Training Log Archive: Mr Wonderful

If the elliptical would stay on its rails, that'd be great. :(

Edit: Company is sending parts, and tech will inspect. Thank you to dear wife for dealing with hassle.

C • GPS Tracking 2

Taking advantage of my post WT lust for a full course run...although I came close to just lounging around and driving all the way in. Phew!

This bike rolls alright at 65 psi; could use a few more teeth up front or a few less in the back. Or maybe it's okay because then I can't push too hard

A Dukes of Hazzard orange bike in your cube is quite a conversation starter.

Sub loop with little dog and dear wife. Forgot to refill the doggie bags, so we improvised with a discarded McCafe cup. Mmm mmm.

Biked the sewer bill over to the township office, with dear daughter on the tag along. Some driver slowed to inform me that she wasn't pedaling. :)

The "not 45 minute" sub loop with wife, daughter, and dog.

w/ little dog.

Short course to finish; missed cut off by 90 minutes. I'm not entirely sure we could have finished the paddle and final short trek in 10 hours had we made the cut off.

With no known way to keep any air in Mark's tire, and with a lot of road riding back to the finish, Mark elected to run. He figured it wasn't much more than a trail half marathon, which he knew he could do. We loaded all of his mandatory gear into Greg's pack. It was cold, so he dressed up a bit, and I accumulated his gear as we headed out and he warmed up.

Eventually we realized that Mark could jump on my bike, go down a hill and up a hill, drop my bike, then I would jog along and pick up my bike, for sort of a turbo boost. We did that a few times; in hindsight, more might have been better.

We were in good position to be first of the short coursers, but even at Mark's brisk pace, two teams passed us back, the second beating us only by a few minutes. They did cheer exuberantly when they went by.

Time includes TA; Mark ran faster than shown. I don't know the TA splits yet. I think we left after 6 am.

Loved the course and race. Hope to be back next year for a full course or bust run.

C • Great job! 9

Event: Proud Lake Adventure Day
 

Event: Wilderness Traverse
 

Casual ride up to the start for the 2013 Wilderness Traverse with MarkVT and Double M and Greg VanTol.

Mark VanTongeren is a BEAST!

Some notes:

20 m contour intervals mean there are next to no lines on the map.

Only 8 CPs!

C • What happened? 20

If we had any doubts about this not being our standard type adventure race...CP1 was ~30 km from the start.

Navigation was interesting - for most of the trail junctions, I never saw the other part of the junction. So you'd go around a bend, but not see the third thing that should be there. Plus the Scalex can underestimate a bit (at least with this operator), and with no topography on the map, keeping track of position was a challenge.

We stopped to worry about overshooting the turn off, and it doing so, were inadvertantly exactly at the correct trail junction, which most of the field had overshot. At some point, my teammates tell us Tecnu flew by from an earlier trail choice issue, blazing the way into the grassy trailhead. So if the race was 90 miles shorter...look out! That trail point was slightly shorter tall grass leading to a rocky rooty rocky bumpy mess. It was a mad house as faster teams all tried to get by to compensate for their nav error. Some very pretty sections, like the crossover between some ponds.

Eventually we got to the powerlines, where would spend a lot of time. It was very exposed, and I got warm, so I dropped down to just the race bib. It was also relentless - bouncing and bumping. I went to take a drink from a bottle and then saw trouble ahead, tried to put the bottle away, and ended up hitting something and going over the bars. I was very, very fortunate not to hit the rock, and instead only get my thighs scraped up on gravel.

Meanwhile, Mark was getting flats all over the place. He started tubeless but that punctured, so we put in a tube. Then that popped. We tried cleaning tire and rim, but couldn't find a cause.

Especially after my fall, I got really gun shy about not getting unclipped, so I kept walking hills, which had to be annoying. Also, my chain was skipping teeth, so I could only use the big ring, which didn't make for easy climbing.

I'm not sure if it was faster, but we shortcutted the big loop of trail at the train tracks by going straight and walking over a dry swamp and back up to the powerline elevation.

We were very glad to see Barbara at CP2. Paramedic Jackie called me out for looking a little flush. We left there, Mark towed me a bit (the terrain was finally started to get conducive to me being comfortable being towed without such rigorous obstacle work) and then Mark flatted again, so he just rode on the rim but luckily it was just sandy to TA1.

Lessons learned:

* I should bike more
* I should bike harder terrain more
* Get my drivetrain sorted
* Carry more patches and duct tape
* Really watch distance, and maybe practice with the Scalex to see if I can get more accurate

C • 3 things 7

The team was agreed we would avoid swimming unless required, so we left the marina via trail and starting working through the trail network to #4. Bugs got a little fierce, but it went well. I almost chose the wrong trail, but Mark talked me out of it. We saw the trail that the swimmers were trying to hit - it was just a ride of fewer trees and lots of ferns - good luck noticing that!

I believe the pro line was probably to swim, coasteer, swim.

We did find a nice sort of trail along the lake to CP4, which was a good section. Caught up to a team that swam and tried to find that fern trail - it took them a couple hours they said.

Exiting to find the trail we wanted to take to 5, we either never saw it or missed south. We hit some lakes for a back stop, and changed our plans to use them as a shortcut. It worked well. Then we got to a long bushwhack on a bearing. No thorns, but thick in spots - very slow going. We determined that our accuracy was not spectacular - we aimed off by 500 m, and ended up 800 m above the junction. And we were lucky to see the junction - again, a grassy bit of fewer trees. Then it was quite interesting climbing up rock to get over to the point. We missed the lake end a bit north, but were caught by the stream. Then we couldn't figure out if we wanted to stay on the coast or go high, so we did both.

To 6 we had a great line, over the peninsula, a good bushwhack over the plateau, then along the coast and then finding a beaver dam to cross the narrow section just past the cabin. Woo hoo! Unfortunate that was the end of our brilliance. We then believe we crossed the trail, and ended up in an very generalized mess of swamp and large tiring reentranty bits - not large enough to be represented on the map, mind you. One swamp had us going very slowly. I felt bad for Maria and Greg, wondering what the nav team was up to. Finally we decided to shove east and find the lake, and while climbing, we happened to pause on the trail, which was an area of ferns and reduced tree volume.

We thought we might make the cut off, but for some reason travel was much slower on that trail, and again we could not find the junctions on our map, and the trail and compasses...I'm not sure. We lost quite a lot of time at one open area, trying to figure out the correct exiting trail. Several stalled out or turned up. We crossed a "bridge removed" bit; I'm not sure where that was on the map. We ended up on the right trail, I presume by luck. On one map it appeared to be the 401, but it was labeled C, and C was not shown going that way on the 1:150k supplemental map. I was very confused. But we were comforted by lots of footprints and found TA2 and Mark's flat tired bike.

C • 2 things 7