One Tough Month!

This month will be a true measure of how successful my return to competition has been. I will be racing 3 times in 4 weeks in some pretty great events. Here is a breakdown of how the next 4 weeks shape up for me.

September 5th – Logs, Rocks and Steel Multisport Adventure

This is an 80km course comprised of a 16km trail run, 14km paddle and 50km mountain bike course. This race will be fast and the competition will be the toughest I have seen all year. Many of the fastest racers from the area will be here racing as either solos or teams of two including Andrew Cameron, last year’s champion, who will be off to the Adventure Racing World Championships in Portugal this November. With little to no navigation this will let me go all out and see how I shape up against some of the best when it comes down to pure speed and endurance.

Lastly, to add fuel to the competition the winner in the solo category on the championship course gains free entry to THE original multisport race and World Solo Multiport Championships, Speight’s Coast to Coast (http://www.coasttocoast.co.nz/).

September 19th - Storm the Ten

Storm the Ten is a unique race that has various types of teams and solos racing non-stop for 10 hours on a loops course. I will be racing this as a tag team with fellow Race Day Rush teammate Adrian Makurat. My logic behind not racing it solo is that this race is only 1 week before the Frontier Adventure Challenge (FAC) Series Championships (see below) and I don’t think I could handle 10 tough hours and recover enough in a week. Racing tag team we will take turns racing alternate laps. Given the race format the hub of the race should be a great atmosphere and give us the chance to hang out with fellow racers and watch other teams move through the transition area.

Adrian will be capturing some of his laps with the Race Day Rush Helmet cam and we hope to get some great transition footage as well with the HD camcorder. I’ll be sure to link to everything we get together that gets posted on at www.racedayrush.com.

September 26th – Frontier Adventure Challenge Series Championships

Unlike the other FAC races I have done this year this course will be 14hrs and approx. 70-80km long. This will be much more rugged than Logs Rocks and Steel and involve some serious navigation sections. Bob Miller, race director of Logs, Rocks and Steel, and one of Canada’s top adventure racers will be setting this course so it should be a good one!

I’m excited to for this race simply because of the length - last year’s winners finished in around 11 hours or so. With a race of this length it should still be pretty fast and intense but also give you more time to think and make up for any small navigation errors on the course (of which I have made a few this year!). With a start at 4am the first 3 hours of the race could make or break it as we will probably start on our feet with some challenging navigation.

I am really looking forward to this, although it will probably be a totally exhausting month, but fun and exciting too! My training has been going well and I am feeling pretty good about things so far. I think the best race for me will be the FAC Fall Classic, a decent length and some true navigation and off-trail trekking suits me best. The first two races will be a bit faster than I am used to and I am sure will be a shock to my system. I’ll do my best to gets lots of great photos and will have some heavy writing to do on what should be some great race reports.

August News

Another apology for being so slack lately! It’s time I get my act together. There are a few new things on the horizon that deserve an update.



First and foremost I would like welcome Simon River Sports to my team and thank them for their support! Simon River Sports (SRS) has been supporting adventure racing for over 10 years supplying racers with top of the line paddles and lightning fast boats. Needless to say they were a logical choice when I was in the market for some new paddling gear. So thanks again to Steve and the crew at SRS!!

I’m actually paddling a SRS kayak now as well. I found this boat for sale on the Running Free Forum and had to check it out (check out the Running Free Community Forum for all kinds of great racing and gear talk). To make along story short I'm now addling an SRS Swallow kayak - at 17”7’ and just about 19” wide it weighs in at just over 26lbs!!! I’ve looked at other boats and they don’t get much better than this for what I need. It’s fast, light and made to handle a little white water...doesn’t get much better than that for AR.

After my less than stellar paddling leg at the FAC Searchmont I’m lovin that I can get out and paddle whenever I want now. Paddling was definitely my weakest discipline simply due to my inability to train. The other bonus is that I don’t have to worry about trying to track down a decent kayak for every race I do. I can sleep soundly knowing I will probably have the fastest boat on the water!

I've also decided to bail on running the Iroquioa Trail Test this coming Saturday. I’ve been putting in some decent runs to get ready for this but there were just too many factors that I was worried about. This September I will be racing 3 out of 4 weeks and I was concerned that if I ran this race I would miss out on about 2 weeks of training (if you consider my taper and recovery time.) For me that is just too much right now. Next year I am sure I could have handled this, but I'm not strong enough and don't recover fast enough right now. Also, having rolled my left ankle about 4 times this season I wasn’t about to risk doing that on a brutal trail for 32km putting all my September races at risk.

The other factor that made me decide to skip on the Iroquoia was that it is actually on my birthday....the big 34 (damn that sounds old!). Rather than getting up at about 4am, beating the crap out of myself for 3 hours and then trying to stay awake past 6pm I’m going to sleep in, go out for birthday brunch with my lovely wife and RELAX!!!

September is going to be a tough one...but fun fun fun! In my next post I’ll break down the goods on each race.