Haig Camp 2010

Two Mondays ago (July 19th), the team and I set out for the Haig Glacier for our third training camp of the year. Despite a very cloudy and wet looking first couple of days, we ended up having fantastic conditions for the majority of the week, which made for some great skiing. From a training stand point, I had an amazing week, getting in over 25 hours of training, and over 200km of skiing. Getting back on the snow also helped to get me all fired up again and excited to start racing this winter.

With the Haig camp also came the annual Academy Disc Golf Tournament, which is put on every year courtesy of teammate Jess Cockney. This year's tournament was full of surprises and was a blast to both compete in and spectate (being put out in a fairly early round, I was able to do a good amount of both). The two time Champion, Chris Butler, was dethroned this year when one of our coaches, Eric Groeneveld, put him out in the semi finals. And after a 9 hole over time and 3 or 4 sudden death holes, teammate Drew Goldsack managed to edge out Eric for the win. While I ended up finishing 9th place overall, I managed to not go home empty handed by getting the only hole in one of the week. So that was my highlight of the tournament.

The camp wrapped up on Sunday for most of the senior athletes, while myself and about 9 others ran out on Monday. So I am now back in Canmore with one last week of heavy training before I will be treated to a much needed rest week to both recover from these past few weeks, as well as to prepare for our next camp in Whistler. I have resumed my job at Boston Pizza, and yesterday I also tried out busking at the local weekly market. The idea was put in my head by a couple of my teammates while on the glacier this past week, so I thought I would go out and see how I could do. I ended up making $15 in about 90 minutes, and despite being a little nerve racking at first, it was pretty fun. Now I just have to learn some more songs and try to find more opportunities to do it.

Jacquelyn and I are both eagerly awaiting next week, as her sister and one of our friends from Ontario will be joining us for a week which, as timing would have it, puts them here for my rest week as well as my birthday.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I did get some pictures from the camp, and I have posted them on Facebook. Here is a link for those who are interested:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?id=510412683&aid=191000&s=0&hash=7d09ea4f9e3884f3556ecb0ca33538ee

Cheers!

Summer time!!!

As I mentioned in my last post in June (I apologize for the big time gap between posts), this past month has been a very exciting one. Picking up where I left off, I had the pleasure of joining the Parker family in the Canmore "Try-a-Tri" triathlon on June 20th, and it was lots of fun. I ended up posting the fastest time on the bike by almost a minute (over 9km), so I was pretty happy about that.

The next week was the team's first testing camp of the year, and while I had been looking forward to it for months, I unfortunately got sick at the beginning of that week. So after discussing it with my coaches, we agreed that the upcoming training camp in New Denver was much more important for me than the testing camp, so I took about 5 days off training, missing the testing, but was able to recover in time to join the team for the 3 day camp in B.C.

This camp was very fun, as it was lots of training and lots of km's. The first day was our long road ride around the Silver Triangle (New Denver to Nelson to Kaslo to New Denver). Hats off to teammates Kevin Sandau and Graham Nishikawa for being the only ones to complete the 220km loop, taking them a total of just over 7 hours. For myself and many of my other teammates, we stopped at the 170km mark, which for me took a total of 5.5 hours. The rest of the camp was spent running, ski walking and rollerskiing, and of course, the warm up game for the "World Series" (if you will) baseball game which will take place at our camp in Whistler next month. This game was a bit of a blowout (24-12 I believe was the final score), so team Pepper is going to have to pull up their socks if they want to compete with Team Salt in Whistler.

We arrived back in Canmore the evening of June 30th, at which time I was greeted by Jacquelyn who had arrived that afternoon. The next day I had the Canada Day running race, which went far better than I expected, as I won the 18 and under age category and was 13th overall. A couple hours later my teammates and I got into our Academy race suits and cowboy hats and rollerskied through the Canada Day Parade, which involved our usual short sprints and horse-mess dodging.

The parade was the end of my busy couple weeks, and then I was treated to a much-needed rest week last week. This week I have been ramping up the training again in preparation for my next training camp on the Haig Glacier, which will be taking place next week. VERY EXCITED!!! I am hoping to get some pictures from that camp, so I will try to get them up as soon as I can after I return from the Haig. Until then, Happy Summer!