pitter pat pitter pat

Run: 12.56 km @ 8.36kmph taking 1:30:08
Run km Total: 99.61km

Time to assess how the 1500km goal for November 28, 2011 is going.

On the surface, I am going to miss it. However, I think I am on track to making it with ease. In the last 33 days, I have had two days out for Christmas, and no less than 15 out from being sick. Factor that in, and I am on track to blow past the 1500km mark with ease.

Now all I have to do is do it.

I'm back! (sort of)

What a week the holiday week turned out to be!

Family times were good and wonderful, but we all managed to get hammered by one of the worst cases of influenza that I have seen in ages.

Let's just say that the ewww factor was high and leave it at that, shall we? We are all better now and are raring to go again.

Here is a brief run update from Christmas Eve:

Run: 12.5km
Run km total: 87.05km

The mileage is a bit of a guess (I recorded it) because my phone decided to brick itself and had to be completely reset. Naturally, this happened before I had a chance to record all the details. I am, however, within 200m of being dead on so close enough. I remember it being a slow one though.

I miss my bikes.

Speaking of which, within the next week I should have my shiny new Kona Dew City hanging on a hook in the basement ready to go. I am a bit loath to use it in the snow this winter since I have no place to store it and keep it cold. Nothing is quite so bad for a bike (short of running it over in a truck...) as riding it in the salty Southern Ontario snow and then bringing it into a nice warm heated house. You could, if you felt like it, sit and watch it rust for an evening's entertainment. I am crazy, but lets be serious here:) By next winter, there ought to be a shed or something secure outside where I can lock it and let it stay frozen. I might do what a friend does - he has a shed dug into the ground, and inside the shed is a post set in five feet of concrete. This post has a ring welded to it. His commuter bike gets put in the shed, locked to the post, and then the shed is locked from the outside. No one steals it...

On another note, I am picking up an old friend today. Yes, it is a bike. My friend has been holding my most prized possession from my teen years for me for a number of seasons now. It is my old Marinoni road racing bike from about 1984 or so. I forget precisely when the frame was built. It might be from 1981. I put many many thousands of km on that beastie and wore the frame out to the point where the rear triangle is fatigued and hard accelerations cause the gears to change. Ahhh bliss. I am looking forward to polishing it up and making it look like new again. It will then hang on a hook in the basement and get ridden on "special" occasions (like when I feel like it or something...)

And lastly, I have started a new photography project. It is one of those tacky flickresque 365 projects where you take one picture a day for one year with one central theme. Mine is pictures of or from my bikes. Expect more of than from during the winter months... However, there shall be much that is from them when the season starts. I already have plans to carefully haul the rig out to the off road trails and take pictures of my friend (and he of me) whaling it down some trails. Expect too some of the family or bits of it on outings, and at least some of my daily commute. It should be fun once it gets rolling.

Here is the link: http://www.pbase.com/christopheru/365_bikes

Cheers for now,

myself.

on finding another route

My usual running route has narrowed up too much to be much fun at this time of year. The one section has a very narrow sidewalk on it, and try as I might, I am having difficulty passing people who refuse to share the sidewalk. So, rather than risk a collision, I have switched up my route a bit.

Thankfully, there are a lot of MUPs in the immediate area of my house which can be linked together to provide a nice run. I can either do a longer loop (like I did last night) or an out and back along the Laurel Trail and Iron Horse Trail. The only problem is that it is downhill out, and uphill back for the most part. Ouch. The loop I did last night (looping around through the high tech park, University of Waterloo, Laurel Trail, Iron Horse Trail, up Glasgow, down Fischer Hallman, etc) is at least slightly less uphill on the way back since it slices off the side of a biggish hill rather nicely.

Here is the mileage report:

Run: 15.5 km @ 9.19km taking 1:41:10 (I keep getting slower! I cannot shake this cold!)
Run km total: 74.58 km

Quick mileage report

Last night's run was both painful and awesome. Running on a salted hard pack snow base with new turning to slush powder on top is horrible.

Dear City of Waterloo and its citizens,

STOP WITH THE SALTING ALREADY ON THE SIDEWALKS WHEN ALL THERE IS IS SNOW ON THEM!!!!  All it is doing is making a heavy sticky unstable slush base which clings to the shoes and sucks the energy out of anyone using the sidewalk. It does not make the sidewalk safer. A good argument can be made that it makes it worse. Feel free to salt ice if you must, but for crying out loud leave off with salting the snow.

Sincerely,

My aching legs.

Anyhow, here are the running totals:

Run: 12.15 km @ 9.64km taking 1:15:40
Run km total: 59.18 km

the thing about running in snow is...

... that it is almost exactly like running in wet sand.

This means that any given distance tends to take a lot more energy than is the norm.

I call this a good thing. After all, if the purpose of the running is to maintain fitness and be ready for dropping the hammer on the bike (so to speak) come spring time then a little extra effort is worth it.

Tonight's run was a blast. It was snowing lightly, and most of the route I usually run was plowed or shoveled nicely. The temperature was about -9 Celsius. Due to blowing snow, and how fundamentally useless a plow is at making a sidewalk bare, I found myself in about 5 cm or so of snow give or take a cm or two the whole way. There were a (very) few bare patches and a (very) few unshoveled bits.

Big Kudos to the citizens of Waterloo and the city itself for doing such a great job of keeping the sidewalks and roadside MUPS cleaned off even during a week of fairly heavy snow. That takes a lot of effort and is appreciated. In particular I appreciate the MUP being done which runs beside the newish Westmount Road extension. I don't know who cleans it but it is either the city or the University of Waterloo. There are only about two driveways on it (one into Columbia Lake and one into the grad residences for the University of Waterloo) and the distance is almost exactly two km long. At this time of year, I imagine that the primary users of this MUP would be a few walkers, people like me, and a rare bike. A good effort for what amounts to a few users. Like I said, it is appreciated.

The only two unshoveled bits belonged to a condo corp and a school. The condo corp had made no effort to clean up at all (sigh) while the school had it plowed but it had drifted over during the day. To be fair, there has been a lot of wind, and the school does have this big old field, so the snow was not a surprise. With luck, they will get to it tomorrow again. It is interesting to run in snow that is over a foot deep with a trough up the middle. Each footfall is a little dance with a sprained ankle - the trick I think is to be relaxed, not go too fast, and don't fight the slide when your foot slips. Wiping out in the powder would not hurt, so it is not worth dramatics which might involve twisting something.

Anyhow, here is the report on mileage:

Run: 12.54km @ 10.06 kmph taking 1:14:49
Run km total: 47.03 km

Overall, I am very happy with that all things considered. It is within the ball park of what I would normally cover that distance in with no snow and temperatures well above freezing.

on snow, early morning runs, Lady GaGa, and Christmas Pagents

Well, here is another mileage report for you:

Run: 9.19km @ 9.63 kmph taking 57:13
Run km total: 34.49

All in all, I am happy with that run this morning. It has been almost nine days since I have been able to do anything at all physical because of my cold kicking my behind so thoroughly. A nice short one like that at a slow speed was just what the doctor ordered; it helped me feel energized, and it helped clear my lungs and sinuses (for the delicate of stomach, I will just leave it at that, ok? ok? nuff said...)

I left at around eight in the morning. Snow was falling. In theory, we are getting a "snow storm" today but what I have seen so far is not much of anything. The snow is falling fairly heavily, but it is so wet that accumulations do not seem to be amounting to much. What it is doing though is beautifully muffling all sounds of the city and keeping most people inside instead of out driving.

Wonderful bliss.

I saw very few cars while out on the run this morning, and almost no pedestrians at all. There was some evidence of other runners (footy prints in the snow) but that was about it. I felt totally alone.

This is something that I enjoy when I run - solitude. Usually, due to time constraints and the time of year I do my running, I end up running in the dark. Those conditions are fantastic for creating a little bubble that blocks out the rest of the world and running becomes very solitary, and thought provoking (let's face it, running is boring, so I get to do a lot of thinking whilst stumping around the city in my running shoes.) I rarely end up running in daylight. Come the start of the cycling season, running will happen once every seven or eight days for the sole purpose of reminding my legs how to do it so that next winter's running season is not so painful to start. I will be too busy riding my bike to think about running at that point.

Anyhow, the run just plain worked once my legs woke up.

Which brings me to Lady GaGa. I run to her music. There is only one problem with it for running and that is the way the beat changes up mid song throughout most of her music. I just nicely settle into a rhythm matching each stride to a musical thump, and she introduces a little hitch in the song which throws my pace off. I therefore just listen to it and totally ignore the beat. This makes me thing I should source some different music which has a more constant beat if my goal is to use the music to lift the running to a more effortless level.

I used to do spin classes a lot - upwards of five times a week - and the instructors were very careful to pick music with a steady beat which matched the rate that they wished us to pedal to during whatever interval drill we were doing. It was possible to completely zone out and float away with a thrumming beat and a long enough drill. I need some of that stuff again for running.

Here is a picture from this morning:

Yep, Angel child in uniform :)


I will leave you with that.

Cheers.

don't run with a belly ache

It was not my plan for the night, believe me, but I ended up cutting an "over run" short due to developing a belly ache part way around my loop. I had to walk a significant amount tonight.

Well nuts.

Here is the mileage report anyways:

Run: 13.34km @9.29kmph taking 1:26:13

Run km total: 25.3
Bike km total: 0

time to lay out some new goals

I am not a fan of new year's resolutions, and think them largely a sham designed to make people feel bad as they are encouraged to make promises they know they cannot keep, only to be made to feel a failure when the predictable happens and they fail. The whole concept is kind of like deliberately tripping someone, and then mocking them for a clutz.

So, it is in that frame of mind that I make the following fitness goals, today, on November 28th. There will be no pressure this way.

It is my goal this next calender year to run about 1500 km, and to bicycle about 5000km. This is not as outrageous as it sounds, and should be doable without really exerting myself too terribly much since I like to do those things. Where this will be challenging is that I want to drop back down to between 170-175 pounds (I am six feet tall.) That might be a bit tougher although really, it goes with the territory of the sports I participate in.

I figure I might as well report my progress here.

So, with all that in mind, here is my first mileage report:

Run: 12.02 km @ 10.72kmph taking 1:07:17 hours.
Bike: 0 km

Run km total:  12.02
Bike km total: 0

Cycling won't start again until the salt is off the roads again in the spring.


Cheers.