works of wanderlust

Tag: spring

  • weekend wrap three

    How the heck is it already the middle of May? Didn’t we just do Christmas last week? I mean. C’mon!

    Next weekend is the long weekend, but this past few days have been a bit of a hectic hot mess. That’s okay, I guess. Everyone needs a hectic weekend here and there.

    This past weekend I…

    Alas, it is the week of the Big Show. The kid is performing as Rosie in her high school musical production of Mamma Mia starting tomorrow, so it’s been us doing late night pick ups at the theatre, transfers to other important things, and on and on and on.

    I met up with my former boss for lunch on Friday. It was pretty much the weekend for her. It started out as a chat message asking her if it was still cool I used her as a reference, and next thing I knew I was picking her up at her mechanic’s appointment and we were chowing down on a local Indian buffet.

    The upcoming show has us doing a few theatre parent chores, specifically we got put in charge of the concession, so it was off to Costco for our semi-annual visit and to score a bunch of concession-sized snacks to sell. Saturday morning is not the day for that, but our options were limited.

    This spun around and did a one-eighty and by mid-afternoon we were out in Sherwood Park at a dance competition. Oh, that’s right. In the middle of the high school main stage final week of rehearsals we still had dance choreography competitions to work around. Though the final sadness of it being her last ever didn’t ever really set in, what with the hectic hot mess and all.

    We stopped for dinner on the way home and it was… ok. Less ok for the price, but I’ll save that rant for another post.

    Mother’s day morning we made crepes before I rushed off to do my regular Sunday morning run club. Ten klicks sounds less impressive mid-spring when everyone else is training for marathons and such.

    We capped the mother’s day events off with a lap of the local dog park and a chill stroll in the masses and throngs with the same idea.

    Oh, and I paid for my business license. Woot. Excitement abounds.

    And that was that.

  • patio season

    It is only just the second day of May and I find myself sitting on the patio at the local Starbucks.

    Yeah, I know. There is a likely chance that you are reading this from somewhere in the world where (a) patio season in May is entirely normal and (b) eighteen degrees would not be considered patio weather whatsoever.  But I am writing this from a place in the world where the second of May is just as likely to be a snowy inside day as it is to be one facilitating a coffee from a suburban bistro table two meters from a bustling drive through.  So I’ll take it where I can get it, and celebrate it just the same.

    It is also my first writing excursion since walking out of my latest life phase: if you are a dedicated reader (but who am I kidding?) you may recall that I wrote earlier this week that I had quit my part time job. Resigned. Hung up my apron. De-shifted in order to pursue some more mentally stimulating contract-type work, and as I sit here sunning the light reflecting off a mini-mall cafe, it still hasn’t quit sunk in that yesterday was my last day juggling expired foods and lugging boxes of olive oil. It will, but there has only just been long enough to mark the space between shifts, so I could walk back in there this morning and only just be a few minutes late for work. I’ll let it settle out a bit more, but either way, I am free of that.

    And now here I am. It is in fact the first day of patio season and the first day of whatever comes next for me, and neither are lacking prospects. The patio function of the equation urges me to stop procrastinating with navel-gazing blog posts and finish my damn novel already, jeeze! The whats next(?) steps part of the same mysterious equation is a little less crystalized and may give me cause to write more about that in a day or a week or so, but not so much yet. There will be time for explanations when the dust settles.

    Patio season is different than the rest of the year for some reason, too.  It is a simple calculated fact that I spend a good chunk of my free winter morning agendas sitting at a table in this or that or other cafes around the neighbourhood. Everyone generally puts their heads down and avoids eye contact. But this morning, sitting and typing at a wobbly little bistro table, tilting my screen to angle it for best visibility in the glare of the outdoor ambiance, I’ve already had two jovial conversations with other patio folks. “What a great day!” “Do you live around here?” “Finally I can ride my bike to the cafe!” The glory of the finally spring mentality has burst through the hunkering isolationism of the winter chill and everyone is just happier enough to glory in the moment.

    Spring is such a cliche for new life I am reluctant to draw such an obvious analogy here, but alas it seems unavoidable. It seems cliche that I have timed my emergence from the chrysalis of career change in such synchronicity with the world around me.

    On my very first day of the job I just quit, back in August, when I arrived to a store-under-construction on a hot late-summer morning, it happened that the sun was shining and the dust was blowing and we all sat on the curb for our coffee break drinking cold pops and munching the assortment of salty snacks they had provided. It had been a hard morning lugging boxes and meeting new people and settling into a physical job. Yesterday, I stepped out the back door of the warehouse into that same alley, now just the cluttered space behind the store, the sun almost a parallel spring analog to that day last summer. We’d been through a winter, made a store, struggling in solidarity against the silliness of it all, and there I was on my last day on that same patch of asphalt almost a year later feeling about as full circle as one could feel about such things. Hardly a patio, but not completely different from where I am starting my day, this new era ahead of me, typing these words.

    It’s patio season. A new one.

  • 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.

  • Spring Runoff

    I had this grand plan about ramping up my mileage for spring.

    Not that it was an orginal plan. Same plan as every year, in fact. Arguably, not so much a plan as a routine.

    Each year around this time I’ve been “streaking” — but in the running, way, as in trying to run a minimum distance each day. Setting a running streak. Three weeks or maybe even a month of consecutive running. Kicking off April first with a daily challenge to myself to say, um, how many days can I lace up in a row? What kind of distance can I chalk up? How often do I want to do sports laundry this month?

    But then I got sick.

    Perfectly, poorly-timed, sick. April first, just as we got back from a mini-vacay to the coast, I got off the plane with a chest cold of the kind where running seems to make it worse.

    How does that go again? Neck up, run about. Neck down, rest it out.

    This was a neck down cold. Chest coughy-phlegmy-x-ray-worthy sick.

    I’m like 97% better. And better enough to do some short, slower runs with the crew now that spring is in full swing. Not better enough to attempt that streak, yet.

    We ran our regular Thursday meet up last night and slogged off a six klick semi-trail run through the trying-to-bud-out tree canopy, the light and shadows playing with our senses in that way that only happens in the shoulder seasons. I wore shorts, and only had one coughing fit. I guess that’s a good thing.

  • Tracks in the Mud

    There were imprints of multiple bike tire treads in the dried mud.

    This particular corner is not exactly technical, but it would inevitably pose a challenge for a novice off-road cyclist. The hairpin turn is at the lowest point of a narrow runoff trench, a kind of wrinkle in the landscape where water might escape down into the valley-proper but which now, in the late spring, was barely damp. The hairpin turn is to be found at the lowest point in a narrow trench down which the trail skirts a rapid descent and counterpart ascent leading to or from, depending on one’s perspective, the hairpin turn in question. That is to say, the hypothetical adventure cyclist may round a corner on the path and encounter a descending hill tracing down along the side of the trench and then at the bottom of the hill be made to take a sharp turn before ascending back up the far side of said trench to resume their slog through the river valley trail.  There is no other way around, save for taking a completely and altogether different path.

    There were imprints in the dried mud indicating that this represents a common scenario.

    But I was on foot.

    I rounded the corner and shortened my stride to accommodate the fifteen meters of downward grade, my hand instinctively brushing up towards the branches of the nearby trees as if I should, could, would grab a bit of the foliage if my feet slipped on a bit of loose dirt and knocked me off balance.

    I didn’t fall. Instead I found myself at the bottom of the hill down which I had just walked and the bottom of a second hill I was destined to climb and standing at a sharp hairpin corner down low in a wrinkle in the landscape looking towards the dried mud where a number of dried bike tire tread tracks had hardened into their familiar waffle-print patterns.  

    It was quiet. Unnervingly quiet. 

    The trail running in and through the landscape here, a hundred or so meters into the woods and away from the suburban neighbourhoods nearby, was already insulated from the usual hum of sound from the city. But somehow, the little rent in the path, this dip and turn and wrinkle was like descending between two soundproofing berms and completely shutting out whatever remaining noise had penetrated the woods. Here, I might just have found one of the quietest places in the city.

    The sunlight pinched down between the scraggly poplars. The air carried the heavy scent of the spring mulch rotting on the forest floor. The wind stirred now and then, just a trivial gust and enough to stir the newly budded leaves glowing that radiant green of freshly popped foliage.

    One path. Uncountable tread tracks traced through the dried mud. And me, on foot, looking down at the silent hairpin turn a hundred meters from civilization.

    For every person who descended into this trench there was one journey, but an infinite variety of paths. No one who entered this turn came into it at the same angle, speed or trajectory, and likewise, no one left it alike any other. Each path was unique. Each journey was personal. 

    I stepped past the dried tread tracks, glimpsing over my shoulder through the rift in space I had just traversed. That was mine. And I climbed back up the other side of the trail, back up and out of the wrinkle in the landscape, and tried to figure out exactly where I had ended up.