Training Log Archive: Bash

Spectacular shorts weather yet again, although it really is time to get some snow to ski on. My plans for the day changed abruptly when Mom tore her right bicep and I had to go to Brantford. Doing everything one-handed is tough and unfortunately, she is right-handed.

Hard Core Live with Caron

C3 Yoga class. Nice to see new class member Nick de St. Croix.

At 10 weeks post-surgery, we're allowing BazingaDog to start using stairs again. That means we get to move from the main floor guest room back upstairs to our bedroom - yay. (B-Dog would cry all night if he had to stay downstairs while we were upstairs.) Wrestling a king mattress up a too-narrow staircase with 'Bent took 20 minutes and turned out to be just as tough as boot camp with a much greater chance of injury. So I'm not counting it as a rest day!

Here's a document listing "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y and/or Satirical News Sources". It's not comprehensive but it's pretty good - like Snopes for news sources.
http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/Re...

I've also been looking at different media bias rating sites, trying to decide on a favourite place to help me put news articles in context. If you haven't seen them, these sites rate different news sources on left vs. right wing bias and sometimes also on their tendency to publish false information. If anyone has a favourite media bias rating site, please share. I'll post here when I've reviewed them more.

It used to be that critical reading was the key skill we needed but with the proliferation of fake, biased and/or non-fact-checked "news", we need to beef up the toolkit.

New C3 Injury Prevention class - Similar to last year's boot camp with some foam rolling at the end. I was still feeling Raid The Hammer in my legs but it was good.

Event: Raid The Hammer
 

I wanted to do Raid The Hammer even though I've been running out of energy quickly since running the Javelina 100 in the heat two weeks ago. Dee and Audrey have been injured and sick respectively so we formed a team with the plan to just have fun. At least, that's what I thought! As always, these strong ladies are still in great shape even when they're not 100% so it was a very tough day for me physically. It was still lots of fun to explore the woods together on a beautiful day with terrific maps.

Dee and Aud are both excellent teammates so I got lots of towing and pushing in places where the terrain allowed. It was *way* more than my body was ready for. There were a few big climbs when I felt so weak that I couldn't pull myself up and thought I might topple over backwards off the cliff. There was plenty of ankle busting terrain so I was protective of the ankle I've twisted twice in the past four weeks; it held up. My brain got fuzzy with the physical effort but it was an OK nav race for me - neither great nor terrible.

It was interesting to see areas where I'd never been before. The finish line was in Stoney Creek and somehow I'd never been on the Bruce Trail on that side of Hamilton. There are some pretty views and gorgeous homes.

There were several different challenges that helped us reach the promised 50 controls for the club's 50th anniversary. We had two Matrix sections, a long-ish Walk the Line and three sections where we had to watch for flagging tape at "potential control" locations, then report to volunteers which controls we had seen. Sometimes I wished the WTL or potential controls had been placed in trickier places since we noticed teams accidentally missing some of those sections and saving time but that's a minor niggle. It was a fun course, tremendously hard work and a fantastic day for running in the woods!

The final map was mostly an aerial photo that I didn't wrap my head around immediately, which led to our biggest bobble of the day enroute to the dog park. We ran hard to the finish beside the school track - except it wasn't there. We spent several minutes in that area trying to find it tucked behind a wall or hill before we ran around the school and 'Bent directed us to the place it had been moved to - 4 minutes lost, according to GPS.

Fun day, completely zonked! One bruised kneecap and one big scrape but otherwise I seem to have survived. Thank you to all the DontGetLost staff and volunteers who work so hard on these events. It was a great day!

Tonight was the annual banquet for the C3 triathlon club, to which we belong since it's local and we enjoy overlapping activities and interests. I was very surprised and honoured to receive the C3 Female Runner of the Year award. They obviously decided to reward distance over speed this year! Although I feel quite undeserving, given that most club members could kick my butt in a 10K road run, I'm impressed at the way they have embraced 'Bent and me and our crazy adventure sports over the past decade.

The keynote speakers were the Mallory family, whom many of us know from adventure racing. They have a book now, "The Family that Conquered Everest".

Now to enjoy some down time from quality training until Dec. 1! (Oh, except for Raid The Hammer tomorrow.)