Training Log: Timato

Woke up to pouring rain today, at least there's no bugs in these conditions. It was a shorter hike out to the van which was pretty straight forward. Well... until I had roughly 1 km to go and a big thunder clap went off. I picked up the pace to see if I could beat the ran, but with a few 100m to go a full-on hail storm hit. Oh well, I was soaked by the time I got to the van, but quickly changed and headed home.

Overall, I consider the trip a success. If I do this loop again I make try it in the other direction to stay at some different sites.

Given today was supposed to be hotter than the previous day I decided to modify my route. I hiked 20km to Lupis lake rather than doing the outer loop which would have been roughly an additional 8 km. This site wasn't nearly as nice as the first night and I spent the evening wearing my bug net. Nothing exciting to report here other than the fact that I was embarrassed by how bad my fire was tonight.

With the family gone for the week I booked a 3 day backpacking trip in Algonquin. I had a 24km first day planned. It started cool, but warmed up pretty fast. With not a cloud in the sky and no buds on the trees it was really warm the whole way out. Bugs weren't bad when I was moving, but as soon as I stopped they swarmed, but didn't bite.

When I booked my site for the first day Clara-1 (which I stayed at last year) was already booked, so I booked Clara-2. When I passed the first site it was empty, stopped for a minute to consider just staying there rather than going the additional 500m to the second site (I was pretty tired by then), but I continued on. I was rewarded for my effort because Clara-2 is a great site. It's got a rocky shore to the lake and on a bit of a point so the wind from the lake kept the bugs at bay. I was able to sit out on the shore, enjoying the warm sun and not needing a bug net at all.

Event: Challenge the Shield Adventure Run
 

A really fun Challenge the Shield with Anvil.

The chance of me doing this race are always really low because it's the same weekend has Aubrey's birthday. I got lucky this year because I had to drop Kristen and Aubrey off at the airport early in the morning and that gave me enough time to continue up to Parry Sound in time for the race. It was hard to find a teammate who wasn't already signed up. I got lucky asking Anvil who has a rule he never says no, but warned me we'd have to go at a pace his current fitness/calf could handle.

When I saw the map I found it a bit overwhelming and struggled to process it at first. This carried over into the first hour where we followed the wrong trail and ended up at a totally different checkpoint than we intended. It seems that around the 1 hour mark I started to really understand it, from there on we nav'd really well. We ended up doing all the controls except a few big pointers on the edge of the map. I think if we'd tried one of those we would have had to drop one of the last controls at the end, so I don't think it would have matter either way.

A really fun day in the woods with Anvil and it was great to finally get to do the event.

Good ride with the boyz along the trails around the Grand River.