Month: April 2021

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Running: What is Hill Training?

Sunday Runday and while the weekends are reserved for distance training, the springtime has rebooted our training schedule and put us back into proper-training-mode. This includes regular and progressively longer hill training runs.

If you happen to live beside a hill where runners train maybe you’ve seen folks like my running friends and I, climbing and descending on repeat, week after week. Perhaps you wondered what the heck why were were torturing ourselves so…

So, what is hill training?

Running is running, and the longer you run the further you’ll be able to go… eventually.

More serious, focused run training tends to pry apart the various aspects of running and portion them into dedicated types of runs meant to isolate enhancing various pieces of the running puzzle: speed, endurance, longevity, pace, and strength.

Hill repeats are meant to build strength. They add a very specific element of resistance to a run, building stronger muscles and generally agreed upon to improve overall performance.

Our hill is roughly a 7% – 9% grade leading into and out of a creek valley near our meeting point. Our Wednesday runs turn into hill training sessions in the spring and early summer, building back up that foundational strength that usually dwindled over the winter months.

There are many different approaches to training on hills as there are runners, but here’s what my crew does:

A brief warm-up run leads us down to our start point.

A single repeat includes a steady climbing run up to a designated point roughly four hundred meters from the base of the hill. As we crest this distance, we do a short recovery walk, turn around, and jog at an easy pace back down to the bottom of the hill.

Starting in early March we begin with three repeats, building by one each week until we reach a maximum. That maximum count depends on the type of race for which we are training, but usually somewhere between twelve and fifteen repeats total by the time we enter June.

(After June we switch to speed training mixed with “hilly runs” which are things I’ll get around to writing about then!)

It’s a tough session. It’s a tough spring. But it’s been working for us for a long time.

Hill training is a slower, deliberate isolation of run training meant to build strength, train muscles in ways not targeted on flat trails, and make runners better at their sport. We grumble a lot, but the spring pain has payoffs for a great summer.

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Suburban Fire Craft (Part Two)

Back in early March I introduced my readers to my simmering big plans to upgrade my backyard fire pit set up.

For years we’ve not made campfires in our backyard a priority, mostly because we could go camping any time we wanted and evenings in the city were otherwise filled with social visits and travel. Backyard campfires were an occasional indulgence.

For half a decade we have had a small fire bowl which for basic purposes allowed us to have a small marshmallow-roasting fire in the backyard if we wanted, and I kept a bit of wood in the shed for a those handful of evenings a year when we kindled a flicker-filled gathering out our back door.

But the prospect of another summer of limited camping and sidelined travel plans… blah, blah, blah. You know the story. You’re all living it, too.

Since that post, I’ve made some purchases and done some setup work. Last night it all came together for an innagural (if small and simple) backyard cookout involving some sausages, marshmallows, and a beautiful evening watching the sunset beside some glowing coals.

First, I bought the family a new movable fire pit. It’s a much more elaborate setup than our old bowl, though. It’s a side-vented deep body steel fire pit, with a removable tray for charcoal burning, and two cast iron grill plate attachements. I can either cook on the grills directly, or it’s strong enough to hold a pan or a small dutch oven atop.

Second, I bought some cooking fuel in the form of both charcoal and smoking pellets. The tray insert allows us to have simple grilling fires which (unlike the gas grill we often use for backyard “barbecues”) is a more authentic cooking-over-fire option we now have.

Third, I stocked up on wood. Not only did my coworker chop down a bank of aging trees in her backyard and provide me with a few good chopping stumps and a truck full of logs, but I ordered a cubic meter of firewood from a local supplier, dried and ready for a summer of backyard fires.

Summer isn’t quite here, but I’m officially ready to tackle it with flame and iron… right in my own backyard.

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Douglas Fir

Look up but watch where you’re going.

On a recent trip to the mountains I was reminded of the diversity of the forest and the interesting world of trees. I may not work in the field, but I have a four year university degree in biology which included more ecology, botany, and entomology coursework than any normal lifespan should have to contain.

Even though it didn’t turn into a job, those four years earned me an immovable respect for the natural world and a firmly entrenched fascination with the diversity of living things.

I was looking up at the trees, but not really watching where I was going.

Of the many of varieties of trees I was looking at, and among the dozens of species that make up the mountain forests, there is one that has held my interest for a very long time: the mighty and curiously-named Douglas Fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It has held my interest not because it is necessarily an interesting tree, which it probably is in its own right, but because when I learned about this tree as a kid my best friend’s name was “Doug” and I always felt a bit jealous that he had his own tree.

Yet, the Douglas fir was most definitely not named after my school chum, Doug. It was in fact named after a nineteenth century Scottish botanist and explorer named David Douglas. He is credited (in the narrow bandwidth of European science) with first cultivating the fir which would later bear his name. He did this in his twenties. In his twenties!

I certainly did not discover or cultivate much of interest in my twenties. Though in my thirties I helped cultivate a daughter who is now a teenager and who is anxiously contemplating her future education. We spent nearly an hour last night having a heart-to-heart conversation, me trying to bear witness to her struggles to find a meaningful life path, and also empathize through recounting my plight of squandering a university education in an interesting field for which I still have passion but most definitely no career.

She is young and still looking up at those millions of trees in the forest and their possibilities.

I’m getting older and often watching my feet, trying to remember to look up occasional and admire that world around me.

Look up.

David Douglas died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty five, but the officially documented cause was still interesting. Like a cartoon villain in a Gilligan’s Island rerun, he fell into a trap hole on a Hawaiian island and was mauled to death by an angry bull while his dog watched from the edge the pit. I suppose it could be said he, being a young and ambitious guy, spent a lot of time looking up at the trees and what was under his feet ultimately got him in the end.

The moral of the story is that if you’re always looking up at the trees someone might name one of those trees after you forever securing your legacy… but also don’t be surprised if you fall into a hole to your immediate doom.

The parenting lesson is that I need to give my teenage daughter the ability to look up and admire those trees, take her to the forest (both literal and metaphorical) but that I also need to be a good dad and keep my eyes on the ground for her. Maybe those four years of university weren’t a waste of time after all.

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pihêsiwin ᐱᐦᐁᓯᐏᐣ

I need to get serious for a post.

I had a tough conversation at work yesterday about racism.

One of my coworkers had been slurred while out walking in our otherwise beautiful trails… because of his visible ancestry.

Really. I mean… *ugh*

I have a lot of conversations like this recently. Simultaneously not enough talk but sadly too many instances. I guess I should feel good that a work friend feels he can confide, and give me an honest ask of “as a white guy… what the heck is up?”

(Not that I have an answer.)

I try to use this blog to write about positive things. After all, like me, I’m sure you have all had enough of folks veering ever-more divisively on political topics throughout your social feeds. But here’s the thing: I go for many walks in the woods, through the trails, around my city, and rarely do I feel fearful. Learning that anyone, but maybe today and particularly a guy who I work with, who is essentially my professional contemporary in position, age, and education, feels threatened walking through those same spaces… that sucks. It compounds the negative and works against the vibe I’m trying to create here.

This morning yet again I was reminded of this.

In a meeting someone suggested, as a election approaches in the fall, that we learn to pronounce our ward names. Over the last couple years, Indigenous Elders and urban Indigenous community members worked to tie some historical indigenous naming to what was previously a numbered collection of electoral districts.

I now live in a ward named pihêsiwin.

Pee - HEY - sa - win

The name pihêsiwin means Land of the Thunderbirds and was given to this ward because from an aerial view it is shaped like a pihêsiw (thunderbird).

These trails I explore, that weave through and between and among the places I work and play and live, they have a long history. My ancestors may have come to live here many, many years ago but on cultural timescales it has been such a short time that I’ve been a part of this space. I share this Cree word, pihêsiwin, because it reminds me of a bigger story hidden among the poplar trees, swimming through the river, and swooping through the skies above me.

I may spend my entire life here. I may live here and call it home. I may hope to shape it and build in it, and enjoy it, but like everyone before me and everyone after me, I’m just passing through. I hope I can leave something of a mark upon this space, but only if that mark builds upon all the great stories that preceded it and made this space what it is today.

More importantly that story takes everyone to write no matter your history, shape, colour, or philosophy, all of us shaping it together. And I like it that way.