Training Log Archive: Bash

With all the things planned for today, my brain was buzzing too much to sleep well, so at first light, I took a final ski/run around the course to check that the SI controls were all in place. It's hard to get them to stay up when the ground is frozen solid, so next time I'll use some wire or string.

In spite of my fear that my laptop may be toast, I felt a strange feeling of peace with the world as I skied into a brilliant sunrise with bits of last night's fluffy new snow drifting down from trees and glittering like fairy dust. I can see why morning people love being morning people. It wouldn't work for me, but I really do understand the attraction.

Thomass Caledon in Palgrave West - Course Setter.

Phew - everything went pretty well. We had about 70 people in attendance on a sunny, snowy day. As I suspected, the snow increased the winning time to 62 minutes from my estimated 55 minutes. Keith did a great job on the maps, and I received positive comments on the course and route choice options from several good navigators. I'd been concerned because the race map is so small that I'd devised an unusual course design to come up with the necessary distances. To my relief, the top ten included a mix of racers, including a couple of masters women, a couple of elite males, a junior, etc. I think I might have been too hard on the elite women - I'll have to look at that.

Crash provided an awesome host site with bonfire, tunes and yummy munchies, and took charge of the hot apple cider situation. Everyone commented on how wonderful her place is! Thanks to GHO for the map and to Doug for SI support.

And then came the real heart rate increase for the day... I spent the afternoon on the phone with Dell - and then with Microsoft (in India!) for a second opinion. Yup, my operating system and all my installed programs are toast, along with any data on the C: partition. Just what I needed before leaving on a week-long trip where I planned to use my laptop. They've got me to the point where I can copy data files off it, which is useful, but I cringe at the thought of re-installing and configuring everything. I think this will mean a new laptop, since I was only 6 months away from replacing this one. I'm surprisingly calm, given how many hours a day I spend with my laptop on my lap. I guess it's been a bad enough week that my sense of perspective is pretty well-honed.

A bunch of people signed up for the Thomass Novice course at the last minute, so I designed a trail-oriented course quickly and headed out to hang flags. The cool thing about the Novice course is being able to ski to all the controls. The less cool thing is hand-drawing the course on 12 maps because so many people signed up after the deadline.

Adventure Girl! and Hammer kindly agreed to help me do a final vetting of the courses for tomorrow's Thomass event. We visited the first couple of controls together, then split up to save time. There is enough snow that tomorrow's race promises to be quite physical. I spent a lot of time fussing with the course lengths, e.g. a 25-year-old man should run twice the distance of a 60-year-old woman. With all the snow, it will come down to more than just distance though. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. In an ideal Thomass event, you want to see a mix of ages and genders in the top ten.

Many thanks to Adventure Girl! and Hammer for making the long trip to help me. We followed up with 30 minutes of strenuous tobogganing, which I won't log, but it's worth mentioning because it was a ton of snowy fun.

And then I restarted my laptop and got the blue screen of death. Can't even get into Windows Safe Mode. As if tomorrow wasn't busy enough already, I now need to spend some time on tech support hotlines in between running an orienteering event and leaving for Canmore. Arggh.

Hard Core DVD. I usually go to the C3 workout on Thursdays, but... well, it's a long story involving a furniture store with abysmal customer service that took a significant cash deposit.

'Bent and I have been sleeping on the floor on our new mattress since the promised delivery of a new bed in October, but there has been no sign of it, in spite of my polite phone calls every week. Finally, yesterday I tried attitude instead of good manners, and miraculously, they offered to deliver it late today. That meant I had to miss the C3 workout night, so I tried to emulate it at home as closely as possible.

And the bed? Well, the truck drove 2 hours to get here, bringing only 4 of the 5 pieces required to actually assemble it. And one of those 4 pieces was maple stained red, instead of pine stained gold. I'm afraid that I drew upon some of the language I learned in engineering school before asking them to take it back on the truck. Argggh. Oh well, it's only money. Heck, 'Bent and I have paid a lot to do adventure races where we've slept in roadside ditches.

BulletDog and I did the same route as yesterday, taking about 20% less time because (a) the trail was broken, (b) I used waxable skis (without much grip - oh well), and (c) I only had one dog stopping and sniffing things and rolling in the snow. (OK, I actually missed having two dogs.) It was another beautiful day in the snowy woods!

Power Yoga DVD.

Sadly, we didn't get the huge dump of snow that Hamilton got, but we have about 10 cm of fluffy new snow on top of the excellent base that we had before. BulletDog, ThunderDog and I went out for a ski around Palgrave West and the Charlevoix trail. Feeling lazy, I took my waxless skis, and boy, was THAT the wrong choice. I really had to work for everything, in addition to breaking trail through deep snow - except for the few pre-broken sections where my route intersected Crash's route from earlier in the day. The pooches had a fantastic time, making dog angels everywhere and plowing through snow that came up past their chests.

The forest was absolutely beautiful, and I was sorry that I'd left my camera behind. I've been writing magazine articles about outdoor sports, and because of the publication deadlines, it seems that I'm always looking in August for a photo with snow, or looking in February for a photo without snow. So I really need to get better at taking a good selection of photos in every season, before I know what I'm going to need.

Don't forget to register for Thomass Caledon in Palgrave West this Sunday. We'll be serving world-famous Crash Brownies!

Finally there was a happy convergence between Time Available and Unfatigued Body that allowed me to try out K/O's new strength routine today. As I get more familiar with it (and thus less awkward), I think I'll continue to enjoy it.

The routine is set up to work with free weights, rubber bands, stability ball and balance board, and the idea is to exercise different upper and lower body muscle groups by moving through single, smooth motions. For example, you might start with a squat, then stand up (using glutes and hams) until you're balanced on your toes. In the meantime, you've got one end of a rubber band in your hand, using it either in a pushing or pulling motion.

We'll have to get K/O back in a couple of weeks to make sure we've got it right, but I was happy with the Non-Boredom Factor today. I am a little worried about knocking my teeth out from a crash during the Full Push-ups on Stability Ball While Being Harassed By Lab Retrievers exercise, but I guess that's one of the advantages of being married to a dentist.

Not sure whether to call this running or just skidding around in the snow. I didn't wear spikes, but I should have!

KS failed to find one of my flags when he was testing the Thomass course yesterday, and not surprisingly, it was the dubious rootstock that I'd had very little confidence in. It didn't help matters that I had a different rootstock circled on my hand-drawn map than KS had circled when he put it in OCAD, but the truth is that I was much more wrong than he was. So... I returned today and wandered around until I finally chose a rootstock that I was happier with. There are about a dozen rootstocks in the area, and they're not all mapped. One of the features of an area full of fallen trees is that it's hard to pace count on an accurate bearing, so I came at the thing from several directions, but it was never straightforward. I think I'm happy with the placement now, but I will be asking Hammer's opinion when he's here.