Tag: pandemic fallout

  • Pi Day, Eve

    We spent the evening making pies.

    Tomorrow is March 14th.

    It’s one of those “we celebrate the day because it’s funny“ kinda days.

    The third month.

    The fourteenth day.

    3-14

    3.14

    Pi.

    π

    Pi day.

    Last year I bought a pie on my way back to my office after lunch. It was March 13th. I got called into a meeting fifteen minutes later and didn’t go home until almost 9pm that night having been drafted to the emergency communications team reacting to COVID-19.

    I ate a cold piece of pie late the next day after another 16 hour work day, stressed, deflated, and shell-shocked from the pandemic hitting our little city full force.

    I went a bit overboard on this baked pie.

    I used the 12 inch frying pan as a pie plate.

    Two cans of store-bought pie filling.

    It’s so big.

    The kid helped, and in fact she did most of the work.

    This year’s pie is going to be so much better than last year.

  • Holy Molar!

    I didn’t get much chance to focus on writing anything better than a short personal update for today.

    Anyone who has been reading my posts regularly might know that blogging, cooking, and enjoying the outdoors is a stress-relief valve for me…. though apparently not enough of one.

    According to my dentist I’ve been grinding my teeth.

    Are you stressed about anything?” she asked.

    Hmm. Let me think… while I adjust this facemask and re-sanitize my hands for the sixth time today nearly a full year into a global pandemic.

    It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but all that stress grinding meant that I cracked a filling and needed two hours of emergency dental work yesterday morning after an ivory chunk clinked into the sink basin Sunday evening.

    I slept a lot yesterday and went to bed early. My face hurts. My newly capped tooth and my morning coffee did not get along at all. Zing!

    I think a nature walk is in order.

  • #RunClub : New Season, New Plans

    Sunday Runday, and for my #RunClub approaching spring is usually a time of ramping up our training, distances, and intensities for all those summer races.

    By mid-March of 2020 we were swimming in a kind of moving goalpost of uncertainty. Races were being cancelled without much warning. There was always a sense of… well, we’ll see how things look in a month or so.

    As mid-March of 2021 approaches, nearly a year into the local reaction to the global pandemic, our uncertainty is a lingering aftershock of the past twelve months… mixed with hopeful optimism… sprinkled with a dash of we’re all kinda used to this now, right?

    Last summer our “coffee club with a running problem” moved our weekly meetings to the parking lot of the recreation center (closed to general access) where we had been meeting to run for nearly a decade.

    A club that was usually twenty to thirty members strong, accustomed to weekly Sunday morning takeovers of the local café, found itself instead quietly gathering in lawn chairs over asphalt drinking take-out coffees near the bumpers of our vehicles while we observed social distancing rules.

    Then winter hit.

    ….and the deep, dark, cold lockdown happened.

    Me out there running solo was a thing for at least three months. Coffees were virtual, hugging a mug at home and staring into the familiar glow of my iPad for a visit via screen. It’s only been in the last couple weeks that the weather has cracked through the zero degree barrier and made resuming the coffee club meetings in the local parking lot a real possibility.

    Which is the noteworthy thing about today, I guess.

    This Sunday last year was normal: races being planned, training being sorted, coffees being shared in close company.

    Next Sunday last year was when all that normal-ness shattered.

    We sat in our lawn chairs in the parking lot this morning after a ten klick run, wrapped in blankets and huddled in hoodies, sipping take-out coffees. It felt normal… which is the strangest part, because it still is so not normal.

    A new season of not normal.

    And I don’t know how to plan for that.

  • Spreadsheets & Footfalls

    Sunday Runday, and I’ve been hiding in my basement from the brutal cold, focussing on cross-training which is never a replacement for actually getting out on the trails.

    Not in quality of workout nor in the enjoyment of the effort.

    I’ve also been reflecting on the last year of pandemic lockdown and realizing that I’ve let a few things slip. I used to be particularly diligent in how I recorded and tracked my fitness. Used to be, being the operative words.

    Last year, for example, I completely neglected using the tracking tools I’d built for myself over the last decade. Before using Strava as a tracking crutch, I was meticulous in how I tracked and recorded my runs. I had built and refined a simple but useful goal-based spreadsheet for time and distance that calculated a few other factors in keeping myself on track. How much did I run. How did it compare. How much did I need to focus to catch up or get on track with an annual distance goal… that sort of thing.

    I also made it available to others for a few years in a row on my previous website:

    So, since I’ve started using it again and I’ve put in the effort of updating it for 2021, please make a copy and use it. It’s mostly simple, but I’ve always preached that in running (or life in general) information and data are powerful allies.

    Spreadsheets can be for more than business and budgets.

    They help track goals and progress.

    They highlight gaps and changes in routine.

    They offer insight into trends in your training.

    And they provide an ongoing overview of what can be accomplished by day after day after day of hard work which is motivational and can often give that extra nudge towards improvement.

    I’m neither fast nor competitive, but that also means I don’t have the benefit of a coach or endless access to resources that could improve my training. I’m just a guy who likes to get out on the trails, but that doesn’t mean it’s none of it is worth tracking. It’s worth it to me, and a spreadsheet is a simple and low-cost way to track it all.

  • Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek

    After a bitterly cold week the sun broke through the chill for a few hours on a recent Saturday afternoon. I met with some friends to explore a local creek, frozen and snowy, on a pair of trusty snowshoes.

    Adventure journal.

    I live in a winter city.

    It is cold, bitterly cold, freeze your cheeks frostbite cold for at least three months of the year. Nearly a million people live here. While not all of them savour the dark, chilly winters, most everyone embraces the hard reality of the climate. A hardy few revel in the snow and cold, and seek adventures unique to our northern location.

    In this winter city, I live in a suburban neighbourhood framed on three sides by preserved wilderness. Incredibly, the city has made an active planning effort to avoid development (apart from trails and bridges) of the river valley (to my west and north) and the twisting feeder creek bed (to the east).

    This means that I can access a vast ribbon of natural area on foot in fifteen. Alternatively, by driving for a mere few minutes I can find a place to park and step in.

    As the local pandemic restrictions loosened over the last week, I met some of my running crew for a snowy hike in the aforementioned creek bed.

    We wore snowshoes.

    Admittedly, these were unneccessary for ninety percent of the hike.

    Yet there seemed to be something more interesting about story called “Going Snowshoeing on a Frozen Creek” than a tale merely titled “Winter Hiking!

    The Whitemud Creek feeds into the North Saskatchewan River to the north. This is a broad, shallow river that flows east across multiple Canadian provinces and eventually drains into the Hudson’s Bay, whereas the feeder creek is a half dozen meters wide at best. Though I’ve never actually tested it I would guess I could stand in the centre in springtime and not get my shirt wet.

    The creek is frozen nearly solid by January each year, or at least solid enough to safely walk atop it. Thus, after a fresh fall of snow the creek makes for a smooth, flat course, and one boxed in on each side by an alternating combination steep banks as high as twenty or thirty meters, natural boreal forest, and a single track trail that paces through the woods that we often run in spring, summer or fall.

    By far the best part of the two hour, seven kilometer hike was time spent with three friends. I had not seen in any of them in person for over two months. Over the holidays we video chatted, texted, and shared pictures and stories. This is not the same as walking beside someone through the snow, even if they are wearing a pandemic mask.

    The ice crackled underfoot.

    We climbed like giddy kids under and around multiple fallen trees that had not yet been cleared away by municipal maintenance crews.

    We skidded across patches of bare ice on snowshoes meant for trudging through deep snow.

    The sun warmed the air with a loving apricity as we paused for breath, or conversation, or just to take in the simple natural views. Even the clean, crisp air of a suburban creek bed was a brilliant change from the hour spent hunkered down in our houses simultaneously avoiding the cold and a contagious virus.

    A winter city adventure, and a local travel adventure for a strange, frustrating year.

    I don’t think I could have traded it for a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.