I was practically begging my coach to let me race. Begging. When he said “it is a recovery week, so go for it. Go all out, don’t monitor your heart rate, just go for it” I was ecstatic. The Smiths Falls Classic is an event put on by Somersault (they organize/own most of the triathlons and running races around Ottawa and surrounding area). We had heard good things about it, but wanted to confirm for ourselves. The sprint distance was a bit shorter than what we’ve done before: * 500m swim * 26km bike * 5km run Kathryn and I quite literally had no idea what to expect. We hopped in the car early on Sunday morning, drove in the rain for an hour to the race site and arrived to find… nothing. We were told to go to the Comfort Inn hotel in town and expected to see lots…

Last year, as part of our IronMan training, I set a goal. After the 2007 Ottawa half marathon, I wrote:

I’m hoping that the next half marathon we do, we can get our times down to 1hr 45 mins – I’m not exactly sure how fast I can go, but I definitely want to find out

And with that, I had the seed of a plan in place—to hit 1h 45min as a time in a half marathon. Based on the way everything has gone this year, that goal should have been achievable. I had a plan in place to run faster for each 5km split of the race and then really run hard for the last 2 or 3 km. And then the gun went off. Plans must change. While I had in mind the perfect race, my body didn’t agree. I’ve been sick…

My wife and I have been on the lookout for wetsuits here in Ottawa for some time. We started seriously looking about 2 months ago, and weren’t really able to come up with too many options. Pretty much everyone carries the same brand: Orca. I tried on three different Orcas and really wasn’t too happy with the fit of them – the ones that fit my legs didn’t fit my torso and the ones that fit my torso didn’t fit my legs. Being in the internet world, I looked to Google for help. The problem was that all the sites that turn up when searching for wetsuits in Ottawa are for diving/scuba shops. Searching for triathlon wetsuits in Ottawa gives you a great resource that helps you determine if you need a wetsuit, but doesn’t help you see which stores carry which brands. Basically, searching was useless, and I needed…

In cold and blustery January 2007, my wife and I ran our first half marathon – 13.1 miles/21.1 km – on a very cold -20 degrees Celsius day. We had never run farther than about 16 or 17km before, it was ridiculously cold for the entire 2 hours and 8 minutes that it took us to run that race. We were happy with the fact that we had finished the race at all. Fast forward 4 months to May 27, 2007 and we were ready to run our second half marathon as part of Ottawa Race Weekend. We knew we felt better, but weren’t sure how much faster we’d be able to go – most of our other training runs that we’d done were not at a race pace, but at a long, slow, sustained pace. Our goal was to finish in less than 2 hours. We had a great…