works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

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

  • 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.

  • head over feets, two

    Apart from a few sweltering days, the weather has been mostly cooperative for some good outdoors summer adventure. Of course, my return to the pool has meant that I have exerted quite a bit of that sweat equity back into a refreshing laps at the local pool where my rec pass is grinding out the milage.

    The last few days I logged…

    After swimming on Tuesday morning, I got it into my head that I should go back later that afternoon to reaquaint myself with the strength equipment at the gym. Mid-afternoon in the summer holiday season was not ideal for this, but I did get a full lap of sets done while tripping over the hoards of gym-rat boys hogging the equipment and taking selfies. But after sufficient reps I came up with a kind of quantitative measure for overall effort distilled as a single number—y’know, for my spreadsheet—that summarizes how much strength work I did. It’s not magic, but it gives me something to chart.

    The heat subsided on briefly on Wednesday evening and that brought out a respectable crew to the run club at the store.  Our regular group leader was sick, so I helped pinch hit and led the front of the group while KB, the manager took over and pushed from the back. She was tapering for a fifty miler this weekend, so didn’t want to be pushing it near the head even just for a seven klick run around the neighbourhood.

    I was back at the pool the next morning, dutifully doubling my distance over my introductory session just two days prior. That was almost off the table entirly because even as I was crawling into bed the night before my arms were raging with exertion pains and I had to take something even just to get comfortable to sleep—which I did, and felt well enough to log five hundred meters worth of laps Thursday morning before coffee.

    I here use the words “guilted” and “motivated” interchangably. Either one, I found myself organizing our regular Thursday evening running adventure, sans adventure, with just a regular meetup at the Mill Creek starting point. Most of the crew was getting ready for a road trip down south to the S7 Ultramarathon so anything too extreme and ankle-twisting was off the table. 

    I rested until Sunday morning and when no one else showed up for our standard run, I swapped my track shorts for swim trunks and logged yet another increment upwards in my watery distances.  I have been building with the goal of hitting a respectable time & distance combination that makes a punch on the swim pass card worthwhile, and right now 800m in a little under 25 minutes seems to fit the bill.

    I repeated that swimming distance this morning, Tuesday, and my goal for the day is an exercise triathlon: I swam this morning, biked to the cafe to write this post, and will go for a run later this morning. Details on that to follow.

  • head over feets, one

    I used to write a whole blog about running and fitness. And then? Well. It was one of the only things that was lost that I truly cared about in the hack that took down my little private server—back a couple years ago. Ten years of rambling journals about races and training and side-fitness projects. It was not something that anyone but I read, but I did go back and peruse it on occasion.

    I miss that, and it’s hard to just start over from scratch with something that big.

    But…

    Starting in July I’ve decided to get back into the fitness groove. I haven’t fallen completely off the truck, but I haven’t ben focused. And that is in itself a multidimesional effort of motivation, accountability and grit. To that end, I am going to do what I always do when I start getting serious about my personal fitness, and write about it. But no stand-alone website for now: the format that is really working for me these days is the quippy list of short-form reflections, tucked away in the files of this blog.

    That said, so far this month I have:

    Logged a Canada Day run with the crew.  We used to more frequently do this thing where on any stat holiday (usually Mondays) we would meet at the local breakfast joint, trot out a five klick run, and then go for a long breakfast. July first is not only a stat holiday but kind of a second mid-year new years resolution day, so a good day to start off on the right foot, even if it ended with a side of bacon.

    A few days later I logged a solo seven klick run in the rain. For a dozen reasons no one else showed for runday sunday, and those that did ran inside (for injuries reasons) or on their own outside (for pace reasons) so I went off by myself into the drizzly neighbourhood and got a short lap done.. and done.  It was nothing particularly special, but it would have been just as easy to go for coffee and skip the run when no one is there to breath down your neck about it. Grit.

    Yesterday I cracked and bought a pass to the rec centre. Back when I worked for the municipal government, the half-price annual pass was a deal and then some. Now, still paying a slightly discounted rate (‘cause Karin gets a deal through work after all) was a slightly tougher pill to swallow. But excuses be damned and effective last evening I have a year of access to the pool and the gym.  I celebrated with a sixteen klick ride on the stationary bike.

    This morning I was feeling ambitious, new pass in hand, but cautious. I haven’t swam laps in over two years. Seriously, I looked it up. March 2023 was my last time in a pool. I used to be damn near religious about it and even did a triathlon a few years ago.  So I suited up at quarter after seven with the ranks of all the senior swimmers and did a ten lap re-introduction to a sport I once moderately rocked. First time back in two years I didn’t want to push it. Ten laps was enough to feel it, but not enough to burn me out for another two years. I’ll be back soon enough for a little longer next time.

    In the meantime, I went right back to one of my old fitness hacks: the trusty spreadsheet. Strava and those other apps are all great for social cred and light accountability in the fitness jam, but nothing beats a good old fashioned fitness ledger to see the numbers laid out on a grid.  That, and I’m still in a bit of a value mindset having just dropped a lot of money on an annual pass and I want to see if it is worth it—though I suppose “worth it” is a subjective thing and getting out and moving is a tough thing to quantify. For the next year I’ll play fitness accountant in my spreadsheet, tho, and see how it all adds up.

    Now? Off to buy some batteries for the scale. Eep!