works of wanderlust

Tag: spring

  • 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.

  • works of wandering

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I have logged nearly seventeen thousand steps. Walking. Wandering. Vaguely destinationed towards places where I could sit and write after walking and reading and trying not to trip and fall flat on my face.

    I’ll be the first to admit that I had no real plan about what to write in this blog. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe. But too, correlating with that lack of a plan came a lack of a name. Anything I have written in the last decade or so has pretty much started with a clever name after which the words on the corresponding topic seemed to flow with clarity and abandon. I had no real plan this time, though, and so when the blogging software asked me to type in, dammit, something, anything, what are you calling this blog, man? I typed in something about “wandering” and off I went to post.

    This struck me as an adequate title, at least to start. Why? Well, obviously because as it stands I seem to be doing a lot of wandering lately. Literally and figuratively. Wandering through life. Wandering through my career. Wandering the trails. Wandering up and down and back and forth and wherever the trail seems to be taking me.

    So that the first few of my posts have been about wandering and walking is, perhaps, no surprise.

    And so that I spent my latest day off walking until my feet hurt was, perhaps, also not much of a surprise.

    This may turn into a blog about wandering after all.

    As of two o’clock then I have wandered at least ten kilometers through the trails and streets and neighbourhoods, and though I have found myself having not gone very far nor accomplishing very much, I have logged some serious wandering steps to that specific nowhere in particular.

    I have been inclined to write for as long as I can remember. I would even suggest that there has never been a conscious moment in my life when I have not felt that my purpose—my raison d’etre as it were—as a sentient human being wandering around with my senses alert and recording was not also part of some grand universal plan to turn those thoughts and observations into words on a page. 

    Sounds like an ego thing.

    If that sounds egotistical, it should not. 

    I usually struggle to find any other equally driving force behind my own existence, as if my fingers are simply the equivalent of whatever constitutes the USB port of the universe and my role is to turn everything I see, think, and hear into data output. It’s a silly idea, but rationally it’s not a terrible thing to have a role that one can articulate—even a role as silly as being a data port on a computer analogy. I wander and I write and then I wander some more and I write some more. Click save…aaaaaand writing to disk.

    So here I am, writing some more.

    Writing about writing. Writing about wandering and then writing about wandering and then writing more about the irreducible loop I find myself in writing such things before I go out and wander and write and wander and write some more.

    I have been trying to write an introduction to this blog. I don’t attempt to do that because I expect some grand audience to dive into these words and make sense of them, or to make sense of me, but rather to try to formalize this role I have taken upon myself: recorder of things, stenographer to the universe, guy with a keyboard and a website. This is important shit, after all. These are big shoes to fill. If I don’t know what I’m doing here, what’s the point. I gotta make sense of it if no one else but for myself.

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I had logged a helluva lot of wandering steps and typed a few hundreds of words and landed in a cafe where I could sit and channel all that data into a keyboard. And out the metaphorical data port comes this: a purpose and maybe the best explanation that I can muster.  These are works of wandering the world and wherever, opening my eyes to the universe and logging it into yet another website. 

    You want a reason for something or anything at all? I write because it is who I am, and I can’t explain why else.

  • book reviews: april flowers

    I just posted about my newfound enjoyment of walking and reading and so I figured now may be as good as time as any to start doing some light logging of the books I’ve been reading while out and about.

    Is it any surprise that two of those books are literally books about walking?

    How… um… on point.

    A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

    I’ve never actually read a Bryson book. I think it must be the kind of thing that appeals to middle aged folks who find themselves compelled to read travel stories from their aging counterparts. Or maybe that’s just what I am now and I’m projecting. Whatever. I’ve seen his books all over and had this kind of edging towards curiosity about them, but—well—I had other stuff to read first, y’know. But then the digital library recommended this one and I bit. Bryson has a vibe, I’ll give him that. He’s a storyteller and can turn a months long hike through the wilderness into a compelling dramatic narrative of a frustrating bro relationship. I could feel the pain of the walk, but also the pain of tolerating someone who is glumming on your good time. I got it. I soaked it in. I read the thing in three days. I’m not ready to hike the trail, but I definitely felt like going for a long walk alone afterwards.

    The Witcher: Blood of Elves by Andrzei Sapkowski

    To be completely fair, I’ve been trying to read this book for at least two years. I bought the box set on a boxing day sale in like, I wanna say 2023–but I’m pretty sure it was 2022. I was into the game on my playstation for a while and the lore struck me as wild, so, ka-ching. It’s been sitting on my nightstand with a bookmark one chapter in for all that time, always somewhere about third or fourth in the stack. Always. But it was available to borrow immediately from the public library as an ebook the day I unwrapped the new Kobo from its box and so it was pretty much the first book I loaded onto the device. I mean, sure, paper copy… but I actually read the digital one. That said, it took me until about half way through to really get into it. There was so much damned lore and backstory that I was trying to piece it altogether in my head for a lot of the opening chapters. Somehow it’s written both simply while tying itself in knots. I liked it in the end, but that first bit was a slog to be honest.

    In Praise of Paths by Torbjorn Ekelund

    Ok, so as far as philosophical essays on the joy of travelling through space and time while on foot goes, this is the book they could sell at Ikea and it would fit right in on any of the Kallax or Lack shelves. Yeah. Right. I know. Norway is not Sweden, but the vibe from those Scandanavian countries is all mashed together in my head and sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong place. I like Ikea and I like this book and the ideas is spurred to life in my head. It made me yearn for that last bit of icy snow to melt from the paths around here so that I could get back out on the trails and go for a stupidly long walk. Long walks were on my bucket list for when I took my career break and sometimes while I’ve been out wandering I do feel like I’m wasting time when I should be sitting at a desk writing something or coding something, so getting a swift kick in the reminder that sometimes the walk is the whole point made this a worthwhile read.