Tag: running summer

  • head over feets, eight

    I dug into the early week with an afternoon five klick run on Tuesday, squeezing in a neighbourhood lap before dinner time. I figured I’d get it out of the way and have my evening free and clear. It worked. 

    Wednesday was the usual Run Club meetup, and so I went to the drop in at 6pm and we did an out and back on the suburban asphalt (with a bit of off-road trail mixed in) and the weather wasn’t too hot but it was slightly uncomfortable at the upper ends of my safety range. We logged only about seven klicks.

    Thursday my streak continued and I organized a casual adventure run in one of the southside suburbs. We did a big lap down through the Windermere area, and had to double back for you-know-who showing up ten minutes late and then texting me. No problem. He did drive all the way across down in rush hour traffic for a run.

    Friday, I was feeling adventurous and up for an afternoon solo, so I drove down to the dog park and did some trail running across the river in the wilds.  I logged about six klicks on the flat wilderness run, which was a bit of an homage to RM who had started a hundred mile ultra that same morning down in the south of the province.

    RM was still running when I did my Saturday morning run around the neighbourhood again and logged a simple five klick lap. He would finish his 161km trail race after running straight through for 31 gruelling hours. I just got to brag that I’d hit day eight on my streak.

    Sunday the firesmoke was starting to creep back in a bit, though the air quality was only at a five so we met and ran nine klicks for my ninth day of streaking. I had anticipated a real slog, what it being the ninth day of a solid daily run, but I think I’m in a bit of high point on the streak right now and that nine klicks felt really, really good. I could have kept going—maybe even to my race distance.

    Monday I found myself back to the solo run life for a few days, and with a stretch of evening obligations needing to get my run in earlier in the day. I got out the door by 11am and did a respectable 6km lap around the neighbourhood, up near the grocery store and back along the freeway.

    Tuesday I was in a similar situation, but not wanting to repeat my route from Monday I took a reverso and started up the freeway path but took a turn the opposite way and looped up around the other grocery store for another 6km. It was the eleventh day of my streak and I’m creeping up to a total distance around 70 klicks for the span of it.

    I was back in the pool on Wednesday, but all the way across town. Needing to run an errand I took advantage of my morning proximity to a city rec centre and brought my gear to swim about thirty minutes. I gotta say, it’s a nicer facility than my home location—just a shame it’s a twenty minute drive down the freeway.

    Needing to continue my streak, I was back on the trails later Wednesday morning. Avoiding the monotony of just doing more laps around the neighbourhood, I drove closer to the trailhead of  the river valley trails and logged six klicks down and close to the dog park, including some great single track.

    On day thirteen of my streak, I was finally able to connect with real people again and we met for our regular Creek run. That whole meetup location started because of it’s location close to where The Kid had dance class, but now that she has moved on from her youthful extra curriculars the run meetup may need to adapt—or whatever. There were enough of us out last night that it’s hardly my decision anymore.

  • weekend wrap, fifteen

    Writing a weekend wrap on a Monday morning is very much a shakeout ritual. You see me posting some low-stakes content here summing up my random acts of nothing much on the opening day of a new week and wonder what’s the point, but getting back into the business of productive writing after a few days of schedule flux is not just as easy as it seems. Jotting a few sentences as a mental catchup, is as much a writers warmup as I’m ever going to do.

    All that is to say, this weekend was busy enough.

    Shaping the whole thing was the fact that the Kid was housesitting, so after a quick family dinner on Friday we drove her over and dropped her off for her housesitting gig. Tres exciting, non? 

    The rest of the evening we plonked on the couch and caught up on some trash television we’ve been enjoying. Not much to speak of, nor anything worth writing about, but it was a bit of weekend fare to ease out of a long-ish week.

    Saturday, I went to the doctor. Nothing urgent, of course. I’ve had a nagging cough for about a year and I’m seeing a specialist about it and the appointments are every three months on a Saturday. I get to sit in a glass box and blow into a plastic tube and then they adjust the cocktail of respiratory medications I’ve been taking and voila.

    I celebrated learning that I probably don’t have asthma by going and running my five klick lap around the neighbourhood. I’ve been working on a running streak and Saturday was day eight, the loop around day, particularly since day one was last Saturday when I did a Park Run. 

    Before it got too hot we took the dog to the off leash park and walked a lap. The highlight of that trip was randomly finding a fossil in the river. 

    And then while Karin went to The Mall, I stayed home and fuddled with some technology projects; I got a new memory card for my GoPro (delivered) which seems to have fixed the file corruption errors I’ve been getting and then I started poking at adding a new feature to my “unsocial media applet” software. I’ve been pondering some quality of life improvements for our upcoming trip to Japan, specifically simplifying the time stamping feature I had in a waaaay early version that let me tell the post I was in, say, New York and it would flag the time stamp to indicate that. I was able to pull in a location from the IP address of the internet connection and do some fancy pants stuff to automate that plus start building a kind of bespoke geographic database to simplify other aspects. Plus, I cleaned up some bugs. All in all, a few hours of coding work, but it’ll save me as much over the next year of posting.

    Another evening of chilling in front of terrible television with a beer and the day was done.

    Sunday, I met the crew for a nine klick run which was also the ninth day of my streak.

    And then I left coffee a bit early so that we could go to the thank you barbecue for the Heritage Festival French pavilion volunteers.    

    We ran another little errand to visit the Kid and drop off something she forgot, and then it was back home for more Sunday errands: a dog walk, cleaning up the kitchen, some more coding, groceries, and cooking dinner.

    I went for another walk to test my fixed code out in the “field” by which I mean, literally in the field but also on a connection that was not our house wifi, and that was about that for another late summer weekend.

  • going streaking

    I hear you. Four runs is hardly a streak. 

    But every streak has gotta start somewhere, right?

    I do my best training in the shoulder seasons: spring and autumn are seasons of inspirational motivation. Neither too hot nor too cold. The expectations of obligations are shifting. Races are tapering into short distances in the autumn, or ramping up as the winter snow melts. The spring and autumn feel like times of adjustment to new goals. 

    I got it in my head about a week ago that when the heat seemed as though it was about to dissipate, I would plant the seeds of a running streak into a new training plan and seek some desperately needed motivation.

    I admit, I’ve been slacking.

    Oh, sure. You non-runners out there see me on the trails a couple times each week logging five klicks here or ten klick there and ask “what’s the problem—you’re still actually running, aren’t you?”

    But there are definite degrees of training, and I have been idling in the lowest gear for the better part of a year, barely maintaining fitness let alone actually training for anything of consequence.

    Part of that has been a reluctance to race. Part of that has been dealing with a respiratory health puzzle. Part of it has been raw laziness.

    Now that the proper race season is over (the local marathon finished up about two weeks ago now) the pressure to train for anything substantial has waned for another year.

    But there it is—that notion of seasonal motivation as we creep ever closer to autumn and the end of summer. And while the heat is still hanging about, it is not nearly as oppressive as it was even a couple weeks back. 

    A running streak is nothing special or official. Ideally, casual runners should really take rest days. Running every day is the work of elite athletes with coaches who plan their training regimens around important recovery spells. But having tackled the idea of a streak many times in the past I know that one can fit in a run-every-day plan when life allows. 

    Logging a minimum distance or time each day wears you out. It’s exhausting, so doing it when life is busy, the environment is not cooperating, or an event like a race is upcoming makes the effort less compatible with a healthy choice. And heck knows, this isn’t advice to anyone: know your limits and your body and your own health if you attempt your own streak—and if you don’t, talk to a professional first. 

    I know I can generally and safely log a 5km minimum each day for about twenty to thirty days in a row before I need to take my feet off the gas and take a couple days of rest. 

    And the fuzziness of that number is the key right there: it’s always an experiment in listening. I push myself every day until I know I’ve pushed just far enough. How many days was I able to streak this time? I never know when I start, so every day is a new and fresh milestone. Four days in a row, right now? Yeah, that’s my longest streak in over a year so it’s worth celebrating. Am I aiming for thirty? Sure. Will I be happy with twenty? Probably. Would I settle for five? I’d be sad for a day, but of course. 

    The whole point of this, of course, is a kind of accelerated punch to my training. Stressing the body through daily runs—at least for me—puts me through a kind of ramped up punch towards a fitness goal. For example, I have a ten miler race at the end of October. I have been consistently running eight to ten klicks. So I need to effectively double my comfortable distance to sixteen klicks.  That’s not substantial, but also not as simple as it sounds if only because those ten klick runs have been bagging me.

    Adding six means one of two things: either (a) inching the distance up incrementally over the next eight weeks and then running the race as a progressive next step or (b) firming up my base with lots and lots and lots of shorter runs at first, then adding distance in the four or five weeks leading into the race. 

    The streak is an attempt at option (b)—build a firm base atop a year of slouching by running a streak, and then adding the time and distance to that as the autumn-proper kicks in. 

    The two plans are only subtly different, but the latter plan puts a bit more focus on front loading that foundation-building versus spreading it out across two slow months of incremental building. I’m not a doctor so I don’t know which of or even if these are healthy approaches, but both have worked for me in the past.

    The other aspect of the streak that gives this the win-win bias, tho, is the motivation factor. There is just something personally inspirational about daily run goals, making sure that each and every day I put aside at least thirty to forty minutes for a run—then logging it and counting up the days.

    And right now I’m at four.

    Slacking over, right?

  • head over feets, seven

    With the pool closed now, I have been a couple of things fitness-wise, frazzled and lazy. I mean, it is going to take me a couple solid weeks to find a rhythm and routine again, and one of those fail points is definitely reared up as my lack of logging of everything here. Yeah, I haven’t posted—not that anyone but me is checking, but accountability is accountability, even to oneself.

    So I figured I would do two things: (1) try for a running streak in September and (2) reset this log starting on last Saturday (back in August) when my running streak properly started. 

    So Saturday, huh? Yeah, I woke up feeling motivated and drove down to Park Run. I don’t want to say I’m a rare participant in Park Run but the August long weekend was only my second outing of the year and my ninth overall.  The vibe is that of a race, even though people have literally argued with me about this online, but for me it checks enough boxes—start and finish lines, timed results, online records, lots of participants—that I feel like I’m racing, so I try a bit harder. As it was I pushed myself and came in just barely under thirty minutes, good but not great, but still anything under thirty feels like I’m not completely out of shape.

    It doesn’t strictly count as a fitness point, but I ordered a pair of wireless waterproof bone conducting headphones. I’m a normal kind of guy, after all, and I like to listen to some tunes while I work out. I tried the whole fruit-based pod thing and they get sweaty and fall out, and I know the new ones have improved—but then I saw the waterproof wrap-around version (no brands mentioned) were on the reward points website and so, I’m like, that seems like an upgrade for my purposes. They are currently on order and I won’t say a done deal, but I expect them in a week or two.

    Sunday we met thirty minutes early for our Sunday run because the forecast was for hot, hot, hot by mid-morning—and it wasn’t wrong. We logged an honest eight klicks and tried to keep it to the shade.

    I figure that pretty much anything I log with my watch counts as fitness, so having logged a two hour paddle down the river with my wife and dog on Sunday afternoon I can say, yeah, kayaking down a river is a workout. I was tired like crazy that evening.

    I was feeling dedicated to my still-young run streak on Monday but the firesmoke had rolled in and we cancelled our traditional breakfast run meetup—in that we still went for breakfast but skipped the run for health reasons.  But I had a run on my mind and a rec centre pass in my wallet so I hit the track and logged a five klicks track run shortly after we washed up from dinner.

    Now, summer vacation proper is over, effective as I write this knowing my kid is off to school again, and my days can be a little more focussed on getting back into the fall and winter routine—and that includes some serious ramping up of my training. Stay tuned.

  • weekend wrap, thirteen

    Oh, lucky. 

    Here we are on another Monday morning perched in front of a keyboard as summer wanes. The Kid was lamenting that her first post-grade-school summer flew by in a blur of summer job and a smattering of friend gatherings which seemed as tho it cheated her a little. Get used to it, I told her. That’s life. What’s two months anyhow? A couple of bill cycles and another season blows by.

    It wasn’t all a loss, though.

    I picked her up from said summer job on Friday afternoon and plunked her at one of those friend gatherings. Her high school pals have been successively hitting the eighteen-year old birthday milestone these past few months and I think she’s next.  We never really found out what goes on at these parties, but it all seems pretty tame. We idled on the couch post-dinner and a friend drove her home. Ah, Fridays as our responsibilities of parenting a kid dwindled into the final countdown towards her impending legal adulthood.

    Saturday, feeling a bit lazy and knowing that the local marathon weekend was going to disrupt Sunday running plans, I dragged my sorry butt to Park Run. You know Park Run, right? The Saturday morning 5k “not a race” but really a race free event in the river valley. It happens all over the world and in like a dozen locations in Canada. I have now done it eight times.

    The Kid and I took the dog for a loooong walk on Saturday afternoon, stopping briefly at the pop-up off-leash park one neighbourhood over. The dog could not have cared less about the off-leash, but a random chunk of field surrounded by a tall orange construction fence and which probably reeks of other dog’s markings was probably epic confusing.

    Later, it being our wedding anniversary and all, Karin and I went for a fancy dinner at a new Japanese-inspired fusion cuisine place, and then went home and watched another in our getting-ready-for-Japan Miyazaki movie marathon: Princess Mononoke. I’ve seen it a dozen times and it still rocks hard.

    Sunday I should have gone to cheer on the marathoners, but I slept in. That’s not a trivial statement: I never sleep in. Like, once a year, maybe. And yesterday was the day. I dunno why I was so tired.

    I spent a couple hours working on the computer. Literally. Lester had loaned me a graphics card which I had anticipated may work to get my VR setup working on my old desktop. He recently replaced that card and it was just sitting in the box. I spent too much time and the best I got to was it loading half way through Windows boot up and freezing the computer. Maybe after I finish this contract I’m working on I’ll risk blowing up the whole computer, but I had a minor panic and restored the old hardware. Computer 1: Brad 0.

    We set out early-afternoon for the Fringe Festival. We have a smattering of tix for the week, and two sets were for Sunday. We took in “Plays by Bots” (which we’ve seen annually for 3 years now) which is improv based on poorly written AI scripts, and then “Colins Back” which was a big, fun improv show with a local troupe hosting famed improvist Colin Mochrie for an hour of silly fun.

    Not a bad way to cap off the evening, which was otherwise mostly capped off by a quiet dinner back home and watching Japanese travel videos on Youtube until bedtime.