I will bore you with a short entry today that is large on bragging rights and short on substance. Your humble scribe begs your forgiveness on both those counts.
The humble brags involve two significant “dubs” as the kids say – a dub being a “W” which is a win. So, follow along, I had two big wins.
The first win was Saturday morning when I was part of a small but loud crew from our gym which climbed all 144 flights of stairs in the CN Tower. We were not fastest and I was certainly not fastest among the five of us. But I started last in our crew, and we all finished within two minutes of each other.
My time was 22:14, which I thought was okay for an old guy and well below the 40 minutes or so that we were told was the generic benchmark for average. I am nothing if not average. No pauses or breaks en route to the top, I just climbed.
In the parlance of hockey playoff player interviews, I took it one step at a time. In the stairwell, we’re all in there together and you just gotta get it done. Keep it simple. Walk your walk. Try and keep your shift short. No going back at this time of year, right?
A stark piece of honesty here: it wasn’t really that hard and it was not particularly interesting. You are in a windowless concrete stairwell for 144 flights (plus six more at the end to get to the observation deck and the elevator back down). Spinning with Chris at the ATC on Saturday mornings is a far harder workout.
I am the largest and least attractive member of the team which climbed the CN Tower. This shot was taken before we climbed.
I wasn’t expecting that.
I also wasn’t expecting how much fun the four people in the group were to climb with up the tower. We went to breakfast after and mostly I just sat and listened and heard them slowly peel back layers of their personalities and lives I had no idea about. Tattoos and piercings? I had had nothing to contribute to that part of the conversation.
Interesting, accomplished, and fun folks, not to mention fit. A couple people who ran the six kilometre run with us a few weeks ago were missing but that wasn’t too much of a wet blanket and the crew is already on the lookout for another outing.
I will happily come along for the ride when they figure out the next adventure.
The second, and larger accomplishment, was the news Sunday that the team I was on in the ATC winter challenge (co-captained by me and Coach Dave) actually won the thing. We were known as Team Newsies and it’s safe to say the key to whatever success we had was simply a commitment from everyone to participate in the diet rules, in keeping food journals, in showing up to work out, in just getting it done.
Most of Team Newsies, from left Teirney, Coach Dave, me, Kim, Maggie and Dave B. Missing Rob and Dana. Is it just me, or do I look like some kind of Eastern European giant?
I won’t go so far as to say the challenge was fun – elements of it were fun, other elements were educational and some parts were just frustrating. But I was better off at the end for having done it and, hey. We won.
So, yay us. Where do we pick up our Teslas?
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Pad arrived home from Halifax on Saturday evening and after enjoying a BBQ with his family promptly filled a duffle bag up with beer and disappeared for the rest of the evening.
It’s great to have him home! I’m yanking his chain — I had a social life once, too.
The perfect weekend weather on Sunday was spent doing yard work – mostly doing a three-hour trim job on a tree. I decided not to work out Sunday but I think by the end of the afternoon I probably did a harder workout sawing, trimming, raking and bagging in the yard than anything I might have done in a convention training circuit.
Chris and I went looking at bikes but I didn’t pull the trigger.
Fact is I’m having trouble getting my head around spending that much money on a bike for me. Chris says I deserve it.
Good kid, that one.
teamoakville 