Easter and Facebook

My Easter weekend was more productive than usual. On Good Friday, I ran in a 10 mile road race close to where my folks live and ran a race that came with a surprise. My second loop of a five mile course was 63 seconds faster than the first. This was good news. During the weekend we installed a new countertop in my folks kitchen which went without a hitch. I also did something I should have done at Christmas but for time and weather reasons didn’t; to catch up with some of my running friends. On the weekend, Perry and I went for a seven mile run on an extremely hilly course that we would usually do twice a week while training on the cross-country team. The course is known as the “three-hills” and every two miles you have to descend and climb the Niagara Escarpment. We finished the workout in a brisk 53 minutes. Perry and I haven’t seen each other for a while as he went to Korea to teach English after university. During the fall we reconnected by Facebook and vowed to catch-up and go for a workout. He is married and has an energetic son that loves hockey. We played a game of pickup hockey after our run. I did some geocaching which was good as area near Niagara Falls has less snow and as a result locating a cache involves little or no digging in the snow. In keeping with tradition, the three families got together for an Easter dinner and the kids are getting older at an incredible rate.

Good Friday Road Race

There is a Easter tradition with my family which is to start off the Easter weekend with a road race. For the past eight or so years, my father and I have run in the Burlington Good Friday road race. A runner has two distances to choose from to do a spritely 5km(3.1miles) or 10 miles. My father always runs the 5km race while I will switch between the two distances. This year I ran the 10 miles. The race went really well and I finished to find a surprise waiting for me. The course is two loops. The course undulates as you run along the shore of Lake Ontario. Ten miles is a long distance and you have to pace yourself as there is a danger of starting out too fast and having to suffer for your early exurbance. I started out at a comfortable pace and sped up as I started to warm up. My goals was to pass as many runners as I could. The first loop went well and have had more energy than I thought. My five mile split was 37.02. It was time to take the race a little more seriously. I increased my pace slightly and started to pass people at a more brisk rate. Each successive mile was done at a slightly faster pace. At the finish line, the clock said 1:13.04. My second half of the race was 62 seconds faster than the first. I am pleased with my race as it lets me know that I have been able to perserve through the tough Ottawa weather and thay my running, snowshoeing and swimming is keeping me fit.

Shoes

On Friday, I was looking at my shoes with a smile. There is a little problem with my Keen slip-ons. It is a fatal problem. There is a hole that makes me happy as it is in my forefoot. Hmm, why would this make me happy? A hole in this location means that I have been doing my swing dancing correctly by dancing on my forefoot. The shoes are a year old and have taken me through a challenging winter. When REI had a fall closeout sale I bought a replacement pair at a fire sale price. This pair is currently getting daily service at the office as I change into them at the start of each work day. When there is a hint of better weather it will be time to retire my well trodden Keen and embrace the new ones.

Raining and running...

On my way to work today, I felt compelled to take off my winter gloves. Something unexpected was happening where I live; it was raining for the first time this year. It felt good to feel the rain landing on my hands. If you live in Vancouver or Victoria, British Columbia, I think this thought would come with a groan as it is always raining on the west coast. This can mean that warmer weather is on its way. There was a downside to this warm trend. The snow is starting to melt forming large puddles that one must dart between. This is made more challenging at night when it is hard to distinguish between the black road and a puddle. This became more apparent during my Running Room workout in the evening. I ran down to the store trying my best to avoid getting a soaker but failed miserably. The workout took the form of four mile warmup followed by 5 x 1km repeats on 90 seconds rest. It was my first speed workout of the year so it sets a benchmark on which I can only improve. (4.04/4.09/4.24/4.24/4.22) On Friday, I head down to my folks place and will run in the Burlington Good Friday 10 mile race. The race is long enough that I can only treat it as a training workout.

10 days to go before my next winter adventure

Tonight, we had our planning meeting for the uOttawa Adirondacks winter camping, snowshoeing and mountain climbing meeting. Steph, one of the guides, walked us through our gear list and hammered home the fact that we will need two sets of clothes, our day outfit that will get wet during the day and our night set which will keep us warm, dry and toasty overnight. During these meetings he likes to put the fear into the foreign-exchange students so that they take him seriously when he says to pack warm clothing. This year he toned it down a bit. I think this will be the fifth trip that I have taken with Steph and they are always fun and interesting. We talked about peaks and will likely climb Algonquin Peak or maybe Phelps mountain this year on Saturday. The weather-of-the-day will determine which peak we attempt to summit. I talked to Steph about changing the trip date in 2009 to the April 3-4 weekend so that it does not conflict with the Boston Tea Party. It would be awesome if Jason could come on the trip in 2009. With Easter coming up rather quickly, I'll be visiting MEC a couple of times over the next couple of days to load up on provisions.

Too much snow for some…

This morning on my commute to work I passed Alf. He was on his roof with a shovel trying to offload two feet of snow that had accumulated over the past couple of days. Alf was rightly concerned about the snow load of his roof. Earlier in the day in the hamlet of Westboro, near where I live and the home of MEC, a roof collapsed due to the weight of the snow. The family escaped but the house is toast. My first exposure to snow loads was when we were building my parent’s deck and had to build it in a certain way to meet the snow load standard published in a reference book. As I think about the snow load tables, they make sense given what recently happened in Ottawa. We are now within a foot of exceeding the 1970 record and strangely enough the locals are praying for another of foot of snow.

Let it snow...Let it snow...

As I type this entry it is snowing. We are within three feet of exceeding the snowfall record set in 1970-71 of 444.1 cm or 174 inches or 14.5 feet. Our current tally is 357 cm or 140.5 inches or 11.7 feet. We are expected to get another foot overnight. As I was heading back to Ottawa earlier this week we got another foot. The local newspaper claims that the average resident has shoveled the equivalent of 16 rhinos or 37, 572 kg or 16,970 pounds.

All this snow is good news as it is the first time that I have snowshoed in March. The plan is to trek along the Ottawa River for a couple of miles on Saturday. Earlier this week, I signed up for the UOttawa Adirondack snowshoeing adventure. It is a long weekend of snowshoeing, winter camping and mountain climbing at the end of the March. I am hoping to convince the organizers to change the date for next year's outing so that Jason can come along. But with more snow on the horizon I'll be snowshoeing for the foreseeable future.

SwingD for Fri = 14d

Sent from my iPod

Swing dancing--Solomon Doulglas Swingtet

The Ottawa swing dancing scene will have a special guest on Friday night the Solomon Douglas swingtet. I bought my ticket a couple of weeks ago as when we have a live band the tickets always sell out. I wasn't too sure who these performers were so I decided to check out their website and found a really useful and helpful nugget. It is a play list of songs that Solomon uses for teaching the Lindy Hop. It was a sweet find.

I had an incredible past couple of days in Baltimore swing dancing and taking in dancing workshop at John Hopkins University. Charm City Swing(CCS) organized the event had a beginner/intermediate tract as well as an advanced. I took the beginner tract and was able to develop a basic grounding in the lindy hop which I can now start building on. I really liked the depth that the instructors took to making sure we understood the basics. For example, at the end of the first triple step your body should be at a 90 degree angle from where you started the move, and at the end the first step it should be 135 degrees relative to your starting position and the final triple step is completed 180 degrees from where you started the move. It is details like this that allowed me to visualize and remember where my body needs to be at a certain point in time. The dancing weekend closed out with an hour long blues dancing lessons which was a lot of fun and quite intimate. I learned an enormous amount about swing dancing and how I can improve on the main things I already know. I would like to thank Jason and all the folks at CCS and the many local and imported teachers for a great weekend.

I'm in the midst of drafting a blog of the weekend and will post it later in the week.