Category: Being active
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R&M Roadster: Early Review
Early thoughts and observations of my new Riese und Müller Roadster Mixte e-bike. Spoiler: it’s amazing, a worthy car replacement that feels like an ordinary bicycle whilst having superpowers
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Search for a winter-worthy e-bike
After two years of making do with the Rad Mini I’ve decided to upgrade my e-bike. The Rad is the inexpensive hub-drive bike we bought to help Fiona get around Nelson on her own. After she graduated from high school it languished for a year or so until I took it over in 2021, making […]
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The orange pill
During the summer of 2021, Fiona was offered a job working as a veterinary assistant at a clinic 50 km away. It was a super opportunity, so I told her she should take it, and she could use my car for the commute. I would use the e-bike. We had bought a Rad Mini in […]
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A thoroughly empty nest
As mid-2022 approaches and we are facing the likelihood of not having any of our four kids “home” for the first summer ever, it seems we really are empty nesters now. We still have an unbelievably ancient dog though, if that counts. Limpet is almost 17 and a large breed mix whose life expectancy was […]
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COVID-19: the first six months
I had a haircut scheduled. Fiona was supposed to be doing her driving road test in a few days. It was March 17th, 2020. A week later my hair was longer than ever, and it would continue to grow for another 12 weeks, and Fiona was still a student driver. And then, with gloves for […]
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Done?
Are we done raising children? It almost feels like it. This is the third year with all three older kids living and working far from home. Fiona turned 16 this week and is incredibly self-sufficient, living 90 minutes from home. She finished her high school graduation requirements last week, though she’s taking a couple more […]
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Ex-runner? Cyclist?
I’ve become whatever the female equivalent of the mamil (middle-aged man in lycra) is. I am obsessed with cycling. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since my last cycling-related post exactly a year ago. At that point I was all set up on Zwift and enjoying riding my aluminum tri-bike regularly, noting improvements […]
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Mountain Goat Hike
We continued our end-of-summer alpine hiking tradition as best we could this year. Instead of four or three of us female members of the family, we only had two of us. Sophie spent the summer train-hopping, road-tripping to the States, launching rockets and doing military training, so she hasn’t been home. Erin spent the summer on […]
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Zwifting along
The Boston Marathon has turned out not to be possible for me. I spent three months babying my knee (after just barely beginning to run regularly in the fall) and still, within a month of starting marathon training it was as bad as ever. I was living on ibuprofen, and most mornings it was so swollen […]
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Zwifting on a Stac Zero
Yeah, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have had any idea what the title of this post meant either. But for the past week, after more than a year of waiting, it’s become a part of my daily life. Well, at least part of my daily life in New Denver. There are two bits of magic […]
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Upgrading the trail
I began working on a connecting trail from our property to the linear park below almost three years ago. I hacked in a goat-path of sorts: narrow and full of switchbacks. It changed my life, in that it made one of my favourite running trails a mere 3-minute scrabble from my door. But it wasn’t a […]
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Dance showcase
Four performances, four or five numbers each time. It was a crazy weekend, but she emerged motivated to add even more dance next year, to immerse herself further in life at the studio, in training her body, in learning more technique, in broadening her skills.
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BQ
The stars aligned, and I had a really good race. In my last post I said “I would be happy, now four years older and well on the far side of 50, if I could better my 4:24 time from 2012. I think that’s definitely possible, and if all goes well I could cut quite […]
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Ready to Taper
T minus ten days to the marathon. Because the training schedule I’m using has a short taper, and I further offset it by two days to fit my weekly schedule, I still technically have one more tempo run to do. But I’m going to scale back the intensity on it. Basically the hard work is done, and I […]
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Circus
Both Fiona and Sophie are doing aerial silks at the new circus arts school in Nelson. They’re in different classes and I haven’t had a chance to see Sophie in action yet. She’s been at it for just over three months; the instructor moved her up from beginner to Level 1 after the first session and she’s […]
