Training Archive: BashIn the 7 days ending 2008-03-30:
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| M | T | W | H | F | S | S | ||||||||
Sunday Mar 30 | ||
| Snowshoe Orienteering (3 hrs 20 min) 2:45:00 [2] *** | |
| I needed some good orienteering training to get ready for the Flying Pig and Salomon Giant's Rib Raid, so I rounded up Goose and 'Bent for a session in my personal navigational vortex - the Rocky Ridge/Hilton Falls area. We used snowshoes the whole time, but the snow didn't get soft until high noon, about halfway through our session. Conditions must have been reasonable for today's Thomass Eliminator, since the morning was cold.
It's a nice area, and it was a gorgeous day to be out in the snowy forest with friends. We tried different methods of navigating and different people leading. Without flags to help us in such a tough area, we had to spend a percentage of the time verifying our location at each control. We all learned a few things that should be useful in our upcoming races. Goose is navigating for another team this time, and they're going to be tough competition! I'm wondering what conditions will be like on April 12 for the GRR. There is a LOT of snow in there right now. It's starting to melt, and we're going to have some warm weather and rain this week - but I think the slush and rock will make for slow going compared to snowshoeing over this nice, smooth snow that covers all the rough stuff. | ||
Saturday Mar 29 | ||
| XC Skiing (Skate) 2:07:00 | |
Not much sleep, but it was a gorgeous winter day, so 'Bent, Coach LD and I headed up to Highlands Nordic for what will probably be the final skate ski of the season. Conditions were still pretty good, although in some places we had to watch for ruts on the trail. There was almost no bare ground showing.
The best parts were when we left the trails and started crust cruising around the fields. Snow conditions were absolutely perfect for that! At some points it was wide open, and at other times we had to thread our way through gaps between thorny bushes. It felt like we were a bunch of kids just playing and being crazy. We slalom-skied through a Christmas tree farm, bumped over snowdrifts, and held a contest to see who could reach a distant point with the fewest skate strokes. Fun morning!!  | ||
| Yoga 23:00 [1] | |
| Rodney Yee Power Yoga for Flexibility DVD. Mmm, I needed that. I'll be nice and relaxed for Earth Hour now. | ||
| Note | |
| Eked out a narrow victory over 'Bent in our Earth Hour Scrabble by kerosene lamplight. (When we got low on kerosene, we cheated with headlamps.) We turned off pretty much everything - had to turn a breaker back on when some smoke detector started beeping and scaring ThunderDog. When we went out to see if the stars looked better than usual, we noted that the house of our arsonist neighbours - the ones who burned 70 acres of land around here last fall - was lit up like a Christmas tree inside and out. It was so bright that they *had* to be making a statement. Or maybe they were holding another one of their big parties - perhaps an Earth Hour bash for people who don't get it. Our *nice* neighbours to the east were dark - good for them. | ||
| C • Downtown TO 8 | ||
Friday Mar 28 | ||
| Note | |
Some members of the Caledon Navigators orienteering club were spotted at tonight's Dorados semi-formal, and they were nearly unrecognizable. No mud, no duct tape, no burrs on their pants. And in Goose's case, no pants at all!
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Thursday Mar 27 | ||
| Note | |
| Starting to get worried... Still no sign of the May 3 Frontier Adventure Challenge (which I've already paid for) on their new website: http://www.fastadventures.com/. The High School Adventure Race isn't listed either, which is a bigger problem, since kids (and their parents and teachers) need more time to prepare. | ||
| C • may 5th? 7 | ||
| Note | |
| Ah... the power of Attackpoint. The race was added to the FAR website tonight, and I've just received an e-mail acknowledging my entry. And the sun is shining and birds are chirping... | ||
| Running intervals (Treadmill) 30:00 | |
| With the Giant's Rib Raid just 2 weeks away and the forest full of soft snow, I decided to try an interval program on the treadmill while watching "Star Trek Voyager". The user's manual for our treadmill went AWOL awhile ago, so I tend to just push the speed and incline up and down on the rare occasions when I use it. I figured out how to set up a program today, and it was *definitely* better. My top speed was faster than it would have been if it were under my control outdoors. So maybe I should do this more, in spite of the "yeccchh" factor.
ThunderDog and I went hiking in the forest, and it's hard to know what would be the best way to get around. Some south-facing slopes are half-bare now, but I went up to my knees in snow on several north-facing slopes. Some parts of southern Ontario are getting more snow tonight too! | ||
| Strength (Upper body) 19:00 [1] | |
| While watching the end of Voyager. The poor hologram doctor was really stressed out. | ||
| Strength (Core) 22:00 [2] | |
| Hard Core Live with Caron. Ouch! | ||
| Yoga 54:00 | |
| Power Yoga class with Caron. Tonight's theme was yin and yang - poses involving challenging repetitive movements followed by poses that are difficult to hold for a long time. (But we had to.) Tough workout. | ||
Wednesday Mar 26 | ||
| Running (Snowshoe) 30:00 | |
| Headed out into Palgrave West for a run on snowshoes - wow, that was tough! We got 10 cm of new snow yesterday on top of snow that was still pretty deep in many places. It's very heavy and wet now, and it formed sharp crystals that wedged into my shoes and threatened to give me blisters. Next time... gaiters!
The Thomass Eliminator race was postponed until this Sunday because there was snow in the forest, and it looks like conditions will be about the same as two weeks ago, based on the weather forecast. If I were doing the race (which I'm not), I'd wear snowshoes in order to focus on having a good physical and navigational workout, and avoid the risk of unseen obstacles under the snow. I think I would be disqualified for doing so, but Thomass is just supposed to be a fun winter training series, so I'd take the DQ. The race director says that snowshoes are unfair - even though the top ten finishers in recent races have included a mix of snowshoe and non-snowshoe users. He also does *not* believe that Thomass is a fun series anymore, which is why this stuff matters. I suppose that people could get equally worked up about the unfairness of tall people racing head-to-head against short people in deep snow, racers with specialized orienteering shoes competing against newbies wearing running shoes in mud, or age/gender-handicapped races where no women crack the top 10 - all of which we've seen in this series. But they don't. I guess those of us who do these casual winter orienteering races just for fun need to keep smiling and enjoying the parts that *are* fun and do our best to avoid the silly stuff. | ||
| C • Handicaps 7 | ||
Tuesday Mar 25 | ||
| Note | |
| Another snowstorm today - on the 6th day of spring. What an amazing winter for skiers!
Just before I was going to leave to meet Leanimal for our hill interval run, I managed to mess up the touchpad on my new laptop enough that that I deleted my entire Documents folder. I'm surprised that it took me 6 days to screw something up with my newbie touchpad skills, but I hadn't expected something quite that spectacular on my first attempt. Luckily I had a 6-day-old backup, and I hadn't created many new documents since then due to Easter weekend. But - sigh - by the time I got all that stuff sorted out with my new best friend JJ from Dell Tech Support in Phoenix, there was no time left for training today. Well, that's not totally true - we had an indoor classroom training session with the Caledon Navigators tonight, followed by intensive debriefing at the Black Bull Pub. | ||
Monday Mar 24 | ||
| XC Skiing (Skate - Off Trail) 1:35:00 [3] | |
The Caledon Crust Cruise hotline rang early yesterday with the news that it is now - temporarily - possible to skate ski just about anywhere you want to go. We were out of town for Easter but today 'Bent and I hooked up with Coach LD for a morning ski around the fields, rough bush and wetlands north of Bolton.
It wasn't the wilderness experience that Slice, Dog Runner and the gang enjoyed this weekend, but it was still the most fun that I've ever had skate skiing. It was a mix of cross-country travel wherever we felt like going, bushwhacking and occasional surprises - like the little piece of wire fence that flipped me onto my face. We had a few centimeters of snow last night, and all the branches were lightly dusted with feathers of snow and ice that gleamed in the morning sun. 
Conditions were certainly nothing like the photo in Revy's log today, but 'Bent still couldn't resist throwing in a bunch of telemark turns when we found a good hill. Coach LD followed his line doing parallel turns. As you can see, when we Ontarians talk about spring skiing in corn snow... we are talking about *actual* corn.  | ||