Nurtured by Love

Year: 2015

  • Another marathon?

    Screenshot 2015-11-22 16.30.50
    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.

    Screenshot 2015-11-22 18.05.37
    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.

  • Front Room

    Front Room

    Old plaster-and-lath and gaping fir flooring in the front room.
    Old plaster-and-lath, upside-down receptacle and gaping fir flooring in the front room.

    Oh look. I did some things. The front bedroom was uninhabitable when we took possession of the Nelson house. Over the summer Noah, Sophie and friends stripped and then repainted the two gyproc walls, but the ceiling was flaky acoustic tile and two of the walls were this stuff: plaster and lath with a bit of vermiculite behind it, being held together by many layers of paint, wallpaper and press-board panelling. At the suggestion of our building inspector we chose not to investigate asbestos status but simply to leave everything intact and seal it off. The safest way, really. So I cleaned loose plaster away, shimmed the places where it was gone completely and got the walls passably flat.

    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up
    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up

    Then I drywalled over it. The ceiling required ten-foot sheets. Chuck and I did those together with a single step-ladder and, among other things, a baseball bat. Not too many corners (or arms or toes) got damaged.

    I actually kind of like taping and mudding drywall. Not that I’d want to do that for a living, but a single room is a gratifying project. I’ve done it before, but it had been years. I got better at it as I went. In the end I didn’t get obsessive and do a full skim coat, since the two walls that had been done by a previous owner weren’t perfect either. But I got a pretty decent finish in the end.

    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.
    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.

    From there it was on to painting. I went with what was marketed as a sort of chic tan-grey but turned out to be not that far off the colour of raw drywall, but whatever. Neutral, so that redecorating won’t require repainting, since we’re not really sure what this room will be for over the medium-term, and may not own the house for all that long anyway.

    Then the flooring went in. That was really fun. I had picked up enough surplus engineered hickory via the regional buy & sell website for a nice price. I floated it over an underlayment, gluing the tongue-and-groove together, staggering the joints. It took me about 5 hours, and this was where the room really began to pop for me. Adding the mouldings was a time-consuming final step but brought everything up to the next level.

    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.
    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.

    Sophie liked the room enough to move into it, vacating the larger, slightly more private room on the other side of the house. Which prompted Fiona to move across into the now-empty “blue room” that had been Sophie’s.  All of which is good because it means that the room she was in, which Noah repainted during the summer, is now empty and can get a bunch of finishing details done. Then I can move into that, meaning the entire upstairs will be empty and we can start looking towards a major renovation up there in the spring. The plan for upstairs is to add a dormer with a bathroom in it, and turn the rest into a master bedroom. The extra bathroom is definitely needed in a house with four bedrooms. Last weekend during the choral festival we had Sophie’s friend plus four billets staying with us. The eight of us had enough space, but sharing one bathroom eight ways was nuts. The girls were great about it but … yeah, it was crazy.

  • House progress

    I really love our Nelson house. When we bought it I was sold on it as an investment, a fixer-upper, but I think I’m falling in love now. It has a really nice feel to the living space. It’s open and light and airy during the day, and yet at night it feels cosy and welcoming: the best of both worlds! I love the absence of clutter and the simplicity of the space. I know it’s probably just a matter of time, but I’m determined to do whatever I can to keep the junk from accumulating. (Maybe it will help that Chuck doesn’t actually live there!)

    Now that we’re establishing a fall routine of back and forth-ing, I’m love having repair and renovation projects I can pick away at when I’m there, rather than just feeling like I’m killing time during the girls’ activities. This week I did a fair bit of outdoor work, dealt with a couple of filthy floors and completed the stripping of a white bookcase in preparation for repainting it black. I’ve also been researching historical colour schemes for the exterior. The big project for next week will hopefully be drywalling the front bedroom. I’ve been making extensive use of Kijiji (our version of Craigslist) and have scored some lovely hand-scraped hickory to re-do the flooring in there too. Sophie is hosting three choir festival billets the first weekend of November, so I hope to have that room finished by then!

    • Finished converting my 1989 black Stumpjumper into a mountain city cruiser

  • 2015 Loop

    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.

    Screenshot 2015-09-16 13.10.20

    Screenshot 2015-09-16 13.10.46

     

    IMG_2517Because 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?

  • Summer, here and gone

    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.

    IMG_2233
    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
    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
    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
    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 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.

    IMG_2312We 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.

    IMG_2371And 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.

  • Running on

    IMG_2243My 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: quirky custom watch faces... what more could I want?
    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 her.
    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.

  • (Two) New wheels

    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. ) IMG_2068

    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
    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!

  • Pergola completed

    Pergola completed

    With lights and wattle railing panels installed.

  • Pergola

    • A little help from Limpet
    Our “new” deck is almost five years old now. I always had bigger dreams for the square apron that extends towards the trees, but at the time we opted to put up a minimalist railing for safety reasons. Of course that had the effect of eliminating all the urgency of doing something else with the space.

    A couple of weeks ago at Fiona’s behest I ordered some nice globe lights to string over the apron. We spend a lot of time walking around Nelson and, being new to the whole business of neighbourhood rambles, we enjoy noticing the neat things people have done with their homes and businesses. We were admiring a lovely lighted patio and suddenly the push was on to enact some similar ambiance at home.

    Over the Easter long weekend, with all four of us home and available, we decided it would be an opportune time to push to get the project both started and [hopefully] completed. I had spent a few hours the previous week digging the screws and bolts out of the under-inner-side of the old uprights. Chuck had got busy reclaiming lumber from the remains of our old carport, cutting it down to the right dimensions.

    When we got home from Nelson mid-day on Friday the girls immediately got busy with the measuring tape, some cardboard templates and the jigsaw. Spring is still toying with us: while the sun shows up from time to time, temperatures tend to otherwise hover just above the freezing point, and today was definitely on the cool side. The fire pit helped warm our hands up when we needed. Between them Sophie and Fiona did almost all the 40-odd decorative ends for the beams.

    The first afternoon we got all the beams prepped and ready for assembly.

    Then we hit a couple of snags. First … it snowed overnight. It took a few hours for the snow to melt. And then we realized that the 8″ lag bolts weren’t quite long enough to anchor the two corner posts that had to be mounted into diagonal braces. Eyeballs and guesses had been substituted for trigonometry. That’ll teach us! The building supply store was closed for the holidays, so we were stuck.

    We did still manage to do a fair bit of assembly, using clamps and braces and gravity and what hardware we had. We got to the point of having the main structure standing, with the cross-beams laid overtop but not secured. The next time we have a chance to do some work, we’ll substitute in the proper bolts, attach the cross-beams, work on wattle railings and attach the light strings.