Back from a lazy summer

Wow! That summer was not at all what I expected. I ran a great race at Limberlost, and after that everything went downhill.
I couldn't get myself to do serious speedwork. Apart from 2 days of trail running in the Highlands National Park on the Cabbot Trail, I didn't do much during our August vacation, and I took two weeks completely off soon after, just so happy to NOT run, after a strange episode of total pain everywhere in my body, following a simple Seaton trail run from Forestream. It didn't help either that the fall I had in Cape Breton Island ended up hurting more that I thought, going into deep tissue, with suspicion of a bruised bone (femur).

Thankfully, I'm back on the trails for the fall season - there's nothing like a few good friends, a few good runs to make you happy again to put your shoes on and go run closer to Nature for a while.

And of course, it also helped that Garth had a strong race at Haliburton 100. I captained Aid-Station 5 and had a blast, and gained new motivation from seeing many of my friends there, along with many new faces, all happy and focused on reaching their goal, whatever this was.

Also, in preparation for my confrontation with the Gnarly Bandit, I joined the Goodlife Fitness Club near my place so I can do some speedtraining on the treadmill, strength and cardio on the stairmaster, and generally speaking some stretching and more strengthening, eventually some spinning.
All that's missing now is introducing one day a week/every other week where I'd bike to work and go for a swim in the morning.

Oh! And to win the ongoing battle for weightloss. What do you think these months of lazyness did to me? You know what it is - you reduce the physical activity, but you still eat the same!!!
At least it seems I'm on track to avoid cheese for a while, it's been over a week and I feel better every day about it. :-)

Post Solstice

It was good to be back running after a three weeks hiatus. The occasion was the Summer Solstice Run, led by Ryan Barrett, a Salomon flight-crew member, out of the Salomon Toronto store, and the idea was that he would run loops out of the store into Sunnybrook Park from sunrise to sunset, and other would join for one or more loops.
Garth and I made the first loop, at 5:30 am - it was already warm. My hips got tight at the end, but I didn't think much of it. Then in the second loop my left IT-band started hurting: I got a bit more worried. I nevertheless started and finished a third loop. Garth went on and completed eight.

A little bit of Rhonda-Marie's magic touch, plus some more of Joshua's, and I felt ready to come back for the 7 pm loop, and even did the shortened last loop. Total for the day for me : 45 km :-)

I had a great time chatting with a lot of people, including Agatha, whom I hadn't seen in a long time, and Peter, who distracted me form the pain in the evening loop until I got warmed up enough, and stayed with me and continued on chatting till the end. A few Ontario ultrarunners showed up - that was nice, as a lot of them were at Niagara that day.
I had a good chat with Susie, Sam, Miles, a few strangers, a few regulars from the Wednesday group.

I went to "restaurative yoga" on Sunday, stretched, relaxed. And strangely, when I went for a short run on Monday with Yusri, over lunch time, my IT-Band didn't bother me at all.
Nor did it come back on Tuesday night, nor last night.
My glutes suffered in the hills yesterday, but I'm ready to start the real training next week!!

Oh - and I committed to swim 4 km with Rhonda-Marie on July 20. I already happily started open water swim with Scott.

Day One

I've been thinking about it for a while. Ever since I discovered that trail running series a few months ago, I've wanted to become a Gnarly Bandit. It was too late to do it in 2013, but 2014 will be the year : five races, four of them 100 miles, the last one 100k. Moslty technical single trail with decent elevation, I've got some serious training to do.
My wonderful hudband Garth was once again my resounding board a couple weeks ago when I set out to draft my training program for the next 9 months. I had just finished a great race in the region where I grew up, my parents waiting for me at the finish  line, and I thought it was time to prepare my comeback to running during my recovery time.
This morning, while we were having coffee on the patio and enjoying the quiet morning and the birds singing, I was mentioning I'd just read the Swiss Miss Blog, from our friend Iris who's running Badwater for the fourth time this year, and the idea was thrown : why not write a blog to help me with the training, keep track of what I'm doing, see my progresssion.

Right now is time to go back to the backyard and get some dirt under my fingernails again. I'm still in reovery and not running, maybe I'll go for a bike ride and an short walk later, or tomorrow. Next week I shall go to the Rouge for the usual loop, before running along Ryan Barrett at his Solstice Run, for however long my legs will allow me.