Week of November 2-8

Autumn is a wonderful season to run...okay, actually every season is a wonderful season to run;)

When I was in high school, it was my favourite time of the year because it meant cross country running. Running the trails around my parent’s farm and racing cross country in my early years as a runner led to a long term love of trail running. This laid the foundation for my passion for trail ultras today and wanting to spend as much time on the trails as possible.

OFSSA:
OFSSA Cross Country is the Ontario provincial high school cross country championships. It is just an incredible meet to watch, both in terms of the size of the fields (250 runners in each of six divisions), but also the caliber of competition. I was particularly interested this year and followed the high school season closely as there were some really strong runners and teams from our little corner of the world who were competing.

Sydenham is a very small community, but their High School Senior Boys team ran incredibly well to win the silver medal this past weekend. Sydenham’s top three runners all finished in the top 30 (Jeff Archer/10th, Rob Asselstine/22nd, Dylan O’Sullivan/28th with Eliot Leydonhorst and Chris Hull rounding out the team). This is just an incredible performance for a school of this size. Congrats guys.

Aside from being strong runners, I’ve met Jeff, Rob and Dylan and they are all super nice guys too. Jeff and Rob volunteered to help out with the Kingston 5Peaks race that I organized last spring (on a very wet and nasty day), and Dylan is actually Sara’s cousin so I’ve gotten to know him pretty well. It’s also very neat to see someone like Jeff finish so well at OFSSA as I remember when he took one of the kid’s running clinics I instructed when he was quite young and only in public school. It will be pretty interesting to see what these guys all do during the upcoming track season and years to come.

Congratulations are also in order for another small school. Ernestown Secondary School is where I went to high school in the early 1980’s and also coached during the early-mid 1990’s. We had some strong teams during this period, many of which were led by the Murphy Brothers, but I believe that the highest any of our teams finished at OFSSA was 8th. The 2009 ESS midget girls team capped off a great season with an impressive 6th place showing. Great job!

Mountain Masochist Trail Run 50m:
Geoff Roes continued his record setting year in beating Dave Mackey’s old course record by 20mins. What a year he has had. Canadians did very well with Gary Robbins finishing third and Adam Hill and Glen Redpath tying for seventh. Tamsin Anstey from B.C. won the women’s race.

Pinhoti 100m:
Karl Meltzer of the La Sportiva Running Team picked up yet another 100mile win on the season. I’ve lost count how many 100’s he’s run and won this year. Just a machine.

Stone Cat 50m:
This is a great race and I’d really love to get back down to it some time. I ran it a few years ago, and didn’t have a particularly good race, but I learned a lot about the distance. I loved the course and remember the volunteers just having way too much fun on the course. The thing I remember the most was when I was going through a rough patch and feeling like I was going to puke (what’s new?). I was promptly being threatened by someone with a perogee on a skewer while being told to ‘eat the perogee!’. Fun race. This was also where I met Bryon Powell and remember running with him for a while on the third loop, then being dropped by him after he took a snort of Jack Daniels at an aid station. Who knew?

Irunfar.com has a couple of good reports on both Stone Cat and MMTR here.

Ozark Trail 100:
The race came and went. I was looking forward to it, but got injured a couple of days after registering for the race and booking my flight. I’m curious to see how the race went as it sounded like an incredible course and strong field of runners. I haven’t seen any results yet, but they should be posted on their website soon. (Note: early results are now posted here)

Training Week Summary:
Not much exciting to report with my training this week. Just a steady diet of 20minutes of easy running each day to keep my streak alive and allow my knee lots of time to repair. I’ve been religiously doing my leg rehab exercises too. I seem to be noticing a slight improvement over the past few days, which is a good sign. Looking forward to testing it more and increasing some over the next week.

Total # of hours this week: 2:56
Total # of runs this week: 7
2009 total # of hours: 521:47
2009 total # of days: 319
2009 total # of runs: 399
Streak: 7,257 days in a row
Training Log Details: click here