Wed 28 Feb 2007
Ever heard of the Canadian Death Race? Does it sound fun? My parents didn’t think so. But it was exactly the sort of challenge I was looking for. It’s in the beautiful outdoors, in the Rocky mountains of Grand Cache, Alberta, and requires a lot of training. I needed some kind of goal in my life right now….so structured training for a 125km mountain run seemed perfect. Yes I said 125km. Over 3 mountains. With 17,000 feet of elevation change. The hardcore people of this world do it SOLO, sometimes in less than 15 hours. I am going for the ‘easy’ option (read sensible) and I’m doing it as a 5 person relay, each running one 25km leg. Although at some stage I do plan to do it solo……
I officially entered today, so have until the first weekend in August to get into shape. I have never done any running before, so it should be interesting. I started a 12-week marathon training program that I found on the net, and I’m not looking forward to this weekend when I already have to run a half-marathon is one of my training runs. I only started running on Monday! When that marathon program is finished, I still have another 12 weeks to fit in another training plan before the race.
I intend to keep a training diary on here….listing all my runs AND my times (no laughing…I know I suck!). I hope this will serve as a guide in the future to other people thinking of entering the Death Race. They will be able to see all my training details, and then I will write a full-report on how the race went too. 
This should give people an idea of how hard (or easy…yeah right!) the race is. We will also probably have some sort of video coverage from the race in the form of interviews and I may even take a camera with me on the run….depends how my training goes!
As an aside…I found this awesome website for planning your training runs. You can click in the route you want to do and it will tell you the distance. Or you can view runs of a certain length that other people have added. It’s really easy to use and really quick.
Check out this discussion forum created just for the Canadian Death race. You can find team members, discuss training tactics and race tactics etc.
