works of wanderlust

Tag: running autumn

  • weekend wrap, eighteen

    We lucked out and got a couple nice autumn weeks to walk through the trails and sneak in some colourful runs, but it seems as if October has other ideas for us. The weather turned cold over the weekend, dropping into the freezing temps for Sunday morning.

    This weekend we:

    Went out for dinner on Friday night. No one wanted to cook and everyone was on board with sushi, so as the sun set we went off to local japanese place and ate our fill. Along with other things, the Kid is now perfectly fine with raw fish sushi. If that sounds strange, just consider that she has been inching towards it with sushi rolls that are more in the imitation crab, avacado, or tempura shrimp realm and is only now embracing salmon and tuna rolls. In other words, we can order a little bit more ambitiously and she’ll just eat whatever. Another unseen benefit of her aging out of childhood.

    She did, however, invite company over to watch a movie so Karin and I were relegated to the main floor of the house. We played some board games. I won. Enough said.

    Saturday morning the ladies were going in six directions with appointments and other stuff. I played some video games for most of the morning, but joined them just before lunch to brave the hoards that had descended upon Costco. My reward was a hot dog. 

    The dog joined me for a bit of a lazy walk. I’ve been working on my daily sketching challenge so I went to the park to draw something. She sat content by my side for nearly an hour as I worked on the shading of a copse of trees.

    That evening we had invited to the fiftieth birthday party of my former boss. We’ve kept in touch, and she pinged me earlier in the week to see if we were free. The place was packed and it was a bit of a rager for a fiftieth. Matched her style, though, and I had a good chat with some former colleagues who had made the shortlist. A limoncello shot was later regretted. 

    Sunday was a crazy run day. I met a few of the crew in a weird neighbourhood in Mill Woods for our ten klick pre-run. We ran a bunch of trails with which I was formerly unfamiliar, all of which ended us at the Towne Centre parking lot. Then we stood around in a crowd of about six thousand people waiting to run the Run for the Cure 5k breast cancer run. SL is a manager for CIBC bank, the title sponsor, so she rallied us onto her team and we wore colours and rounded our our ten klick pre-run with a crowded five klick fun run to make our training distance fit. Then we went for pho. 

    I was hosed for the rest of the day. The combination of running fifteen klicks, partying the night prior, and standing around in shorts in the sub-zero temps spent what was left of my energy and I chilled on the couch until dinner, then chilled on a different couch until I went to bed. I did fit in there somewhere reading all the social media posts about the teachers strike, but once again having a semi-adult daughter pays off.

  • head over feets, ten

    Autumn is probably my favourite season. The colours. The full nights sleep thanks to the sun setting at a normal time and the temperatures being cooler. The abundance of excuses to settle into a cozy quiet evening without feeling excessively guilty about squandering the summer.

    My running streak is over, which is a shame only because some people had just found out I was doing one and were congrats me on the effort… which I had to explain I had finished it and was happy with the foundation it gave me to ramp up towards my race and thanks anyways.

    But since I’m not running every day anymore, I had to focus on the quality of runs and not just the quantity, huh? That means starting the short but important build up to a confident ten miler distance.

    This last couple weeks I…

    Wednesday was just on the verge of too warm, but there was enough of a breeze that joining up with the Run Club for about six klicks in the evening was definitely a win. We ran a big suburban lap, complete with some unexpected elevation change in the neighbourhood. It had only been a couple days of rest, but it was my first post-streak run.

    I was having a bit of a recovery week so I didn’t get back out on the trails again until Sunday. It was our long run day, of course, and now that we’re officially “training” we cranked up our distance incrementally over the last weeks. I led the group on a 12km route into the autumn-toned creek valley and we tackled a few hills in the process.

    With Autumn arriving and the Kid’s birthday eating up a couple days worth of free time, I didn’t manage much for a couple days. But after some blood work on Wednesday morning I threw caution to the wind (rest your needle arm for two hours, they said) and drove to yet another new pool. I swam five hundred and some meters in Confederation pool, and tried out my new headphones underwater too.

    Our first run of Autumn happened a few hours later. I have other commitments (read: Japanese class) on Wednesday nights upcoming somy participation in future Run Club runs is up for debate. But I took advantage of this night off to join a trail-ish sunset run for nearly seven klicks in the chilly September air.

    Thursday, meeting again locally for a run from the local pub (for drinks after) we had to search out an alternative route to avoid following the same path we’d now taken two runs in a row previous. A bit of improvisation resulted in nearly seven klicks of suburban adventure… and then a beer and cheesecake. Running is so unhealthy these days. *sigh

    Sunday was another long run. The race is only about a month away at this point which means that I’ve been ramping up my distance for a couple weeks. The plan was to do fourteen klicks, but the plan was off a bit so we did an unplanned fifteen klicks. That’s alright, tho. Knowing we can do the distance is often as valuable as actually just doing it. And fourteen is better than fifteen.

  • autumn running

    I don’t abide much my astrological mumbo jumbo but Sagittarius that I am has seemed to inclined me to a love of autumn—the cool weather, the orange-tingted palette, the crunch of leaves on the trail beneath my feet.

    We stumbed into a trail run this past weekend. It wasn’t an intense mountain ultra by any means, but in attempting to keep out of the cool October winds early on Sunday morning we ducked into the shelter of the trees and woodier areas adjacent to our more regular running routes and spared little reluctance to dive headlong into hitherto unexplored diversions from the same. 

    That is to say, we knew there was some single track through the little suburban creek that cleaves between our little suburban corner of the city and the greater metropolis but they tended to be trails we ignored in favour of either more serious training or longer, more serious running adventures.

    But it was Thanksgiving morning, there was a fresh box of it-was-someones-birthday pastries waiting back at the coffee shop where we run, and we were looking at something short and simple and let’s just get it done today and go have a coffee, okay?

    The leaves crunching, the colours on the ground and in the trees, and the whole autumn vibe if I’m being honest—it all inspired me to pull out my phone and record some improptu footage of the run. I held the camera ahead of me as I dashed through the trees and dodged obstacles. 

    If autumn seems like a long season, here on the Canadian prairies we are often lucky to get more than a week.

    By next weekend the air will have chilled a bit more, the leaves will be detritus on the ground surrounded by a million bare branches. There could even be snow—it’s a coin flip. 

    So instead we enjoy the trails in the moment, for a moment, and dig our winter gear from storage for another cold season as our autumn running seasons blinks past in a blur of orange and red and brown.

  • Boston Pi (Virtual)

    Most everyone I know in the running community knows that in addition to Canadian thanksgiving, this weekend is also the Virtual Boston Marathon.

    At least five people I know signed up for the race, which thanks to the pandemic was a once in a lifetime opportunity to run through your own streets, track it on the Boston Marathon app, and call it an official run.

    I did not sign up.

    … but I did go out on the dawn trails with a trio of friends who had signed up to run the pandemic version of the famous race.

    When three of us tag-alongs met up with them early on Saturday morning near a local park, the sun was just peaking over the horizon and they had been at it for almost ten kilometers already.

    We trotted into step with their route, followed it as it wend its way along the river, up in the neighbourhood, down into a local recreation area, and around the back side of a golf course. After about eight kilometers of support running, we turned back to where we’d left our cars … and ultimately logged just over thirteen klicks total even as we zoomed past a half dozen other virtual Boston’ers with their race bibs or support cyclists or multi-coloured tutus plodding along with fierce determination through the morning trails.

    Our thirteen was not quite a marathon. Obviously. Not even quite a half marathon. I later calculated that my logged distance of 13.43 km as per my GPS watch, worked out to almost exactly one pi of a marathon. Weird. After all, forty two point two kilometers divided by thirteen point four-three kilometers equals three point one-four, or pretty much as close to one pi of a marathon as my technology can measure.

    Mathematics and adventure collide on a Saturday morning in a curious way, it seems.

    And then the event ended, and we cheered in the actual racers across the finish line via text message, as they completed their virtual distance … and won their real medals.

  • Fall Colours

    During my exhausting trail half marathon this past weekend I may have tired myself out good and proper, but I managed to keep enough mental focus to nab some photos of my adventures through the autumn foliage.

    Of course when one is running an epic wilderness race carrying proper camera equipment is out of the question.

    I did have my smartphone, tho.

    And when opportunity permitted I tugged it from the side pocket of my hydration vest and paused for a moment to nab some photos.

    Enjoy.