come (I now have to go back and look at the maps to see where we went)

Absolutely gorgeous out!

Here is the first part of a very late race report......not like me to be this late and especially for a race that I loved but alas here is part A..

Huairasinchi Adventure Race
Team Untamed New England (Las Chicas)

I have to admit when I received an e-mail from Grant Killian, the race director for Untamed New England, in December about representing his race in Ecuador in February I wasn’t all that excited. Having just returned from my first international racing experience in Portugal in November I was a little discouraged with the effort required to get to these places and the potential disappointment that could be waiting there. My husband Phatty however was quite excited and after some discussion it was decided that I would try to put a team together for this race. My number one requirement was that this team was going to have fun! At 10-14000ft the race was going to be very difficult physically and I wanted people there who could laugh in the face of our hardship. It looked like I would be putting together another women’s team for this and I couldn’t have been happier with the result.

After many e-mails and some waiting for Trish to get back from vacation the girls were committed. La Femme was on board as soon as she got my e-mail. Trish too was keen to get back into AR after a 2 year hiatus raising her son. Crash was also keen to race, although a bit more reserved in her excitement as it would be her first expedition length race and she had many questions about what to expect. As it turned out I don’t know that any of us prepared her for what was to come. She just had to jump in with both feet and I think we can all agree that she did so with the true spirit of an adventure racer.

We had heard many tales about traveling in Ecuador, including one on our government website, about staying away from the Columbian border and watching out for thieves and malaria carrying mosquitos so we had a lot to think about in our preparation for arriving in Quito on February 6th. As it turns out none of this was a concern and we ended up having the trip of a lifetime!

In order to get acclimatized I thought it would be a good idea to head into the mountains and stay somewhere that we could hike and gasp for air without any other competitors seeing us. After a short google search I stumbled upon a website for the Secret Garden near Cotopaxi and was sure that I had found the place! Photo after photo displayed a vista filled with volcanoes, green fields, hammocks, candlelit dinners and friendly faces. I immediately booked us three nights with the excited approval from my teammates.

On February 6th Crash and I met up with Trish at Pearson airport after her early morning flight from the Sault and after two fairly uneventful flights south we arrived in Quito, Ecuador ready for our adventure. La Femme arrived a day later and after getting settled into our hostel (which was situated nicely at the corner of what seemed like the busiest party section of town) we spent the next day going for a short jog, doing some grocery shopping, and hitting the local Sunday market to buy some jewellery and artwork. Already I could tell that this race with the girls was going to be very different from racing with the guys. It was pretty apparent that the elevation was going to affect us but we knew this going to Ecuador so we laughed at our accelerated heart-rates and told ourselves that three days in the mountains would have us as ready as we would ever be.
With La Femme arriving safe and sound with all of her gear we were up on Monday morning to meet our driver Arturo, who would take us the two hours to the Secret Garden near Cotopaxi. The drive was beautiful. We headed out of the city to see it sprawling endlessly up the sides of the mountains until they became too steep. We stopped in Arturo’s (and as we later discovered our support crew Raul’s) hometown Machachi on the way. The children waved and we took photos and then we stopped on the side of the bumpy dirt road at a school and two small children walked out toward our car. We had no idea why we were stopping, as Arturo’s English was limited, so when a small boy of about 4 climbed onto Trish’s lap we just assumed they were coming with us. Trish immediately saw how to make them our friends and offered them chocolate. It sealed the deal. It turns out that they were the hostel owner’s children so they would be riding with us to the Secret Garden.

The landsape that surrounded us was stunning for lack of a better term and as we pulled up the 3 km driveway we knew we had made the right decision to stay there. Our rooms were loft style with a bed upstairs, a wood stove and bathroom downstairs and a view of Cotopaxi that can’t be beat. We were in heaven! We decided that day to change into some running clothes and start our acclimatization process right away. What a rude awakening. As we explored the country roads and marveled at the view we also threw in a couple of wind sprints to see what we were made of. The results were hysterical. Gasping, puffing, lying down on the road, and taking a knee were the outcome and I have some video to prove it. Like we promised ourselves we were going to laugh it off and enjoy the ride.

The next couple of days were spent climbing up Ruminahui and Cotopaxi and riding the hostel mountain bikes back down. It was a great way to get to higher elevation (up to 5000m on Cotopaxi) and to test out the riding legs on bikes that would make ours feel like a dream in the race. We took millions of photos and got to know one another better as a team, enjoying the calm before the racing storm and giving Sarah as much information as we could about what was to come, not that we really knew ourselves. We met some wonderful people traveling across Ecuador and South America. It made us all long for a few more months of traveling and it was always entertaining watching the expressions on their faces when we told them why we were there. By the time we left everyone wanted to know how they could find out how we did in the race. It was a wonderful 3 days and I would go back there in a heartbeat.

Back in Quito on Thursday we immediately assembled our bikes and did some final shopping in preparation for the race before heading to dinner with one of our support crew, Raul, and the Milton Basement Racers (Tim, Tom, Eddie, and Audrey). We had some preliminary discussions with Raul about what was to come in the days ahead but he had supported last year so he seemed to know what was going on, much to our relief.
On Friday Raul picked us up at our hostel, we packed all of our gear in his pick-up truck, and we headed to the race registration 2 hours north in the city of Ibarra. It was a hot and sunny day and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to jump out of the car and take photos on the equator despite the fact that we were late for registration. We also witnessed how diverse that landscape was as we entered a very dry and scrubby area compared to the lush fields and forests near Cotopaxi and Quito.

Registration was long and a bit tedious but we were glad to finally meet the race director Santiago, and his staff who we had been communicating with over e-mail for the past 2 months. It was also a treat for me to see Jose who was the racecourse designer for the World Champs in Portugal and also our saviour at that race. He had just come to volunteer. It became obvious at registration how novel it was for them to have an all female team competing. We had teams coming up to us to ask to have their picture taken with us and giggling while they were doing it. After registration we drove into Ibarra with our support crew to go over the logistics of the race and how we were all going to work together as a team. Raul and Belen were amazing. They were very excited to be a part of the race once again and it was obvious that they liked the idea of supporting the only female team out there. We were going to have to work hard not to let them down.

The race briefing was inspiring, informative, and jovial. Held in the old city centre of Ibarra at the city hall all of the teams for both the elite (3 days continuous) and the adventure (3 day stage) races were there. We were presented with a video from an organization that Belen works for about what we are all capable of doing in the next 4 years to ensure that we preserve the natural environments that we have left. The message was that we don’t have a choice……we do it or we say goodbye to all that is natural and beautiful in this world. The message was strong and it really hit home, especially since we were about to head out into some of the most beautiful terrain I have ever been in. Our team held up a hand-embroidered flag representing this cause for Belen and her co-workers.
Next came the team introductions. We kind of felt like rock stars when they introduced our team since the applause was loud and long…no pressure. We had to listen to the race briefing through a translating device and it was hard to tell if we had missed anything, hopefully not. With the race briefing concluded and the maps in hand we jumped in a vehicle and started heading to the designated camping area where we would do our final prep and mark the maps. Not ideal to be doing the maps in a tent but at least it wasn’t raining. And one of our most vivid memories of Ecuador is the car alarms. They don’t going off for a second, and no-one seems too panicked to turn them off since they seem to stop after a certain period of time. This was all okay until we went to bed and it just continued. Thank goodness for ear plugs.

In the morning we discovered my bike had a flat tire and we couldn’t find the cause so we just switched tires and tubes and hoped that would do it. Time to get to the start line. Ummmm where is the start line. We headed out of the camping area a little close to the start time and had to ride through town with another team searching frantically for the start. Eventually we found it but this also meant we were right at the back of all of the teams including the adventure teams. Not really a problem in the end as we were about to discover our 18km uphill mountain bike start was not going to be easy with the elevation. In fact La Femme had a moment where she had to stop due to nausea but in typical La Femme fashion it only lasted a short period of time before we got going again and she just got stronger from there.

As teams flew by us on the bike the reality of what was ahead hit us. This was going to hurt, but don’t they always, and we promised ourselves we were going to have fun so we commented on the scenery to take our minds off the pain and when we arrived at the paddle in about last place we were looking forward to the water.

The small lake we had to find 4 orienteering points on was stunning. There were high mountains all around and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. As we launched into the water on our sit-on-top kayaks it looked like we were one of the only teams to approach the OP’s in a clockwise direction. Just as we were cutting across the lake teams Buff and Ecuador started heading toward shore perpendicular to our direction. I couldn’t figure out where they were headed since the landscape made it so easy to see where the controls should be. As it turns out one control was misplaced (by a great distance) and only when we looked to see where they were headed did we see it on shore. We got lucky and by the time we got out of the water we had passed a lot of teams. Of course some of this may have had to do with the fact that we saw several teams paddling in a reclined position. Crash thought they might be fishing. In the end it’s too bad there wasn’t way more paddling in the race, we probably could have made up quite a bit of time.

Back on the bikes we made our way to the first transition area to a long trek. The night before when Trish and I were doing the maps we saw only two possible routes. One on a long tortuous road and the other straight overland but it would involve a big climb and we didn’t know what the bush was going to be like. When we were going to leave this TA I asked which direction most teams were taking and everyone pointed in a direction that made no sense to me. I squinted my eyes and took a closer look at the map and it took me a while to see a very faint line indicating that a road also headed in another direction that joined a trail. Boy these maps were difficult to read. We headed out on the trek with MBR but soon they were gone and we were on our own jogging and walking and taking photos and saying hello to the locals who live up in the mountains. It was awesome....

C • keep going - this is good!!!! 3

Another great day! Legs felt much better after last run but still a little stiff. Must stretch more.

Trail run around Fanshawe Lake in London with Goose and Phatty. I felt great for the first two hours as we were just cruising along at a very comfortable pace and then at two hours my legs just died. Nothing left (must have been the three weeks off I hope) so I just hobbled along until we finished. We had to do a lot of detouring as the lake is super high and washed out the trail and bridges in a lot of places.

Great run though followed up with a much needed hot-tub and turkey dinner.