Month: December 2021

Posted on episode 276

Adventure Runs Season Two

I may have written earlier this year about how I’ve spent each of the last two summers devising a weekly run outing for my running crew.

Each week over about fourteen weeks of summer we would meet at a location I’d disclosed earlier in the day for a six to eight klick run.

It could be through a neighbourhood. It could start in a bedroom community outside the city. It might wind through the river valley in an interesting place. It just had to be somewhere interesting, new or both.

What adventure from 2021 will be forever etched upon your memory.

for whatever one photo is worth:

In mid-June I summoned the runners to a location on the far east side of the city in a small park area adjacent to a billionaires row of oil refineries.

From here the mighty North Saskatchewan river wends past the last few suburbs of Edmonton and out into the vast prairies, Atlantic-bound (or at least towards the Atlantic via the Hudson’s Bay).

We parked, lathered up in bug spray and trotted off into the valley at a casual running pace.

Along the way we encountered treacherous cliffs, uncertain detours, instagrammable locations to pose with rusted out vehicles, paths lock to construction, bushwacking through low tree branches, a small but wet water crossing, a climb up a grassy summer ski hill, and a slog through an ill-marked trail …or three.

It was a kooky but amazing little evening adventure.

And it was topped off by the fact that as we all went to drive away home from the single exit to the park, there stopped a freight train blocking our path of escape for nearly an hour. We all wandered around outside of our queued up vehicles and lamented the real meaning of an urban evening adventure that ended with a prairie blockade.

Local adventure is what you make of it. It’s finding something new, even if new is just a few minutes drive from where you live, work, or usually play.

I think back on that evening in mid-June and how it defined what could go sideways on a quirky, loosely-planned run, but it also highlighted exactly why we crave such things at all. It is now, even almost six months to the day later, stuck in my brain as one of the weirdest evenings of the summer… in a good way.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 275

Interesting Places

Depending on how the rest of my holiday-countdown week shapes up, how the holiday break happens (or not), and a couple of pandemic-related decisions that have yet to be made get sorted, going out on the winter trails last night for a six klick run in the falling snow may have marked my last run with the crew of this year.

Describe your 2021 in terms of fitness, health, mind and body.

In fact just about a week ago a new bridge opened up crossing the mighty North Saskatchewan river.

About five years ago the old and well-loved foot bridge at the same location was closed (amidst protest) as construction of a new leg of our rapid rail transit system was officially started. The Tawatinâ Bridge which opened last week now stands in its place and is an LRT rail bridge with a wide pedestrian foot bridge suspended below it. The view from that footbridge is of the city, the river, and a huge collection of indigenous art embedded into the concrete.

We parked near that bridge last night even as the snow started to fall and then we ran a loop through the river valley trails near downtown, a run that concluded with crossing the bridge (on foot) for the first time.

It was dark, snowy, and the bridge was spectacularly lit and illuminated brilliantly even by the frozen precipitation all around and in the air.

If it was my last crew run of 2021, it was a fitting one.

We call it another year of lockdowns and uncertainty, but to be sure for much of the world it marks the first full calendar year, January through December, of what is turned out to be the embodiment of that famous curse “may you live in interesting times.”

Who knew interesting times would be so repetitive and boring.

Admittedly in the last two years I’ve lost a measurable amount of my fitness.

I entered 2020 with the plan of training for and running the Chicago marathon, while two years later (not having ever stepped a single foot in Chicago after all) I plod out ten klick runs on the regular, but can’t barely conceive of training for a full marathon distance lately.

Running has kept me healthy though… mentally, physically and soulfully.

That likely has as much to do with a core group of six or seven people as anything involving sneakers or trails.

That said, a run like the one we did last night would have been an unusual adventure two years ago. Meeting somewhere other than the running store. Meeting at a time off the regular schedule. Running a course that was as much exploration and discovery as it was an exercise in fitness and training.

The pandemic, in blocking off the regular pattern of things, has disrupted so much in negative ways, but in adapting to those disruptions it has created interesting changes.

May you run in interesting places isn’t so much a curse as it is a cure for the mind and body.

And we certainly spent 2021 running through interesting places.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 274

Curry Surprise

There is a graphic design story that I read about a decade ago that goes something like this: nearly everyone hate the font “comic sans” and turns their noses up whenever it turns up printed across an amature bit of graphic design work. But as much as some might scorn the folks who use that font, the alternative perspective is simply that … as bad as that font might be … people who use comic sans are still thinking about fonts, design, and breaking out of the old standard font library that comes default with their computer.

Even if you don’t care about fonts or design, the moral of the little parable is simply that people who try, even if their attempt is mediocre by professional standards, are still people who try.

Trying is the first step to learning.

I bring this up only because back in university I was a terrible cook… but I tried.

What is something you ate 25 years ago that you’d never eat now?

My wife (who I was merely dating at the time) calls it curry surprise.

Ground beef, curry paste, cooked noodles, cheddar cheese, and … well, serve hot.

Or better, don’t serve… and just eat alone in front of the television before you go back to your bedroom and hit the homework for the evening.

It wasn’t great. It was a student meal.

But I cooked it routinely because it was simple, filling, hit multiple food groups, and (honestly) none of my roomates would steal my leftovers.

We laugh at it now and every so often I offer to cook my wife a helping of curry surprise, but I look back on those days of experimenting with weird (and akward) variations as my cooking-slash-comic-sans moment. Cringe-inducing and not worth considering for anything serious, but yet dabbling and thinking about food, cooking, and those first steps to being better in the kitchen as an adult.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 273

Glacial Stares

Sometimes things just click.

Sometimes you need to do a hike up the side of a mountain to an interesting place, lay on the bare ground and get the moment just right for things to work out how you want.

Describe the best picture
you took in 2021.

for whatever one photo is worth:

We had booked a week in the mountains during the lull in the pandemic, checking into a hotel we wouldn’t have sprung for if the borders had been wider open and tourists were filling them for higher prices than we were paying.

We spent our days exploring, day trips mostly, driving from short hike trailhead to short hike trailhead, snacking in the car on the way between and keeping the dog calm on one of her first (of many) family adventures.

Mount Edith Cavell is a short drive from Jasper, Alberta, and for the price of forty five minutes of hiking up a steep-ish but well-worn stoney trail one can sit beside a glacial lake in August and overlook the remains of the Angel Glacier and her various small bergs afloat in the freezing cold water.

We did just that.

And among the small crowds of other tourists we found a quiet spot to sit and look out at the view and admire the natural beauty of this place, pausing for a moment in the (then) nearly year-and-a-half long frustration epic that had been lockdown.

I did what every good father and camera guy should do. I laid down on the rocky beach and tried to get at least one epic photo of my family.

A photo from this short series, one where my daughter’s face is far more identifiable in the shot that would be suitable for a public blog, is the picture we sent out on the front of our Christmas card this year. It seemed appropriate and poignant and pretty much summed up the mood of our year.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.