works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

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

  • head over feets, six

    Unfortunately, my inclination to stay active is frustrated routinely by the effects of mental clutter that has me fomo’ing a blur of professional and personal obligations. That’s to say, I’d go out for a run were I not feeling like I was waiting for the phone to ring or an email to arrive or nudging myself to go out and make some art, darnitall. The net result is that if I don’t schedule a workout into my plan well in advance, the old gears grind to a halt and somehow I linger in the wings failing to do much of anything productive at all. 

    A subjective standstill.

    Somehow, despite these odds, I have been fitness’ing by…

    I showed up for Wednesday run club on the heels of a day-long storm that was just clearing as I set out to drive over to the store. Only two of us showed up, likely because of the rain, and we logged a humid and mostly-cool six klicks through the suburban asphalts. Puddles abounded. 

    I forgot to wear my watch when I went to the pool before lunch on Thursday. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it did incur me the duty of keeping mental track of my laps, and counting accurately while submerged is a trick like patting one’s head whilst rubbing one’s belly. It is an act of coordination. Nevertheless, accurate or not, I came up with a satisfactory number and the simultaneous conclusion that swimming at ten in the morning is not the best time for lane busyness. 

    I was undecided on a Thursday run so I declined to initiate a plan, but others intervened and we ended up meeting down south. Our planned six klick tour of the neighbourhood missed a critical turn so we followed the trail to the next available exit and wound and wend a route we have misguided ourselves to previously. It added an additional two klicks to the distance, which doesn’t sound like much but two unplanned klicks along a deceptively long suburban road takes literally forever to finish.

    I have been to the local Park Run a half dozen times give or take over the last couple years. My beef with the fun run is that it “is not a race” but there is a course, start, finish, timer and people sure act like they are racing. Oh, sure—the race is only ever with yourself, but the vibe makes me amp up my game for better or worse, and yet there I was Saturday at the start line again.

    As the maintenance shut down for the nearby pool looms just over a week away, I am making sure to continue to try to build a habit before that habit shifts to another facility further away. Tuesday by seven thirty in the morning I was swimming laps and pushing myself to go a bit further. All bets remain on the early swims as the best time, at least in the summer. We’ll see how it shapes up when school is back in and all the students are stuck in class.

  • head over feets, five

    Early August has been a mixed bag for me. I’d like to blame the weather—hot as it has been—but there are other factors and life is just futzing along being adversarial to my side-goals.

    Either way, I managed to get out and do a bit of activity, like:

    I had this idea that now that I’ve been swimming a few times I would see how the different times of day compare for lane availability. In that spirit I found myself checking into the wristband station around 1pm and was standing on the pool’s edge by about quarter after perplexed by the number of swimmers mid-day on a weekday. It’s summer, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the crowd and logged about five hundred meters as much for the refreshing cool of the pool in the summer heat as for the exercise.

    I joined run club the next day and despite the borderline too-hot heat (it was 29C in the shade!) we set out on a six klick loop. I am not a fan of hot weather running, but I managed to finish off the distance if a little slowly. Kim, on the other hand, had a bit of a reaction to the conditions exacerbated by the temperature and had to call an ambulance.

    The next night we tried another run of similar distance down along the river, but the weather had cooled considerably and it had started to rain so barely twenty-four hours later a five klick run was logged even though our shoes were waterlogged.

    I don’t usually count my walks, nor even really log them these days, but Friday I set out for a stroll and (having walked that route before so I know the distances) put six klicks on my treads in the light drizzle.

    The local marathon is next weekend so a few people are tapering. I’m not sure many in our group are seriously running tho. We’ve got a couple going out for fun and a couple more pacers—which is serious but usually one paces at a comfortable time because you are out there helping other people run it. All that is to say we did a simple 8k run on Sunday because it’s that time of year and no one was up for anything crazy long.

    My swimming honeymoon is over and what with our little vacation out to BC I lost my momentum. I have been trying to get back into a routine and also trying other time slots. Monday even was not it. I logged 750m in lane swimming around 830pm and the lane pool was packed. I think I’d better stick to mornings.

  • head over feets, four

    One of the hardest parts about trying to keep a fitness routine is that life often takes priority over sweat. Late July and early August have been excellent examples of how a blur of family and community obligations can quickly derail any training plan. Couple that to a mid-summer heat wave where the temperatures have frequently swelled to a sweltering 30C on the daily, and finding the time and motivation to be out on the trails has been a bigger challenge than doing the work itself. 

    To elaborate, since I last posted a fairly productive span of workouts: 

    Literally a day and a half later I was back in the pool with good intentions to repeat my thousand meter swim from Sunday evening. Recovery was not on my side, however, and I did half that much and was happy enough that I could muster five hundred. Those arms were still pretty sore.

    And while we don’t usually run often on Tuesday evenings, we threw off our schedule to do a run + drinks for an impromptu birthday party. After about five klicks around the neighbourhood from the parking lot of a local lounge restaurant we resumed to a pint and recovered the calories we had burnt. 

    Stuff happened here. Namely, we went on a bit of vacation to the interior of BC for six days. In that span I either sat in a car for literal day-long drives through the mountains with little more activity than occasionally getting out to stretch our legs—or doing crazy active stuff like paddling around a lake in a kayak for hours upon hours. I did not run. I did not swim. I did not follow any routine. It was glorious.

    But shortly we were back home and—in the middle of a heat wave—I resumed my swimming the next morning and even spent an hour on a stationary bike that evening.

    Yet summer fun intervened again and as the August long weekend rolled around my fitness schedule was a blur of social activity and volunteering. I did squeeze in a five klick breakfast run with the crew on Monday, but the bulk of my activity was actually being on my feet standing at a stove in the middle of a park cooking crepes for the heritage festival followed by five hours of hard labour packing up a temporary kitchen in the lingering summer heat.

    Life should settle out for a few weeks now, and even though a few of the crew are in their last couple of weeks training before the local marathon weekend I should be able to get back on a regular schedule with my own plans.

  • adventure: mountain kayaks

    The lakes of the Shuswap region of central British Columbia are deep and clear, mountain reservoirs nestled between the diminishing elevations of the rocky mountains that ripple through the middle of the province. According to Wikipedia the wandering many-armed lake has an average depth of over sixty meters, a deepest point over one hundred and fifty meters, and covers a surface area of over three hundred square kilometres.

    Our adventures in kayaks were barely a fraction of a fraction of that scope, but even so it gave me a taste of the place and the vibe with a kind of intimacy that is only found by moving through a space under one’s own muscle power.

    A lot of people live in the region marked by the shores of the Shuswap Lake, dozens if not hundreds of small communities line the banks. A few of those people are the relatives on my wife’s side of the family who, after living in Northern Alberta for most of their lives bought a permanent home a few steps from where they used to vacation each summer and moved. The family that we used to travel up to visit in a remote northern agricultural community now live an enviable life in the microclimate wine region of the country, boating and sunning and living their best days. And, as it was, hosting an anniversary party on the Saturday evening of last weekend.  

    We made the ten hour drive over the continental divide mountain passes and along busy summer highways through the national parks, and checked into a posh vacation rental down a remote road along the shore of one arm of the lake. The luxury house sat in the woods and opened with a view out over the water a few dozen meters below and the rolling mountain ranges a dozen kilometres to the north. And like some lucky fortune ready-made-for-an-airbnb-advert the beautiful home for which we had five days of exclusive possession also had privileges to a private dock on the lake and a trio of kayaks waiting on the shore.

    Of course in a span of five days the weather was not always on our side, but at least four times both time and climate were on our side, and we trod down to the edge of the water with our life vests in hand and clambered into our various watercraft. My wife is a fan of the stand up paddle-board. We bought ourselves one with our airline reward points during the pandemic when we were not traveling far and needed summer activities. I am more of a kayak guy myself, and did we not live in a landlocked city with naught much recreational water but a flowing river and a smattering of shallow swampy lakes I would likely have a kayak of my own strapped to my truck for the duration of the summer. 

    The Shuswap Lake is huge when one enters it in the protection of nothing but a yellow, plastic bath toy. I was not afraid of the boat ever really capsizing in the calm summer waters, but the lake is home to countless recreational motor boats ferrying sports fishers, or pulling water skiers, or cruising the coves. The area is also well known for a houseboating culture where two-story bricks like bloated RVs on floats toddle around the lake blasting party music and hosting happy families swimming from the sides or lounging on their decks. I was never worried about nature, but I was somewhat worried about getting trounced by a speeding motorboat that didn’t see my florescent yellow glow in the glare of the sunshine bouncing off the water.

    Yet I paddled around and around and out and back and around some more. I was out on the water for hours, baking my skin in the unshaded heat as I toured our little stretch of private coastline. All the while I tracked the progress with my Garmin and despite my untiring efforts paddling through the deep blue waters of the lake when I went back to the house and loaded my GPS map onto the screen the little squiggled line of my travels was barely a toe in the vast waters. It had felt like I had gone half way across the lake at one point but in reality it was no more than five percent of the distance that I’d covered with all my efforts.

    Given more time and a better plan, a lack of obligation to attend to family events or the other duties of adulthood I may have set off with a tent and supplies and spent the whole summer paddling the circumference of the lake. I would wager there is at least a few hundred kilometres of coastline to explore.  And as we were driving home, spending over an hour at speed driving along the arm of the lake that led us back towards the mountain passes, I pondered if anyone has ever thought of or facilitated such a thing. Certainly I am not the first to wonder about a month-long trek along the long lake shore, stopping to camp and enjoy, wandering into any of those communities to buy local fruit and wine, avoiding the houseboats and water-skiers, and paddling through the cool, deep mountain waters without a care. 

  • head over feets, three

    As we pass through mid-July it has been a mix of rain and smoke and heat. I can’t complain too much because, as I noted to one of my fellow runners, the trails are lush and green and lovely right now—and we’re already starting to realize that the fall and winter are just a few short months away.

    Summer also means that a lot of people are coming and going, and without a proper race that we’re all training for attendance is scattered for our group activities. I’ve been trying to supplement by making good use of my rec centre pass, though, and also finally motivated myself to tune up the bike for the season, even tho the season is almost half over.

    So it goes and recently I added to my fitness by…

    I did a huge cycling lap around the neighbourhood shortly after posting my last update—as in I literally posted and packed up my keyboard and left the cafe via my bike. Later that day I met Ron for a short five klick run, logging a few hills and then some more distance on the flat. This meant that over the morning and by early afternoon I had swam, ridden, and run in that order and for roughly the distance of a sprint triathlon.  Not bad for a random Tuesday.

    By Thursday, and after a very busy Wednesday, I found myself back in the pool first thing in the morning. I had delayed slightly in leave the house tho, and the lanes were packed—three to a lane in most cases—and I realized that lane availabity is probably my biggest anxiety about resuming my pool activities. You may go there and have a whole lane to yourself, or you may be stuck in a lane with a couple of slow flutterboard dudes or forced to share a lane with someone passing you every other lap because they are training for the olympic gold or something. I never have to worry about space running because there’s thousands of klicks of trails in the city, but just eight lanes in the local pool.

    That same evening I had a solid run with the regular Thursday crew meetup. We dashed through the Mill Creek trails and I logged a six klick run that felt better than most anything I’ve run in the last month. Good news, perhaps.

    Friday and Saturday were pretty chill, but Sunday morning despite threats of rain the crew met up for the regular weekend run and coffee.  We logged an easy eight klicks (mostly because a few people were recovering from their ultras last weekend) and then parked for some java in the rec centre.

    I capped off my weekend with a lot of laps at the pool. Sundays are generally a free community day, so until exactly 7pm when they kick out the masses the pool is too crowded to do much of anything. But by ten after seven, the lanes are all but abandoned and I had a lane almost entirely to myself for long enough to increase my distance again. I logged one thousand meters, or twenty full laps, bringing my return to swimming back up into to more real distances for the first time in years.