works of wanderlust

Tag: run club

  • 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.

  • seeking adventure

    Imagine you are flying.

    Down a trail.

    Over the crest of a low hill.

    Around a hairpin curve in the path blinded by a dense forest of trees.

    I think a lot of people hear the term ‘running’ and can’t fathom that it means anything more than grueling hours spent on a treadmill. I think most people wallow in the sport as little more than a fitness activity, a workout, or a span of time spent sweating for the sake of the sweat and the calories. 

    I have been a runner, properly so, for nearly eighteen years.

    I rarely run for the sweat.

    I do, on occasion, yes.

    But by far what I run for is the adventure.

    I am flying.

    Flying down a trail, over a hill, and around a hairpin curve brushing past the foliage reaching out across the narrow path.

    It did not start out this way.

    For the first couple of years, yeah years, I was stuck in a beginners rut. We do beginner runners such a disservice giving them rules to build into and goals to which they then aspire. How many beginner runners start to either “get in shape” or “participate in some race” thinking that fitness and competition are the best parts of the sport? How many don’t get in shape or don’t “win” the race and stumble back to the couch?

    During the pandemic years I started hosting what I called Adventure Runs. I would post a meeting location. I would roughly plan a route (usually never having run at that location myself). Set a time, arrive, and just run.

    We were not there for fitness or time or training or any of that. It was perfect timing for such things because most races had been cancelled or limited, people were bored and lonely, and the world was damn near empty of pedestrians.

    We flew down new trails, clambered over low hills, and traced unexplored hairpin curves in dense forests that had grown there for decades but which rarely saw more than a few humans on any given day.

    Adventure.

    Adventure is ill-defined. I can set you specific goals for fitness. I can tell you what numbers makes for a good pace. I can adjudicate your finish time in a race. I can see the appeal of quantitative measures against which we can guage our so-called enjoyment of this activity. But adventure? Adventure is raw quality. Adventure is about the feel of it, how your heart sings in the moment and how you end some span of time spent away from everything else, flying, climbing, swerving through the woods feeling unlike anything else.

    I’ve been thinking about adventure again. I have been trying to bottle that effort into a coherent plan for the upcoming summer months. I have been getting myself ready to fly again.

  • run club restart

    I tend to have a lot of sentimental vibes for run club.

    In its current form it is a pale shadow of when I first showed up at my local run store for a clinic, oh, seventeen years ago now, but it exists enough that I attended the latest session of it last night and logged a nearly eight klick out-and-back with a few select members of the the crew.

    Everything was fresh after a late afternoon rain. There was a bit of a rainbow tumbling out of the clouds to the east. There were seven of us plus the leader, and she snapped a photo of the group before we set off into the trail system that runs between the houses and the creek wilds.

    Of course I don’t have that photo so you’ll have to deal with mine.

    I joined run club for the first time as a participant in the 5k Learn to Run clinic offered by the store two moves back. The clinic was a speaker and a short run on a weeknight—and then they encouraged everyone to show up for the drop-in run club two more days of the week for the sake of the weekly mileage. I dutiful followed instructions. And for over a decade it was my regular social outing to meet at the store and run.

    Eventually I became a group leader and then a clinic instructor and I have since flip-flopped around and tried to reconcile my status in the group now nearly and neatly without a formal run club mandate, me just the guy who plans a bunch of what we do but who has simultaneous been trying to nurture others to plan when I can’t. No store. No website. Just a chat group and determination to keep it all alive.

    During the pandemic everything shut down and the store moved for the second time, but our offshoot run club stayed put and in the five years since those first should-we-be-meeting social-distancing runs from the parking lot the group has stabilized into a local running coffee club.

    The running store moved about five kilometres down the road and we thought that was that, but after a couple years of nothing they reappeared and cautiously started inviting runners back to the now once-per-week meetup.

    And despite my semi-regular attendance, I go when I can and have no other training obligations than a straight run, well… the Wednesday night run club is not quite the same. It is, after all, little more than a rendezvous of fair weather dabblers up for an occasional run. Most of them come with a friend with whom they exclusively converse and pace. If they are back a week later it is a surprise.

    Last night? We ran into the freshly washed trails. I had not even bothered with a jacket, risking a bit of chill for the sake of shedding the extra weight of carrying it if it turned out to be too hot. And it was warm enough, everyone else tearing down to their t shirts in the warmish evening air.

    Our leader, now on familiar terms as I’ve been making an appearance for three seasons of the renewed club, was quizzing me on our short parking lot walk back to the store afterwards. I’m not sure what you guys want out of this, she said to me. But I insisted that a place to meet and plan was good for me. Gone are the days of fifty people crushed into the store listening to a mini sales pitch before we strike out in group. Gone are the clinics and the annoying shoe talk. Gone are the bring a friend nights and slipping people in for free as pace leaders. People will stretch if they need. People will sort themselves out, I think. This is fine, I told her. 

    Or maybe I’m under-thinking it all.

    This used to be a real thing, you know. This used to be the centre of my week, the outing around which I planned my life. Everything was about making sure I got to run club and made my distances. Run club was my thirties. Some of my best friends are run clubbers. 

    Should it be more? Or is it just fine? I dunno.

    Sentimentality is a crazy drug, almost as addictive as running, huh? The run club vibe remains, but the memory of it will always be grander than the reality I’m sure.