The Training Run Train-wreck

Imagine feeling the coolness of the air; seeing the leaves turning bright reds and yellows and hearing the tell tale cacophony of geese flying overhead. Imagine the pleading look in the eyes of the dogs, for they feel it too, and make no mistake, they know as well as I do that training season has arrived. Imagine having all the equipment ready to go, imagine the dogs keyed up and for once, imagine knowing where you will take them to run instead of hunting for trails like seasons past. If you are able to imagine this, then you will know the excitement that filled the dogyard Saturday morning as I loaded up the truck with my mountain bike and two dogs.

It was a tough decision to make; which two get to come today? Horton isn't really comfortable running out front, neither is Blizti and Dart is too gonzo to be given the responsibility of lead, even if that responsibility is shared; Dora and Olive had already gone out -- and we'd had a stellar run -- so of the dogs that were left, I chose Jinx and Lacey. I loaded them into the truck, along with my bike, and amid the chorus of howling at being left behind, we left.

Last year's fall training trail was a logging road and I think that it is being used currently to haul logs out, so we don't go there right now. Instead, we go to the trail head we used a lot last year, which is close by and ideal for dryland training.

I pulled into a widening of the road and parked the truck and began to unload. One of our goals this year is to have a team that doesn't loose its' mind while they are being harnessed and hooked up. We want calm dogs that don't chew lines, harnesses or rip off booties -- it's hard enough to put them on once, nevermind twice and while the dog is jumping like a maniac. So, I took out Jinx and Lacey, harnessed them and then proceeded to get the bike ready all the while taking my time and making sure my dogs were well behaved. Finally, everything was ready, so I took Jinx first and put her on the gangline. I told her to 'line out' and was mildly surprised that she did. I brought Lacey over, clipped them together with a neckline and went to my bike to release it from the truck. It is at this point that the wheels fell off. Not litertally, but since the run became a trainwreck, this was the start of it.

This is the view of the trail from where I start. I'm standing in front of the truck.

"OKAY! Let's go!" I said. Jinx started to move forward, but Lacey turned around and came over and jumped up on me. I got off the bike, repositioned the dogs and tried again to go. Same thing. Once more off of the bike; once more reposition the dogs and once more the bike is dragged a few feet through the dirt, riderless. Jinx kept wanting to go but with Lacey turning around all the time, she was getting her harness twisted with the neckline. After a few failed attempts at getting them pointed, together, in the same direction, I decided to take off the neckline altogether; afterall, once Jinx started to run, Lacey would have no choice but to follow because I was going, too.

I had just unclipped the neckline and was stepping away from the dogs when Lacey decided to remember how this whole 'harness and line' thing worked; she and Jinx were off like a scared rabbit, leaving me to run after my bike which was now skipping down the road. For a few strides, it was just beyond my reach and the more I thought about it as a I ran, the more I realised I had better do something fast or prepare watch my team careen around the corner and out of sight. So, I did what anybody in my situation would do, I expect: I dove, quite ungracefully, on top of my bike. The handlebars dug into the ground, the pedal too, and as I tried to right the bike I noticed the front wheel was facing the wrong way which locks my brakes. This sudden stop from the locked brakes tore the bike from my hands and sent it bouncing down the road again. Momentum propelled me forward and I managed to catch the bike by the seat post on it's second revolution. I turned the wheel the right way around, ran along beside it for a few strides and then hopped on the seat. Through all of this, Jinx and Lacey didn't miss a step.

Both of these pictures were shot with me holding onto the handlebars with one hand while the other held the camera; I had to guess what I was shooting and hope it turned out.

There were no other incidents other than me getting a chainring to the calf which resulted in a pretty nasty slash. We arrived back at the truck in more or less one piece; the dogs got a bowl of water each while I packed up everything again. We drove home; the dogs to lay in the now bright sunshine and me to assess the damage to both my bike and me.

Having water after the run.

Jinx -- a hot dog.

Lacey -- a bad dog.

Yarrr! So it's me treasure ye be after, is it?

One night, while sitting around a bon fire at the neighbour's house, I was introduced to the new game of Geocaching. It is exactly what it sounds like: little (or moderately sized) containers filled with all manner of trinkets and the like set in place by members of the global Geocaching community. This game is truly world-wide for there are caches from Oshawa to Austria and all points near and far and the object seems to be to get people out and exploring.

How it works is as follows: someone decides that they have a suitable place to hide a container, so they fill it with items and place it in a safe spot where it is not likely to be found by those not looking for it. A log book and information page is included, and the coordinates are recorded. These coordinates are then uploaded to the Geocaching website, where they are made available to all participants. To find a cache, the coordinates are entered into a GPS and it guides the user to the general area of the cache, where it is then up to them to search around for it. It is very much like a modern treasure hunt. If the cache is found, it is acceptible to either take the contents and replace them with something else or take nothing and leave nothing. There are collectable coins and dogtags and other Geocache related objects to be found, but for most, I think, the adventure is the real prize.

A quick look at the website shows that there are differing sizes of containers and different levels of difficulty: some caches can be driven to, whereas others may need a boat or ATV to get to. There are other caches that are much like the box within a box within a box trick played at birthdays and Christmas. The initial coordinates given only reveal a box with more coordinates in it, so that the seeker goes from cache to cache until they are eventually rewarded with the final one, several containers down the line.

Jenn and I had a house full of kids on Sunday so we thought it would be a great adventure for them to go on a search for treasure. We had them draw up treasure maps while I found a nearby cache. I realize that drawing maps to an as yet discovered trove is difficult, but the kids didn't seem to care about the incongruity of it so we didn't, either.

The Treasure Hunters, eating freshly picked apples from our tree.

Near us, on a road that is not extremely busy, is a tree that is for some reason covered in shoes. It's not a tall tree, it's nearing fifty feet, but there are shoes right to the top. I thought this would be sort of interesting for the kids, so we chose this as our destination. With the coordinates suitably entered into my GPS we set out on our treasure hunt amid talk of presumed bounty and the niggling fear of residual pirates and their ghosts.

The Shoe Tree.

See? Shoes on a tree.

Looking for the treasure around the tree. Nope, not there.

We stopped for some lunch and then continued on and when we were a few kilometers away, we gave the kids their first clue on the treasure map: look for a tree with shoes. Although most agreed that trees don't wear shoes, the kids couldn't stop looking out of the windows. We drove past the tree with no one noticing. Not even me, even though I was sure it was around here. Somewhere. A quick 180 degree turn and we were closing in on our target. Lauren was the first to spot the tree and it wasn't long before we were all out of the van and searching in the bush, under rocks and behind trees for a container.

My GPS was accurate to within 5 meters that day, so it should have been fairly easy to find the cache. It wasn't, though. A combination of me not synchronising my GPS to the format of the GPS used by the person who hid the container (I noticed later that the information was available, I had just missed it) and it being our first attempt at finding a Geocache container led to a longer than anticipated search. It was nearly going to remain unfound until Jenn, who was just about to give up, noticed a white lid tucked into a small cave of rocks. When the kids heard Jenn call out that she had found it, they all ran to be the first to retrieve it. We found some nice moss to sit on and we opened the small, plastic container. Inside it was a logbook, a note about Geocaching, some shoelaces, a pair of Barbie pants, a car which Owen claimed immediately, a Dora the Explorer key chain and a small bottle of bubbles. The loot was evenly distributed, shockingly without incident, and we replaced the contents with some items that we had brought along. We logged our find of the cache in the notebook and put the container back for someone else to find.

Finally! The loot!

Being the brave pirates that we were, we decided to reward ourselves with ice cream cones on the drive home.