Training Log Archive: Bash

Slow sunset ski around Palgrave West on a perfect winter evening. I broke a lot of trail through fluffy powder that spilled over the tops of my boots. In other places, I skied in tracks that were coated with fresh snow from earlier today. When I started, the sky had streaks of powder blue and soft pink. As I left the conservation area, this was the view from Thinker's Hill.

Whenever Dad presented a slide show or a set of vacation photos, he would conclude with a photo like this and say, "And as the sun sets slooooowly in the west..." I think of him often, especially at places like this.

Coming down with a cold. Bad timing (not that there's such a thing as good timing!)

Stars W.A.R. (Winter Adventure Race)
Wasaga Beach

'Bent and I teamed up again for this fun 2.5 hour score-O style race through the winter wonderland around Wasaga Beach. As always, Nick added a few twists (3 dog bone controls this time) although it was relatively tame by his creative standards. ;)

We'd planned to pick up two controls on our way to the first dog bone but like a lot of experienced teams, we managed to miss 45, which was only about 130 m from a mandatory road crossing that was a bit farther east than indicated. We continued forward, thinking the control might be farther north or else we might hit 44 instead. Timato and Nosnhoj were also continuing and it seemed unlikely that we were all wrong. But we were - and we didn't give up even though we knew the distance was too far.

We abandoned the lower value controls and turned to follow a ridge; eventually I relocated and decided to head straight for the start of the dog bone to continue our planned route to the west side of the road. It took us 19 minutes to find our first control - yikes!

By leaving the two early controls until the end of our race, we found ourselves ahead of the crowd and breaking a lot of trail through fluffy snow. We only ran into a few other teams after the first 10 minutes; we mostly enjoyed the beautiful forest on our own.

We hit our self-imposed time cut-off and skipped a few controls on the west side, then we returned to the east side and picked up all but one of the controls we'd originally planned to get on our way in and out. 'Bent towed me for the last 10 minutes so he had to navigate 43 and 45 on his own while I scrambled to keep my footing. It was a decent recovery after a very rocky start. We squeaked out a Masters win but the Humble Bumbles (Owen and Barbara Steele) just missed it. Congrats to Bob & Hermes on the overall win, following by Timato/Nosnhoj and STORM/DD11.

We had hot pizza afterward and good conversation with friends. I won ice wine - thanks, Eugene! Thanks to Nick, Mick and all the Stars who work on this great event year after year.

‘Bent, BazingaDog, AdventureDog and I went snowshoeing from the top of Alpine Ski Resort into the creek valley and ended up climbing into the mythical Loree Forest because it was too pretty to resist. Such beautiful, fluffy snow today after several weeks of icy conditions! We met Logie out running and looking fit.

Late afternoon ski at Scenic Caves with Coach LD while Goose and ‘Bent skied in a different direction. I’d expected to ski alone - not with someone fresh from the podium at the World Masters Ski Championship - so I’d brought scratched-up waxless skis. That made for a great workout chasing the Coach around the beautiful forest. We only saw 2 other skiers, not counting our husbands. So nice. :)