Eight weeks down, ten to go. Nearing the half-way point my training. That would feel like a big accomplishment, except that training is always back-heavy. The second half contains most of the hard work. Deep breath.
The weather has been crazy warm and spring-like for February. The lower-level trails are already clear of snow, which is amazing. Normally this doesn’t happen until mid-March. There’s been a fair bit of rain. My shoes are almost always sopping wet when I get home. Up on the drying rack they go.
When I ran my marathon in 2012 I remember how momentous the Sunday long runs felt. They increased relentlessly by 2k per week from 10k all the way up to 32k. The final phase, when every Sunday meant a run of more than 20k, wore me down. By the last month I started cheating. I was burnt out. I completely skipped one long run and starting cutting corners all over the place. My taper started 4 weeks out, instead of 10 days. Gah. I was just so ready to be done.
So it was interesting today to look back at where my mileage was at this stage when I ran my first marathon. In 2012 I had run 481 kilometres by February 24. Really? That seems nuts. This time around I’ll have done a measly 360 kilometres. I wouldn’t have guessed it was so much less. It feels to me like I am running lots. Like really lots. I haven’t taken a day off in more than 6 weeks. Most of my runs take about an hour now and that “cumulative fatigue” thing is real; I feel it in my leaden legs the day after an SOS workout. I wonder if I’ll feel as burnt out by the beginning of April as I did in 2012.
I hope that because the long runs aren’t as long this program won’t leave me feeling as burnt out. My longest runs this spring will peak at 26k; there will be just three of them, and they’ll be spaced two weeks apart. I think I can do this.
I’m surviving the speed workouts. They’re still the hardest, but there are only two more to do. They’re progressive, so on paper they’re getting more challenging, but they’re not feeling any tougher, so I must be improving. With these I notice what a huge difference tension makes. Efficiency of form is so important when running fast. After the speed workouts are done I switch to intermediate-paced longer-interval strength runs. For me I think these will be easier.
As soon as I left home I could hear them: shells exploding, dropped by a helicopter as part of avalanche control efforts along the highway. So I wasn’t surprised to see a line of cars waiting to be given the all-clear to head up the pass. I had to turn back and do a couple of back-and-forth kilometres, killing time until the road opened.
Fortunately it didn’t take too long before we got waved through. It was a lovely sunny day, so I didn’t mind the delay anyway.
There was a little avalanche that had come down the chute at Nature Boy. I actually smelled it before I saw it … the scent of mud and fresh spruce and pine. This is where we had a big avalanche about seven years ago that closed the road for several days. Today’s was just a tiny thing that didn’t even reach the road.
I’m proud of my 28 black boxes. They mean I have done some sort of aerobic workout (running, biking or both) every day for the past 28 days. My total time spent exercising is going up by about an hour a week, with most of that increase due to running (the green bars).
This was the first week of SOS workouts. My first speed workout was really tough. My first tempo workout was fine; even with rolling hills I undercut my target pace by about 10 seconds per kilometre. The “long” run this week wasn’t really any longer than I’m used to (13k), so it hardly counts as long.
Next week will hold fairly steady for duration, intensity and distance. There will be another nasty speed workout, fewer intervals but slightly longer ones. The rest will be the same, which is nice, because it’s a Symphony weekend. I’ll probably even ditch one day on the bike trainer.
Pace (grey) and Heart Rate (red) over twelve intervals
This is where I really start training. It’s no longer about just building mileage through daily runs.
SOS stands for “something of substance” and it refers to runs that have a particular training focus. There will be three of these every week from now on. One will focus on speed (or later strength), one will be a tempo run at my goal marathon pace, and one will be the Long Run to extend my physical and mental stamina.
Speed is where I struggle. My legs probably have about six fast-twitch muscle fibres between them. I’m a slow-twitch gal through and through; that’s why I can add mileage so easily. So the speed interval workouts over the next five weeks are really going to challenge me. Based on my longer-distance performance, I “should” be able to run speed intervals at a pace of 4:53 per kilometer. I did it today, but even though the intervals were short, it was hard. I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to maintain that pace as the intervals get longer. Today’s only lasted 2 minutes: eventually they’ll last 6! Because today’s were short I had to run twelve of the damn things… and I lost count in the middle (on the graph that’s where I stopped and my heart rate dropped) and realized I had to do two more than I had briefly thought.
Tempo runs and long runs will probably be fine. I accidentally ran a 10k at almost tempo pace earlier this week and it felt pretty easy. And I know I can do long. Speed, though, speed kills.
Well thank goodness. I was just getting sick. That was why I was feeling so tired. Two days and three nights of low-grade fevers, aching legs, headache and fatigue. Then … nothing. My immune system seems to have won.
So, this is my bike trainer. I got it last summer, used, for $150. It’s a CycleOps Fluid2, which attaches to my rear axle and has a flywheel with silicon-fluid resistance. It’s amazingly quiet. I can watch episodes of The Wire on my little MacBook and can easily hear everything through its wee speaker. It has a really natural feel to it. As I increase my pedalling speed, the resistance goes up, just like wind resistance would go up in real life. It is stable, and smooth, and doesn’t slip.
What I can’t do is ride on Zwift, which I had really wanted to do. It’s a virtual social riding app which plops a Virtual You into various simulated cycling courses, with the scenery whipping by you in immersive virtual reality. Sadly they don’t yet support 650C wheels, the size that I have on my slightly smaller than typical road bike. And they don’t account for the aberrant decrease in viscosity of fluid silicon as it nears the 0ºC temperature of a Canadian garage in the depth of winter. That’s a double-whammy that means is that the calculations they do in order to determine my virtual speed and virtual power err on the side of the exceedingly generous. Because of the social nature of Zwift, the result is that when I drop my avatar into the environment — as I did during my free trial — Virtual Me begins merrily whupping all the other riders on the course. Which a few of them don’t take kindly to.
I changed my username to Sorry 650C-Tire. But people still didn’t get it; a few of them still nagged at me to “fix my power settings,” which unfortunately there was no way I could do. It would require some considerable explanation about my set-up to make them understand why, not something I wanted to have to do repeatedly in a tiny chat box, during a ride. And I couldn’t ignore the comments and just enjoy myself despite the snark, because I hate having negative vibes aimed at me. Too bad, because I really really loved the app.
A $600 power meter would fix the problem. Or a $1300 smart trainer like the Wahoo Kickr. But, well, no, not happening. Someday Zwift plans to build wheel size options into their app.
Until then, it’s okay. If I was riding long hard distances five days a week in my garage I’d be desperate for it. But I do at most three short easy rides a week, and that’ll be dropping as my running mileage increases. So I watch episodes of The Wire and I’m fine.
It’s a good thing, supposedly. At least in this case. But I’m feeling it today!
The idea is to train your body for endurance without doing outrageously long or difficult workouts, but by simply doing them frequently enough that your body doesn’t recover completely in between. By pushing your body to do more work before it is thoroughly recovered, you are encouraging it to adapt to these new, tougher conditions.
In preparing for a marathon I need structure. This time I’m basing my structure on Hansons Marathon Method, from the book of the same name. I’m now 5 out of 18 weeks through the program. The first 5 weeks are about building a base and acclimatizing to daily running. The next phase adds speed intervals and tempo runs, as well as longer easy runs. The third phase changes speed workouts for strength-based runs, and the final 10 days are of course a taper to the race.
Having finished the first phase the meat of the program hasn’t really begun. I’m doing pretty well; I find the easy runs easy and I am not experiencing any over-use symptoms from running every day. But because I’m combining the six prescribed runs a week with three bike rides a week on my trainer, I’m starting to experience the fatigue.
This is so just the beginning. (See weekly cumulative mileage in the graph along the bottom.)Some cross-training on the bike trainer. Also increasing.
There’s no doubt I’m going to have to give up the bike rides soon. The alternative would be to use them as substitutes for runs rather than additional workouts, but except for the fact that I can watch Homeland episodes on the trainer, I prefer running.
I took the plunge the other day and signed up for a marathon at the beginning of May. The idea had been rattling around in the back of my head for at few months and I didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to committing, but then on a whim I clicked on an email link and within a couple of minutes that was that. Gulp.
Daily workouts for the last few weeks. Still only 5-6 hours a week so far. Building a training base.
The last time I wrote about running, I was pondering relatively low-mileage marathon training. I’ve kind of shifted my thinking since then. While I’m going to keep my Weekly Long Runs fairly short, maxing out at 16 miles, I’ve been getting into the habit of running (or alternatively riding my bike trainer) every day. I’m finding that it’s easier to start my day asking myself when I will do a workout, rather than whether I will do one, and if so, when. As the length of my daily runs builds from 5-7 km to ~ 8-20 km, that means my weekly mileage is going to end up being pretty typical for marathon training, peaking at around 90 km in March/April.
The ideal winter running route for me.
Here is where I’m running four days a week. It’s a perfect route, flat as a pancake near the lake with a bit of elevation loss and gain getting to and from the green-dot start point (which happens to be where Fiona’s dance studio is). It’s about half well-trodden footpaths and half roads-and-sidewalks,. The lake tends to moderate the temperature, helping to melt snow fairly quickly even along the footpaths. A single circuit along the red route totals ~7 km, but by using the blue section I can create perfect 2.0k loops in the park to add to that. Until the snow is gone from the rail-trail, likely in early April, this will be my main Nelson stomping ground.
I’m home in New Denver on the weekends when I do my longer runs. I’ll have to run on the highways there until spring. “Highways” needs to be interpreted in a Kootenays context, of course: they’re two-lane winding mountain roads that are very scenic and little-travelled. I shouldn’t complain. But they’re full of hills, more open and much less interesting than trails, and there are no options for loops: always just out-and-back. So I’ll be very happy when the trails open up in the spring.
5-6 workouts a week, totalling 3.5-4 hours. Definitely sustainable.
I’m vaguely thinking about running a marathon again this year. Maybe the one I ran five years ago in Vancouver. It was a nice route, and by running the same event I’ll be able to see how my fitness is holding up over the years. Also I have a kid attending school nearby and another one who is going to be performing the Brahms violin concerto with an orchestra in the area around that time.
Right now I’m just trying to figure out if I have the time and (more to the point) the energy and motivation to enjoy the amount of training I’ll have to do? I decided to mock up a schedule training program for November and December to test the waters. I created a schedule of about four runs and one or two cross-training workouts a week. Nothing too demanding in terms of length or speed, just an attempt at consistency. I figured if I ended up feeling tired or unmotivated with the near-daily workouts, that would be a sign not to build to a marathon. But so far it’s going well. My no-workout days feel weirdly empty, and I’m enjoying my runs a lot despite the gross November weather and the early sunsets.
A typical marathon training program has runners build the length of a weekly Long Slow Run from 10 to 32 km over about 20 weeks with a bunch of easier shorter runs filling out the week. A few of those shorter runs will involve intervals or speed, but a lot of them are just “easy 5k’s” or whatever.
I expect my mileage graph will look less tilted than this.
But I know some things about myself and about the science behind distance running that are going to lead me to diverge from that typical plan. First, I’m not a beginner, so I’m starting at a higher mileage level, about 30k per week. Next, I know that I am one of those people who can push my distance pretty easily at any point. For instance I ran a really solid trail 25k in 2012, having not run anything longer than 8k in the preceding several months. I have little doubt I could finish a marathon tomorrow if I really needed to so I don’t need high mileage to build my confidence. Those really long training runs tend to mess with my running mojo when they come week after week. So I’ll avoid most of them.
I also know that slow runs between 60 and 90 minutes train your body to burn fat, the endurance fuel, and that there’s a law of diminishing returns on this count for runs of longer than 90 minutes. Not to mention an increase in the risk of injury. So I plan to do two or more slow runs in this middle range per week (or even, occasionally, the same day), rather than one massive run on the weekend.
And I know that my old stand-by workout, the 5k medium-speed run, is pretty useless from a training standpoint. It may be good for my state of mind, and it works the kinks out and helps burn calories, but from a training standpoint I’d be better off doing short runs of intervals or hills, or cross-training, or even taking a day off. So I’ll try to minimize those non-specific purpose-less runs.
Weird thing I noticed this week: my resting heart rate is really low. I got a new HR monitor after not having a functional one for a couple of years, to help me maintain my run intensity in the “low” range during endurance runs. I was lying down messing with my phone just before heading out for a run today and happened to glance at my Vivoactive watch. My HR was 46. I’ve never seen a reading lower than 50 in the past, more often around 52. Maybe my heart is just unwinding and will eventually slow to zero and that will be that? Ha, just kidding. I’ll take it as a sign of improved general fitness. Who knows why or how, but I’ll take it.
Last year I carved some time out of July to do a self-powered trip along the Silvery Slocan Circle Route. I did it counter-clockwise over three days, combining kayaking, running and road-biking. This year, with a new-to-me road bike recently acquired, I decided to do the same route all on two wheels. I rode clockwise for a switch, and over two relatively short days. The first day took me over the pass, through Kaslo, down the North Shore of Kootenay Lake to Nelson, for a total of about 112 km and 1700 metres of total climbing. The second day brought me home through the Slocan Valley, for about 100 km and a bit less climbing, about 1500 metres.
Because my overnight waypoint was the Nelson house, I was able to ride almost entirely unencumbered. I carried only water, snack, debit card, phone and my little bike toolkit. Knowing that all the comforts of home were already waiting for me in Nelson was almost as good as having a support team travelling with me!
The weather was great: cool but sunny. The seasons seemed to actually turn while I was riding. On Friday I had noticed that the birch leaves were looking paler as if they were getting ready to turn; by the time I arrived home on Sunday they were yellow and flying off the trees in the wind.
I like giving myself a multi-day solo challenge every year. It gives me time to just be with myself. I come out of it feeling like I’ve accomplished something, renewed. I think this is a tradition I’ll try to continue. I wonder what 2016’s challenge will be?
It was an early summer. The trees were greening up a good 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, and the season continued to unfurl early. The lake got “warm” (as warm as it ever does) in June. The wildfires were burning by the end of June. The huckleberries peaked in mid July. The wildflowers up Idaho peak were over before August began. And here it is September 2nd and the ‘late’ apples, pears and prune plums are ripening, the rains have socked in and the leaves are turning.
Symphony on the Mountain
And there has been a lot of water under the bridge. My mom came to visit. She’s really struggling with her rheumatoid arthritis, but a bit of prednisone helped take the edge off while she was here. She was able to be here when Erin performed a repeat of her grad recital locally. It was wonderful for us all to hear the maturity her playing has these days. She played the Debussy Sonata, Beethoven Sonata No. 7 and the Bach C Major solo sonata. She and I did the Symphony on the Mountain gig together in Kimberley. Kind of fun, and nice for me to get back to doing some symphony playing.
Fiona changed violin teachers. Although she really liked her previous teacher as a person, maybe the relationship was too casual: she just wasn’t feeling the drive to impress her, and maybe there was some trust lacking as well. She has had three lessons with the new teacher, and has said “She’s a little bit intimidating at first, but really nice, and she’s seasoned. You can tell she really knows what she wants, and how to explain it to me.” The new teacher is the one Erin went to for part of a year, who had to suddenly stop teaching when her husband got cancer. He’s well now, and she has returned to teaching in a very limited under-the-radar fashion. Fiona is one of three or four regular students she has. So far so good. We’ll get properly underway in a couple of weeks.
Ballet-specific physio
There has been physiotherapy. It has gone well. The tendons healed. The strength and flexibility have been very much compromised, though. There were several therapy sessions and lots of daily exercises prescribed. We had to drive to Spokane to get new pointe shoes and she’s now beginning some re-training exercises en pointe at home. She’s signed up for three two-hour days a week of ballet this year. Hopefully she’ll know enough to avoid pushing too hard as she comes back from this. She’s young and they start the year gradually: she’ll probably be fine. Gymnastics may be harder to approach as carefully.
The Uphill Cruiser, in progress: waiting on rubber and wicker
I started building a city bike, rehabilitating the Stumpjumper I bought in 1989 to try to get a couple of years of life out of it toodling around Nelson. I figure the mountain-climbing gears will be essential climbing 10% grades with payload. Eventually I hope to get an e-bike, but that’s hard to justify now when most of my travel is to transport kids.
Helping out at Dance Camp
Fiona wasn’t able to do dance camp, but she ended up being the teacher’s assistant at both the Music Explorers and age 6-11 dance camp. She was amazingly hard-working, helpful, pro-active and mature. Put in long days … up to 6 hours straight without any real break, herding children, helping with activities, doing prep and clean-up, redirecting problematic behaviour, supervising for safety.
Sophie and Noah have spent most of the summer in Nelson at the Mill St. house. Sophie has been working full-time at a café. She’s taken up longboarding. She’s got herself a twice-weekly paper delivery route. She shops, she cooks, she cleans, she’s been taking a Spanish course. She’s a maniac hard worker. Noah has spent much of the summer getting cold after cold, and when not sick playing D&D with his Nelson friends until the middle of the night. He’s also done some renovation and cleaning work on the Mill St. house. Spackling, washing everything with TSP, painting, carpet-underlay scraping, all that fun stuff.
SVI Play-in
SVI happened. It was over-the-top busy for me. Delegation is not my strong point. But Erin and Fiona were very helpful, and overall things ran smoothly. We had 95 students this year, the most ever, and with my grip on a local team of volunteer-parents slipping away now that I don’t teach locally, I struggled even more with asking for help. I managed to delegate one area, with rather less success than might have been due to my inability to relinquish control, but there is plenty of “room to grow” as they say.
We went to Ontario to visit my family and Chuck’s family. All six of us went, a miracle of planning and lucky timing. Erin was completing a Suzuki teacher training course in Waterloo, so we intercepted her there and managed visits here and there.
I biked as much as I could. The new bike has been fabulous. I got much stronger over time and decided there was no need for a bigger sprocket or smaller chainring. I just bought a used trainer, a Cycle Ops Fluid 2, and plan to keep riding in the garage even through worst of the fall rains and winter conditions. I have my iPhone rigged up on the aero bars for reading books. Also in the plans is a two-day Silvery Slocan bike ride, from one home to the other and back again.
And there’s been a bit of trail-running and mountain biking and alpine hiking. Not as much as any of us wished, but Fiona’s limited ambulatory capacity has put a bit of a crick in our style.
But there: that’s some of it anyway. And so we move onwards into fall.
My six-year runniversary, celebrating the start of my informal middle-aged commitment to running, slipped by without me noticing. When I began running at age 46, I was really excited by the whole endeavour. I enjoyed the milestones, I liked noticing my progress in mileage, speed and endurance. I ran a few races, I had a few injuries, I logged everything using apps and spreadsheets and loved watching the graphs I could generate. I participated in online and in-person running communities as much as I could.
And then for a couple of years I swung the other way. I ditched all the fit-tech, the races, the goals, the groups, the tracking. I just wanted to enjoy the process of running by myself, the zen of being out there, not focusing on the numbers my activity would generate.
The Vivoactive also has quirky custom watch faces: what more could I want?
Now my pendulum has swung back. I’ve just replaced my old Garmin Forerunner 305 with a swanky Garmin Vivoactive. It has some smartwatch features that work with my phone, is small enough and comfortable enough to wear as a day-to-day watch, does accelerometer-based fitness tracking, talks to a heart-rate strap, and most importantly to me has a GPS chip in it that tracks all my self-powered outdoor travel. It does the tracking without the help of my phone, and because it’s waterproof I can take it pretty much anywhere without any worries.
I’m not training or setting any goals at this point. But I enjoy seeing my numbers improve, particularly since I’ve just introduced regular road-biking into my life and that’s changing my fitness. Cranking up the steeper sections of the mountain roads here several times a week is building my muscle mass, for sure.
I do have a chronic running-related injury in my left ankle/heel stretching back three or four years now. It has defied all my efforts at repair and rehabilitation. It’s always there, but if I limit myself to at most 3 or 4 times a week, totalling 20-25k maximum, mostly at a 6:00/km pace or slower it stays under control. So the cycling, which doesn’t bother the heel at all, is filling in the rest of my exercise week really nicely. I can alternate an easy run with what are for me harder days of hill-climbing on the bike. This works beautifully and will continue to be a great way to stay in shape at least as long as the snow is off the roads.
Now that I’m both running and biking regularly, there’s a niggling voice in the back of my head muttering “tri, tri, tri.” But I am not a good swimmer, nor do I much like swimming,. And the lake is too cold 10 months a year. And the pool in Nelson is about to be closed for months for asbestos removal. And, and, and… So I’d be surprised if a triathlon ever happened for me but I suppose you never know.
If Erin weren’t so damned fit, this result would make me younger than she is.
Here’s a cool result from a nifty if fairly crude tool. The worldfitnesslevel.org calculator quizzes you about your age, gender, size, weight, resting and maximal heart rates and exercise habits, and gives you a “fitness age.” I come out looking pretty healthy these days.
Just for fun I repeated the quiz with what I think were my stats just before I started running. I came up with a fitness age of 40 vs. a chronological age of 45. I’ve definitely widened the gap since then!
Lately my life seems to go like this: Cooking, cleaning, computering, RUN! Cooking, cleaning, computering, RIDE! And repeat. Whatever. It works.
I bought myself a new bike. It’s a 2005, so it’s already middle-aged as bikes go, but it is in great shape and is a world apart from my 1989 Terry Symmetry, which was decidedly elderly and decrepit. The Terry was my first step up from the world of chain-store bikes and it has stood me pretty well. But it has a steel frame (which is dinged and a bit bent) and I realized a few hundred miles in that it was probably a size too small for me. I was still happy with it for a really long time, but in the last couple of years I just haven’t been able to keep the necessary parts moving well. It has reached the point where it needs the whole drivetrain replaced. Last winter I realized, while browsing around eBay looking for good deals on parts, that the parts were going to cost a couple of hundred bucks at the least, and in the end I’d still have a bent bike that didn’t fit me well.
Unlike our home up the valley here, Nelson has a couple of pretty awesome rolling routes for road-biking. I was enjoying biking along the North Shore and down on towards Castlegar, except for the inevitable back pain from being squeezed up over a short little top tube and the grinding resistance of an aging bottom-bracket.
So I started scouring PinkBike for small used road bikes. There was nothing suitable in my size on the used market for under $1000 in the Kootenays. I hoped I’d find something in the Vancouver area when we visited Noah in March, but no, not then, nor when I drove out again at the end of April to pick him up. I looked in the Okanagan, knowing I was picking Erin up there in early May, but alas that came up empty too.
But then I found the right bike at the right price in Calgary, and because I knew I’d be taking Erin to Alberta for a rehearsal with her pianist in late May, I begged the seller to hang onto it for me. I did a kind of stupid thing and sent her a deposit, sight-unseen, and not knowing her as anything other than a username on a website. But I got a good vibe from her, did a little bit of sleuthing (or creeping, depending on how you look at it) and decided she was a good person I could trust. I had a good feeling about the whole thing.
I thought it was the right bike. I had been vacillating back and forth between a road bike and a triathlon bike. (What’s the difference? Road bikes are like the traditional “ten-speed” bikes that started being mass-produced the 1970’s with the curved drop-handlebars and gently angled frames. Though of course there are much smoother, lighter, better-engineered versions available now than a generation ago. Tri-bikes on the other hand look similar to the uninitiated, but the downward-pointing tubes of the frame are closer to vertical, and they have those dorky aerodynamic handlebars that are made for kind of lying your upper body down on your bike, resting on your forearms with your hands out front like they’re the prow of a two-wheeled ship. Triathlon bikes are generally considered to compromise comfort for decreased wind resistance, and to “save the glutes for running” in that the more vertical push by the legs favours the use of the quadriceps. )
I had more or less decided that it was safest to stick with road-bike geometry because that was what I knew. But The Bike, the one that was the right size and the right price and that was being sold by the woman who I thought was lovely and honest, it was a triathlon bike. My tri-bike experience was limited to a 60-second test-ride of a similar-but-overpriced bike a few weeks earlier. I liked the aero-bar posture in that moment, but I also knew that most people find road bikes more comfortable.
The price for the new bike was only double what fixing my old bike would cost. It was almost 2 sizes bigger, yet it weighed less. And it was orange! It would (sorta) match my car! I had a really good feeling about it. So yup, even though it’s a triathlon bike, with all the pretentiousness, misplaced ambition and/or dorkiness that implies, I bought it.
I took it for a first ride in Canmore out the Legacy Trail towards Banff. I felt like I was flying. Such fun!
I should confess that I had driven alongside the Legacy Trail many times and had always scoffed: “Is that what Albertans think a trail in a National Park should be? A flat paved strip that runs beside a major highway? How lame!” But now I get it: it’s not that kind of trail, it’s a gently rolling highway-for-bikes and other self-powered wheely things, and it connects Canmore and Banff along the only corridor that doesn’t have mountains in the way. It’s smooth and fast for cycling and there’s no motorized traffic. It’s not a lame hiking trail, it’s a road for road-biking, one that doesn’t have cars and has lovely views of the Rockies. Now that I’ve mentally recategorized the Legacy Trail as a cycle path, I get it. It’s awesome.
So I flew along the Legacy. So sweet! I powered up gradual grades, never needing the low gears. I averaged well over 30 km/h without even pushing myself.
And then I came home and remembered that I live on a mountain. If I was going to ride around my primary home, I was going to have to cope with 10% grades. The 30-metre elevation gain over the entire 28 kilometres of the Legacy Trail? I get that in my 2k “warm-up” here! My first ride up the highway was not an experience with flying. I made it up, but it wasn’t pretty. My old Terry had what is called a “granny gear,” a third, smaller chain-ring that gives a range of extra-low gearing. I’m a stamina-not-strength girl; give me a low enough gear and I can spin all day, crawling up steep slopes like a caterpillar, but eventually getting there. On the other hand, ask me to summit Highway 31A in 1st-gear-is-the-new-7th and I grunt and sweat and want to throw up and the next day my quads begin 36 hours of whinging about what I’ve put them through …. ask me how I know.
At the summit
The easy solution would be to swap out sprockets, or down-size my smaller chainring. Even before I bought the bike that’s what I assumed I’d end up doing. But today I rode again. I took it easier on the easy parts, saving myself for the nasty bits. My legs had recovered, and hey, I did better! I made it up beaver-pond rise without a break, and not once did I feel like throwing up. In fact I had a grand time. Also: no back pain! Tired shoulders after a while, but I can tell I’m still a bit too tight and hunched in the upper back in the new low position. But no back pain at all. Sweet!
Here’s our minivan. We bought it about 18 months ago and it transformed my driving experience. It made access to alpine hikes a breeze. Road trips and drive-in movies were awesome. I loved not having to hike in from the highway end of our driveway even once last winter, and knowing that winding mountain roads covered in snow were safer with our 4-wheel-drive and high ground clearance. The right-hand drive was easy to get used to, and while there are more and more of these beasts in the area, I also loved the mildly eccentric aura that it created around us. Fuel mileage has been pretty decent, and it’s a spacious and comfortable vehicle for five or more.
But the Delica is showing its age (it’s a 1994), especially since we’re such mileage-hogs. Our at-home family is smaller now, and I’m not driving five teenagers to choir practice anymore. In another month all three of my older kids will be in possession of driver’s Learners Permits (Erin and Noah having delayed attaining their full licensure due to a combination of temperament and lack of proximity to home). And really, what is the wisdom in having beginning drivers learn their basic skills in a right-hand-drive vehicle? So we’re planning to sell it and buy something new or new-ish. Something with all-wheel drive, but smaller and cheaper to maintain, considerably more fuel-efficient and with the driver’s seat on the left. I also like the idea of having airbags again. I’d like a few airbags. Hoping to make this a reality before winter hits full-force, since this is a pretty good time of year to be selling a snow-trampling monster minivan.
We’re now spending part of each week in a city. When we get to Nelson, we’ve been trying to leave the van parked at the house, and walk as much as we can. It’s been so much fun to poke our way around amongst the secret stairways and paths in a city where the terrain makes drivable roads a bit of an engineering challenge. Our house in Nelson is a mere 750 metres from downtown, but 100 metres above it with most of the elevation gain taking place over just 400 metres. Just getting home is a workout, and it’s a workout we tend to do at least a couple of times a day. The sidewalks run places roads can’t, and we love the feeling of winding our way amongst lovely homes and beneath hardwood trees with changing leaves, up “sidewalks” like the one pictured above.
So we’re spending three days a week in a walkable city, and when we’re home we hardly need to drive at all. We’re still doing two trips a week to Nelson, but soon that will be in a much smaller vehicle that gets double the mileage. Our carbon footprint should diminish dramatically in size this year.
First I made my own huaraches. That was really fun, and they worked well enough, but I didn’t have quite the right sole material. The soles were thick enough but not rigid enough. They flopped and slapped, and if I didn’t have them laced fairly tightly the front end would flop down during my stride-through and I would sometimes catch the toe end: not fun!
Then I bought a pair of Luna Sandals, looking for something more rigid for rougher trails. Maybe some of their models are great, but I went too much to the other extreme and bought the Leadvilles which were far too rigid and clunky for my tastes. I still own them, but I honestly can’t imagine a trail that would be so rough that I’d take them over a more minimalist sandal: you really can’t feel anything through them. Miles and miles of sharp scree, maybe. Typical rough and rocky Kootenay back-country trails? Naw.
Amuri Cloud: slight heel cup, and one of the lacing adjustment sliders
Finally last fall I bought a pair of Xero Shoes Ventures. They are sort of a hybrid between a flat basic home-made-style huarache and a manufactured sandal. The have techie lacing fittings and slightly engineered soles and a manufactured toe post. But they’re super light and thin, and just barely rigid enough to avoid the toe-catching and slapping sounds I got from my home-made jobbies.
I really liked them, and used them for casual wear, beach and boat stuff, regular runs, trail runs and hiking. Until a couple of months ago, when one of the toe posts fell apart for no apparent reason. I was sad. I had really wanted to like them. I couldn’t decide what to do. I know runners in conventional shoes trade their $120 shoes out every six months or sooner, but as a minimalist runner I thought I was done with that hamster wheel.
Once the laces are adjusted they work as slip-ons. The black area is the foam, the brown the solid rubber.
Finally a couple of weeks ago I figured I might as well write to the company to ask about buying replacement toe posts. They were fabulous. They apologized profusely for the problem I’d had, said they hadn’t had much of this problem but no manufacturing process was ever completely free of defects, and they would like to send me a free replacement pair of sandals — but could they talk me into their newer Amuri Cloud style, which was a little bit lighter with part of one are of the topsole replaced with thin foam. Sure, I said!
They arrived within a few days, no small feat considering where we live. And I love them even more than I loved the Ventures. Partly because of the slight cushioning and better grip and breathability of the foam, and partly because I like the mocha/black colourway.
Gentle but secure lacing — finally!
I should say that I found both my original Xeros and these new ones quite frustrating to get adjusted at the beginning. You can adjust the overall tightness of the laces, but by sliding the knot you can adjust the angle of the forefoot lacing, and by pushing or pulling the laces through the side-holes you can adjust whether the tightness is more in the forefoot or heel. There’s no real science to what works to prevent excess tightness and discomfort while keeping the heel straps from slipping off. Maybe other people have less trouble than I do. My foot is relatively narrow and tall so perhaps I have an especially small window of optimal fit with this type of lacing. I’d think I had it, but then I’d go for a run and the heel strap would slip down, or I’d get a pressure hot-spot from the knot. Try again. Different problem. Try again.
But eventually I found it, the optimal lacing tension for me. Barely on, but always on. They’re my favourite footwear. I didn’t use them for the circle route because I know that when I haven’t done a lot of recent running in huaraches I get horrid blisters in my toe web-space if I run too long in them. Since these are new, I didn’t have time to acclimate to them. But next time — yeah!
It’s an activity tracker, a value-added pedometer. I bought it about 15 months ago. I got it as a way to be less obsessed with tracking the minutiae of my exercise. With my old Garmin (has it really been five years?!), which is bulky and a bit uncomfortable to wear, I tended to geek out and get all micro-analytical when presented with the detailed real-time information about distance, pace, speed, slope, calories and heart rate. It fed into my self-competitive tendencies, and I would find myself running too fast or too far, just to make the next round number. 5k in 25 minutes, or 10k today instead of the 7.2 that feels about right, or a negative split on the second half of the run. That tended to lead to injury and to focus on the data record, with less enjoyment of the actual running. The graphs were beautiful, but distracting.
I wanted to focus more on the experience of running. For a while I ran completely ungadgeted. I had dropped the iPod quite early on, but dropping the data was a big change. It was lovely when I was motivated to run, but sometimes I felt I needed a little prod to get out the door. I thought the Fitbit might be able to give me a little bit of self-accountability without feeding into my self-competitive tendencies.
I was right. It has struck the right balance. Knowing a step-count record is accumulating – or not — is enough to give me a little nudge when I need it, and yet the information it provides is minimal and delayed, so it acts more like a pat on the back when I’ve done well than a coach yelling at me to “push faster!” or “do one more lap!” I’ve worn it almost every day and I still like it a lot.
I like that it counts the about-the-house-and-yard-and-town exercise I get, which I tend to undervalue. I like how unobtrusive it is, and how it looks almost like a simple rubber band bracelet. I like the well-oiled bluetooth connectivity with my smartphone app, which means I can check historical and current-day info anytime on my phone. It has a sleep-tracking function, which I find interesting. It will show me measurements of my total sleep time, and of my times of restlessness and wakefulness. It’s not a perfect accounting, as it relies only on left arm movement, but it provides some interesting information over time. I like the way I can set truly silent vibratory alarms that alert me and no one else. The alarm will awaken me from sleep, but it can also tell me when a violin lesson should be wrapping up.
I find it has very good accuracy. I’ve tested it by counting steps and measuring distances with GPS, and it is as near to perfect as a wrist-band pedometer could be. It counts my treadmill exercise too, which a GPS-based device doesn’t, which is a nice bonus.
I wish it were waterproof. It’s splash- and sweat-resistant, but it’s supposed to come off during showering, washing dishes and minivans, while swimming and in the pouring rain.
I’ve had lots of problems with the charger. It just doesn’t make a connection as reliably as it’s supposed to. That was true of the first charger, which started getting really finicky after about three weeks, and eventually I couldn’t get it to charge at all. The company quickly sent me a replacement, but that didn’t completely fix the problem. So they sent me a whole new Fitbit, which did fix the problem, but only for a couple of months. Now I have two complete rigs, neither of which works well. The new one is much better but it only rarely charges perfectly. Usually I have to carefully construct an array of elastic bands and wedges to hold it in just the right spot in the charger to make contact. The old one I sometimes can’t get to charge for weeks. Sophie used it for a while, then gave up.
And I wish it had a watch. I would never wear a watch and the Fitbit together, and sometimes I would like to have a watch. How tough could it be to add a watch to the display? For a short time the company offered a newer model, the Force, which had a time display, but it was recalled and pulled from the market due to problems with the clasp. It hasn’t been re-released, nor has anything else taken its place. And in the meantime Nike has stopped making their Fuel Band, and it seems like everyone is holding their breath, waiting for the Apple iWatch to drop. It’s in the wind ….
I’m waiting too. I hope my Fitbit lasts until the kinks in the as-yet-unreleased iWatch get worked out and the 2nd generation hits the market. Another 18 months, maybe. Despite its limitations and the charger quirks I really do like the balance the Fitbit strikes. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be one of those keeners pre-ordering the iWatch 2.
