works of wanderlust

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 40^th 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.