works of wanderlust

Tag: sunday runday

  • Turtle Power

    Sunday runday and on my solo five klick shakeout I paused beside path to watch a turtle the size of a football basking in Florida sunshine.

    Also, it was nearly fifty degrees celsius warmer than the last time I ran oudoors a little more than a week ago. I haven’t been that sweaty from running five kilometers since the heat of last summer. I could have taken a dip beside that turtle and …

    The runaway train of vacation planning never actually found a means of slamming on the brakes and the next thing I knew I was boarding an international flight to Orlando with my face wrapped tightly in a N95 surgical respirator and wondering, sometimes aloud, at the bounds of my own sanity.

    Back in the summer, when all things virus had seemed to be packing its bags and getting ready to move out of the basement like all uninvited houseguest should eventually do, we registered in a series of Disney World Marathon run events.

    Then we eagerly booked a vacation around that … and waited.

    It all went great from there, right? Well … no. We watched anxiously as a viral variant named Omicron washed a new wave of panic all across the world. Triple-vaccinated and packing a smuggler’s haul worth of PPE, we warily tracked the news and tripped over ourselves justifying taking the trip versus the stupidly high costs of cancelling it and just wallowing in pity at ourselves from the safety of our frozen house. A dozen times we came a turtle’s breath away from calling the whole thing off, swallowing the thousands of dollars of lost travel spends, and buying a big bottle of bubbly for new years eve to forget the whole thing and …

    And.

    And yet, here we are.

    And here I am on a Sunday morning, looking out at a resort swimming pool after a five klick shakeout run, sipping a six dollar cup of takeway coffee, having spent the last four days wandering through the densely packed, pandemic-oblivious theme parks of Disney World and giving myself blisters and aches and pains and overwhelming anxiety and exhaustion in the process.

    There are a number of smooth and flat walking trails just out the front door of our hotel, winding around lagoons and restaurants and wire-suspended gondolas, leading into and around and between Epcot and a make-believe Star Wars lands. As thousands of racers congregate here over the next few days for races starting later this week, I saw dozens of fellow runners out on the boardwalks and asphalts. I even saw some of the race crew flagging locations for aid stations and mile markers and marshalling points.

    We have a couple days to cool off. A few more days of park-hopping and pool lounging. We pick up our race packages mid-week and run before the weekend starts in earnest. I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle a half marathon I didn’t really train for, on which I’m banking on residual fitness and sheer determination, plodding along at a turtle’s pace to finish the thing on pure willpower.

    This morning on my tour of the hotel trails, weaving around families walking towards the park gates, and as I trotted by wearing my 2014 Disney Half Marathon running shirt, one of the race setup workers looked up, pointed and snapped a photo of me from his phone. I smiled. It was probably the only time I’ve been out in public this week without a mask so it took a moment to remember how. I guess if you see a sweaty forty-something guy smirking akwardly on the runDisney socials this week … maybe it’s me?

    Or maybe I should have posed with my new friend the turtle. I’d bet we have more in common these days than we realize.

  • Pathfinding & Found Paths

    Sunday Runday and we should have known better than to go onto the icy trails after an overnight snowfall less than a week after an ice storm.

    But the sun was peeking over the eastern horizon and lighting up the December sky in all sorts of pretty colours, so the ice seemed like a temporary problem which could easily enough be solved by four guys in winter running shoes.

    Compared to this time
    last year are you
    more lost or found?

    It wasn’t a temporary problem, of course.

    And no amount of winter grip can make up for ten kilometers of hidden ice under two centimeters of fresh, light snow.

    No amount of dodging into the neighbourhood streets and hoping for better traction on the suburban car-packed roads made much of difference.

    No amount of pathfinding through the crunchy, fresh snow counteracted the frustration of pulled muscles and near falls and aching hip flexors.

    Like so much this year, running has become something of a microcosm of my life and an analogy for everything else. A determined effort to engage with the world that has been met with all manner of resistance no matter my level of persistence. This week it happened to be icy sidewalks, but two weeks ago it was heel pain. A few months ago we were battling wasps. Over the summer I tripped and hurt my shoulder as I collided full force with the trunk of a fir tree.

    Yet, we keep going and trying to make it fun.

    Likewise, this whole year has been something of an exercise in navigating.

    The pandemic. Probably enough said about that, but then again…

    Work changes have taxed my frustated mind.

    Friends and family seem complicated by twisted politics and nearly fully electronic relationships.

    Weather. Supply chains. Misinformation.

    Rules. Regulations.

    Waves and lockdowns and everything else.

    It’s hard to even recall that two years ago I was feeling quite solidly purposeful in my own way. Things felt found. Things were on course and on track.

    At the start of this year, though, I think that like so many others I was feeling not just a little lost, but caught in a maze of a world gone mad. We cheered the end of 2020 as if it somehow marked the end of the worst of it. Yet, here we approach 2021 and I’m not clear on if I’m still lost, somewhat found, or just resigned to the newish reality in which we exist now.

    The last year has been a little like running on ice. Uncertain underfoot and apt to cause a slip unless one watches every step carefully. At the end one feels a bit accomplished, a bit sore, but a bit foolish for venturing out looking for a running path where none should rightly exist.

    On the other hand, the only other option is to stay home and wallow in the lack of action.

    Maybe it’s not a bad thing to go pathfinding after all, through snow and ice… or through a crazy, slippery year.

  • Them Feets

    Sunday Runday, and I didn’t.

    For a whole week I’ve been sidelined by a heel ailment that I’ve self-diagnosed as a touch of plantar fasciitis, or runner’s heel.

    Them feets!

    The thing is that I’m supposed to run a half marathon in a little more than a month.

    The thing is that I need to keep in half marathon shape while not exacerbating an injury that could take a couple weeks to recover.

    Them feets!

    The thing is I’m a stubborn guy and I’m having trouble sitting it out. Resting. Healing.

    I have a stationary bike in my basement tho, so while my running crew plodded out on the winter trails I descended to my little exercise space and spun out twenty klicks of aerobic fitness.

    Them feets!

    Then I met the runners for coffee where we can actually, finally, go inside and sit for a bit at the local recreation centre, proof of vaccination required, and all in all not quite back to normal, but close enough.

    The countdown is on to race day and I’ll cross that finish line, hell or high water. Right now, tho, it might be with a limp rather than a leap.

  • Three Cheers for Traction

    Having run for well over a decade in the ever changing seasons of the Canadian prairies I have fought many battles with the hardened warrior otherwise known as winter trail conditions.

    Ankle-deep fresh snow. Ice-slickened asphalt. Road slop like oatmeal or worse, dirty slush.

    It is only November yet already the paths have become an assortment of challenging terrain …

    … except that back in the late summer I bought a pair of trail shoes.

    They haven’t been a perfect winter shoe, but they have made tackling the traction obstacles a formidable challenge rather than an impassible barrier. Unlike my summer sneakers or even previous winter runners I’ve owned, there is a remarkable surefooted stability to be found even in deep snow and icy patches on the sidewalks that I’ve struggled to find elsewhere. I’m sold, and even pullover spikes or other traction offerings that I’ve used over the years don’t seem to fall into a comparable classification as having tested my trail shoes through the abrupt arrival of winter weather this past week.

    So I ordered a second pair yesterday.

    Kinda. Sorta. Almost.

    The summer version, which I own, is a light and responsive shoe meant for muddy paths and navigating narrow gravel trails.

    The winter version, that second-ish pair now en route to my house, is a waterproof, insulated version of the same shoe but with grippier soles designed to take on those cold and epic winter conditions and a warmer approach to footwear.

    Ice and snow will become far less of an excuse this winter.

    I mean, I say that now… ask me again when it’s dark, icy, and minus forty degrees outside this January.

  • 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.