One thing at a time

Mine and the boy’s skates, ready for a test drive at the local outdoor rink in perfect winter weather.

First, the good news.

Well, it doesn’t start well. I have plantar fasciitis and it hurts a lot. When I developed this, quite a few things I love got put on the sidelines because of the pain. Skiing, skating, and hiking all got pretty difficult, for example. I would have to take my ski boots off for ten minutes after one run – not enjoyable.

Skating is a lot of fun and I’ve always prided myself on being a pretty good skater. I could never score goals, but I was fast. With the deterioration of my feet, it became too painful. We’re talking severe pain within a couple of minutes of lacing up, sometimes before I even hit the ice. I was pretty sad about it, especially since before all of this foot nonsense I’d just gotten some new CCM 652 Tacks.

Near Miss?

Okay, I know this likely wasn’t even close because I know more than a little bit about the rules for flying, but you don’t see this every day. I was driving with Graham to pick up some pizza tonight (delicious Tom’s) when he was suddenly pointing out the window and saying “Star! Star!” I had time at a light, then in a minor traffic jam to snap a couple of phone pics. Conn trails in a perfect X!  Forgive the horrible photos, dusk plus dirty car windows plus car glass = bad.  🙂

From a light, X marks the spot.

While stopped in traffic.

Trail Run on the Coulee

After not being able to run on Saturday with the other monkeys (Graham, sick, asked very sweetly to play with blocks with him and I couldn’t say no), I made it a mission to get out for a trail run on Sunday.  I know the monkeys went down and up the same trail, but I just decided to make a loop out of it from my house.  The weather was fantastic, at about 0 degrees, still cold enough that the creek was frozen enough to run on.

I decided to take out my Salomon trail runners as opposed to the regular Brooks running shoes.  They were awesome on the trail, but the second half of my loop was on pavement and they were really not good for that.  I ended up with sore knees and feet by the time I got home.  I know part of that might be my gait, and I continue to try to work on that.  I also used Yaktrax on this run, which made it much easier to keep my feet on the trail.  Still, I was surprised how much sliding out I still did on some of the really side-cut parts of the trail; definitely not safe to ride a couple parts of this right now!

Here is the loop and the run profile.  It ended up being 78ish meters of climbing  over what looks like about 2km, based on the proportion of the loop that was in the ravine.  I was too lazy to just measure the distance in the GPS software.  I loved running the coulee, but the loop back through my neighborhood was so boring.  I have a nice running loop through Silver Springs that is somehow much more satisfying.  I don’t know what it is about running around Scenic Acres, but it just sucks the will to live right out of me.  I digress, the loop:

Loop on the map, 7.2km

Run profile

Video after the break.

Yay, spring is here!

Spring is in the air

Ahhh, spring.  What a beautiful feeling to escape from winter and come out on the other side.  The flowers are just emerging from the ground, the sun has re-emerged from its six month trip to the southern hemisphere, new life is blooming everywhere.  That, and two feet of snow.  That’s right, spring is here and it’s time for winter to continue, because we are in Alberta.  Mom and I were going to go skiing today, but decided there was too much snow to do it.

We had a good day otherwise, though.  We headed into downtown Canmore and got a pizza at the Flatbread Company, then wandered around some of the shops.  We ended up at a wine tasting near the end of the afternoon, and walked out with six bottles of wine.  So really, just as successful as skiing.

What a winter, though.  Sunshine has had over 45cm of snow in the last 3 days and still has over a 2m base.  There was snow on our lawn in Calgary still last week.  There’s still ice on the road, and now a couple feet of snow again!  It’s also supposed to continue snowing all this week.  This is all seems to be a really good argument for moving to Fiji.

Snow-Coulee; March 24, 2011

Me pointing my own helmet-cam at myself

We rode the 12 Mile Coulee (downhill from Tuscany, in Calgary) in the dead of winter (errr, March).  You see, the goal was to get out with the studded tires and shred the frozen creek.  The miscalculation we made was that it got warm at the beginning of the week, then snowed for the rest of the week, then got cold.  So, what we ended up was just a great big bloody trudge!  I showed up with knee pads and elbow pads, expecting to crash on solid ice, but I never got to try it out.  You can tell from the picture how pleased I am, however, so you know it wasn’t a loss.

Video after the break.