works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

My sport involves feet and trails and moving one quickly across the other.

  • little or lotta lazy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What do you wish you’d done more of this past year?

    A few months after my daughter was born and as the days counted down to the stereotypical New Years Eve regrets and resolution-making, my mind shifted towards fitness. Something compelled me to log onto the website for a local running store and sign up for a running clinic.  So it was that starting the second day of January a week or two later in the year 2008 I arrived in the door of the local run club and started their “learn to run 5k” training clinic.

    I have only taken short bits of time off running for injury (or maybe vacations and holidays) since. 

    That will be exactly eighteen years ago in just less than one month. *sigh* My running career will soon be old enough to vote.

    But 2025 has been a bit of a slide, if I’m being honest.

    Sure, I ran a streak in September and a race in October. Sure, I did a Park Run in Tokyo in November. And sure, I have not so much missed a stretch of time in my training… so much as I have just been maintaining.  But, it was not what I would call a peak running season.

    My doctor has told me on a couple of occasions that not only is running probably keeping me relatively fit and young(ish) but it is something of a alternative sort of diagnostic tool: if you ever find that you can’t run because of your heart or lungs, come see me, he said. Otherwise, you’re probably gonna live for a while.

    It wasn’t my heart or lungs, tho, really. Turns out it was my stomach and some secondary symptoms related to reflux and digestive health that has left me hesitant about longer distances for the last while. That, and I have been a bit lazy about it, too.

    Admittedly, it was probably a lot of lazy.

    And yet now that the year is coming to yet another close and I get to look back on my stats for 2025, I realize that it was a relatively grim year for my milage. I kind of wish I had pushed myself a bit further this year, to be honest.

    Yeah, yeah… health first, and there were genuine health quirks that slowed me down and shut off my desire to push out into the depths of the river valley wilderness this past year. Turns out that having a coughing fit what seemed like every ten minutes for six months throws you off your game. You are cautious. You are hesitant. You second guess your own ability. 

    Had I cracked that nut earlier, I may have jumped back into half marathon training or something. And now… well, the snow is flying out the window even as I write this, and the temperatures are grossly unfit for anything I feel like partaking in today. 

    Lazy? Or self preservation? You can make up your own mind. But I do feel a little sad I didn’t cover more trail in my footprints this past year.

  • head over feets, thirteen

    Lucky.

    All good things begin with the number thirteen, right?

    The race kinda wrapped our season, however you look at it, and as an autumn overseas vacation looms I’ve been contemplating things besides long distance training. That said, I’ve been trying to get in some physical activity amid dealing with a minor health issue this past couple weeks.

    On my docket were…

    Tuesday, after a full day and some of post-race recovery, I drove across town to the pool. Gah, I’m getting so tired of not having a pool close by… but I deal and in a couple weeks the local one will be through it’s refurb and I can get back into that groove over the winter. For now tho, laps in Mill Woods.

    I didn’t do much the week that followed the race, but on Sunday (in the wake of the daylight savings time change) we were back to our regular meetup and coffee club run, logging eight klicks in what suddenly felt a lot like impending winter weather. The leaves are all well-gone and there were icy patches on the trail because the temps were hanging out below zero when we started. Long pants weather for sure.

    Did I mention that I gave up caffeine? I don’t know that it is a permanent switch up quite yet, but I’m testing out a theory around this persistent cough I’ve been fighting and I feel like it might be less of a respiratory issue and more of a reflux issue. Too much info, I know, but them’s the reality of my so-called fitness life. So I’m off caffeine for a month or so… meaning I spent most of this week in full on withdrawal. Headaches, muscle aches, general tired and grumpiness. All that, along with a dose of snow late in the week meant I didn’t really get out much at all for a few days.

    I did make my way to the pool again on Friday morning and I swam a bunch of laps. The post-caffeine withdrawal phase felt pretty good and my lungs feel like they’ve opened up. I actually had a mighty good swim and then a nice long soak in the hot tub.  I doubt I’ll have a chance to get in another swim before vacation tho, and hopefully my home pool will be open again when we get back, so fingers crossed that’s my last drive across town for a swim for a long while. It is a really nice pool, but a thirty minute drive was a little much.

    Of course, Sunday despite the flipping cold weather, we met up at the rec centre as usual for an eight klick run. Just as much to remind me of my caffeine withdrawal as anything else, it was a slog. I ran out of gas around six klicks in and ended up doing some walking. I have been doing a whole nutritional reset as part of trying to get this reflux issue under control before our trip, so I’m sure I was just in a bit of calorie debt, too. Ugh! Getting old.

    On Monday I sat down and worked out a game plan for Japan: I’m bringing along one change of running gear, my watch (of course) and I bought some new running shoes to double as fresh travel, walking around shoes but which will more than serve in case I opt to go out running. My best bet is to hope I’m not too jet lagged that I can make a Park Run just a few days after we arrive, and if not that, there is another one much later in the trip. Otherwise, it looks like I might just scope out the streets and parks of Tokyo and try and find a nice homemade route. Travel running is always a glorious challenge.

  • head over feets, twelve

    October has been a bit of a fitness blur. I can’t seem to get it together to get in much swimming these days. Yeah, I know… the pool is only a twenty minute drive away, but twenty minutes each way plus the swim and the other dawdling around that and it seems like I need to set aside nearly two hours just for a swim with the local pool closed. Once a week is my low bar and I’ve been struggling to leap over that. Alas. So it goes.

    But I have been running.

    And lately, my fitness logs included…

    I had been promising that my days of Wednesday run club were over for a while during the span of my language classes (which were happening on the same night) but the class was cancelled this week so I haunted the run club for yet another six klick loop around suburbia at sunset.

    Thursday, we had good intentions and we met down on the south-side for an after-dark loop with some trails. LC caught his toe on a buckling bit of pavement, tho, and took a hard fall on his knees. So, PS and I ran back to the cars to get him a ride and that pretty much wrapped up our run early. We did have a solid two klicks before he fell, however, and running back to the cars we were making a fast clip to get it done fast. Overall, four klicks with a generous negative split on the return.

    Because of the Thursday evening events, I figured I’d better sneak in another run for the week. I drove downtown on Saturday morning for my eleventh Park Run (not so impressive but getting into the double digits I guess) and ran a sub-29 minute five klick. It was stupid chilly, tho, so I stood in the hot shower for longer than usual.

    Sunday was the last of our training runs before the race. We generally taper on the Sunday long run before a race, so we settled on an adventurous ten klick run into the river valley. It provided some generous hills getting in and out of the dog park, but it’s always a quiet and peaceful place to spend some time on a weekend. And some great views, too. I should really take the dog down there again before winter-proper arrives.

    I was back down in the dog park on Tuesday. Kim was planning a route for run club the next day through some of the single track trails and I think she wanted to get a gauge of the rolling grades and meandering tree roots right around sunset for a dozen people, so I joined her for a test run nearly exactly twenty-four hours before that run. We logged a 6-ish trail run (only the second time I’ve had my trail shoes on this year, sigh) and beat the sunset back to the cars. I missed the run the next day because I had my Japanese class, tho. 

    And then suddenly race day was upon me. I’m going to wax a little more now than I usually would in these posts. In the olden days I may have written a whole stand-alone race report, but really, there isn’t that much to write about a small local race on a chilly October morning. If you’ve been following these posts you know that I’ve been working myself up towards the Fall Classic 10 Miler, a sixteen kilometre road race and one of the last big-ish events in the city until we all reluctantly sign up for the Hypothermic Half in February.

    The Fall Classic has been running for 40 years. It was in fact the 40th anniversary year of the race and the medal we all got was designed around a huge number 40 at the centre. I last ran this race exactly ten seasons ago in 2015 and I always joke that it held the distinction of being a race I ran in which winter arrived half way through the course because, simply, the wind whipped up through the river valley that mild October day in 2015 and when I passed about the 10km mark the cool morning had turned into a sleeting storm. It was not so bad this year, but not much better. We had rain and a cold wind blowing up out of the river valley and onto the valley-adjacent boulevard that traces the bulk of the course.

    I have been a wee bit sick, too, this week. Fighting off a slate of autumn infections stirring up as a result of suddenly resuming all my indoor group activities and spending time indoors with people coughing and cross-infecting. I ran anyways and felt it at about 11-12km through the course.

    But I finished. Not a wonderful time, but about what I would have expected for not having raced a proper race (again, Park Run doesn’t count) in over a year (Edmonton half marathon pacer, August 2024) and feeling the cold and the rain and low-grade sinus infection.

    And like every other time I run a race with nothing else in the docket I woke up Monday morning a bit tired and a bit glad it was over again and a bit wondering what my next goal is going to be.  For now, I need to settle into the value of my rec centre pass, prepare for a couple weeks of vacation soon, and ponder how to keep fit over the winter… as usual.

  • weekend wrap, twenty

    I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

    Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

    I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh? 

    I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

    I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

    I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

    I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

    We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

    Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

    I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent. 

    We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.  

    I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

  • panoramic, three: oculus graffiti

    There is this strange place literally walking distance from my house. 

    The graffiti tunnel, more formally known as The Oculus.

    I say “walking distance” though it did take me over an hour to walk there and an hour to walk home—plus I spent time there taking photos, sketching, making a video and then stopping for lunch on my way home. Three and a half hours later I got home from a little suburban adventuring.

    About twenty years ago now they built a stretch of the city-circling ring road that swung round the southwest corner of the city. At about seven o’clock on the circle the road passes over a little feeder creek. Readers of this blog will be slightly familiar with that creek because we run through many of the trails that weave over and around and past that creek—but north of where the Oculus sits.

    Rather than just build another bridge, some industrious city planner seems to have decided that this would be the future site of some connecting trail linking the neighbourhoods on either side of the freeway, so they build a hulking concrete culvert with a beautiful paved footbridge traversing through the middle and atop the creek… and never connected it to anything. Never. Even twenty years later it’s this seemingly abandoned piece of pedestrian pathway that requires a map and some hiking boots to locate. 

    To be fair, they are doing some roadwork about 500m south of this point now and it is a strong possibility that the lack of connection will be formally remedied in the next couple years—or never—but if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen soon. Or, yeah, maybe never.

    Still. In those twenty years much has transpired under the freeway and much paint has been spent on decorating every reachable surface with graffiti. It is a sight. I mean, if they ever connect it, I’m sure they will repaint it as a stark and boring Industrial City White—but for now, it is a destination for adventure and a sight worthy of some stellar photographic efforts.