works of wanderlust

Tag: head over feets

  • 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.

  • 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: zen edition

    I have been doing a self-experiment. (That’s what I am going to call these things that others might call “challenges” or “streaks” of trying to build a habit over the course of 30 days. Experiments on myself.) I have been meditating every day.

    And before you get the images of me all new-age yogi omming on a cushion with incense and such, I’ll tell you instead that it has been an effort much more of a timer-based mindfulness exercise. Me just sitting there with my eyes closed focused on stillness and breath and focus of thoughts. I read a more science-focused book on meditation and the author compared the health-based meditation to mental pushups: just repeating the focus, correcting ones form, adjusting, repeating, and building mental strength and stamina. I mean, it’s all the same stuff in the end, but instead of chanting I have an app on my phone that makes a gentle sound when the timer expires.

    I’m working on a whole article about that experiment that I’ll publish in a couple weeks, but I’ve had some reflective thoughts on the effort and how it relates to another kind of meditation I’ve been doing for nearly twenty years, thirty day challenges be damned. 

    Running solo and sans music is, believe it or not, meditative. At least, data point of one, it has been for me. I just didn’t really recognize it until my efforts to be mindful on my living room floor and my solo running efforts overlapped. 

    Yesterday morning I went for a run in the rain.

    I followed a familiar route that led through my neighbourhood avoiding as many roads that I could and focusing on finding a route towards the river valley. I dodged onto the asphalt trail and followed that fo a few minutes until I found the exit into the single track through the trees.

    Mindfulness is about focus on the body and a stilling of ones thoughts. It is an impossible feat for nearly everyone, I am given to understand. One can creep ever closer towards the goal that is infinitely out of reach. Running through the woods my mind turns itself over to the trail, each step a miniature obstacle that requires a kind of focus and attention. The meandering terrain of a single track course maginifies that focus, forcing the mind into a single purpose machine tracking the undulating and potentially dangerous footing while modulating the body for pace and breath and the beat-beat-beat of a racing heart.

    To be fair, this is not the first time I have made this connection between mindfulness and my chosen sport.

    I used to write a lot about the space that running gave me to think creative thoughts, work through problems, or ponder philosophical ideas. (I know, I’m odd.) Going for a solo run has always been a way to slip into a mindful trance of sorts and plod around the neighbourhood working through stuff with an unencumbered mind.  People even ask me how I run without music, to which I would reply that I sometimes do run with headphones but most often I just prefer the space to think.  What I never really recognized until lately was that this thing that the zen folks and the yogis and the chanters sitting atop cushions are all trying to achieve is a state of mental clarity and calm that I already kinda found out there in the river valley trails, and I suspect is a familiar state of mind for countless other runners and trail racing folk.

    I am enjoying my daily fifteen minutes of mental pushups. I turn on my timer and find a quiet place to sit and then just listen to my own breath for a spell. When my little experiment is over, this effort to build a new habit has reached its milestone, when the final chime rings I will need to decide if it remains something I find space for each day. Or, instead, does this become another tool in my health toolbox, like strength training or eating well, is it something I just do to make me a better runner.