A price worth paying

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competing, family, fitness, hockey, Olympics, paddling, training, working out

There are benefits to social media beyond being able to show you what I had for dinner or complaining about the challenges of commuting in the largest city in the world that doesn’t understand commuting.

Social media is sort of like a never ending class reunion. You run into people you haven’t seen in a long time, you catch up, you meet their families. And sometimes you share a moment.

We have friends in Halifax who we were once quite close with – we worked together, shared dinner parties, that sort of thing. We moved away, life goes on. They have two kids – now young adults, a boy and a girl. Both were competitive paddlers, and one – the daughter – is a nationally carded athlete.

She won multiple gold medals at last summer’s Pan Am Games and is a tenacious competitor. Trains hard, competes hard, studies hard. Ever since she can remember, she chased the dream of being an Olympian.

And this week her life’s work came down to one race and she didn’t make it. Pause and think about the only goal you have had for a dozen years coming down to one race, a few seconds of your life.

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It’s hockey, man

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family, hockey, Leafs

Watching the Leafs game last night – or at least the small portion of it I actually watched – brought back some interesting memories.

Those memories were not of the “brush-with-greatness” players on the Leafs roster whose careers intersected tangentially with my older son. One Leaf d-man was Pad’s defence partner in junior varsity high school tournament hockey for a couple games (Pad’s high school coach offered him “$100 and all the Quiznos sandwiches he could eat” to forgo junior and play high school hockey full-time); another forward was a player he played against for a couple of seasons in the OJHL.

No, my memories were triggered by watching all those AHL callups on the Leafs getting a shot at the Big Time and how exciting it must be not just for them, but their families too. And that made me recall when Pad got called up from midget AAA to play a few games of junior A. I was excited, too.

The OJHL is a long, long way from the NHL. And the Mississauga Chargers, in a universe of junior A hockey teams, would be the planetary equal of Pluto. Is it really a planet? Is it really a junior A team? Hard to tell from here.

But they called and asked him to suit up for his first junior A hockey game in November 2009. It was a home game for the Chargers at Port Credit Arena against the Aurora Tigers, which had in its lineup the tallest, beefiest free-standing hockey player I had ever seen in person.

…keeping the winter at bay

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cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, kids hockey, training, working out

On a winter’s Sunday I go
To clear away the snow and green the ground below
April, all an ocean away, is this the better way to spend the day?
Keeping the winter at bay

— January Hymn, The Decemberists

We really don’t have much to complain about this winter around the weather, but I’m not going to let that stop me.

Yesterday, for the third straight Monday since the end of the holiday break, the weather has been, well, winter-like. In each of these weeks, Monday has been the coldest, most miserable day of the week and frankly if you have to stand on a train platform to start your week, that’s cruel.

Well, at least until today. Which was colder and more miserable. Yay.

There’s a small blessing to be had that we actually use our garage for parking the cars, unlike most of the people on our street. The advantages are that I don’t actually have to go outside first thing in the morning (except today, for garbage day) and there’s never frost on the windows to be scraped off first thing in the morning.

But the garage is still plenty cold and (old man whine again) my car doesn’t have heated seats. Heated seats would make the start of a -14 day a lot better.

And on top of all that, yesterday was what pop culture calls Blue Monday. I assumed that it was invented by a bunch of psychologists who wanted to be interviewed by the CBC, but even better, it turns out it was invented by a travel company to remind us how much happier we would be somewhere warmer.

Five for Friday: Vol. VI

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AUS Hockey, canadian politics, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, journalism, music, tiger woods, training, working out

Time for five for Friday. I have no idea what to say. I’ll be honest. I’m just filling in the spaces right now and hope it makes sense.

–

Item 1: Awesome workout today. The group was a little smaller than usual but the music was a little louder and everyone was having a good time. Why do Fridays always feel more fun?

It was as much of a good time as you can have running suicides, doing ropes and sweating at 6 a.m. , but me, I enjoyed it.

There was a funny moment yesterday just before spin when Richard asked Mike – one of the top athletes and nicest people at ATC – what music genre he wanted for the spin. Mike got the honours because he was the winner of the November challenge. Mike was flummoxed so Richard turned to me to name a genre and I picked Motown.

And then much chirping ensued.

Sonny’s Dream

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AUS Hockey, canadian politics, competing, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, music, ron hynes, sonny's dream, training, working out

Sonny don’t go away, I am here all alone
And your daddy’s a sailor, and he never comes home
And the nights get so long, and the silence goes on
And I’m feeling so tired, I’m not all that strong

— Sonny’s Dream, by Ron Hynes

 I’m foregoing the usual Five-for-Friday with a musical interlude.

A guy you’ve never heard of from a place you’ve probably never been who is famous for a song I’m guessing you don’t know the words to died yesterday. I owe him much.

I never met Ron Hynes, the Newfoundland folk singer who among hundreds and hundreds of songs wrote a barroom howler called Sonny’s Dream.

If you read the lyrics sober, it is a profoundly sad and moving song about a young man trapped in the service of his mother, long abandoned by his father for life on the seas. She implores him to never leave; he stares down the road to the cities he’s never seen and dreams of something better.

If you sing the song in a pub in a less-than-sober state, you will make friends, have a grand time, completely miss the sadness of the song, and possibly marry someone you sang with.

When I was a boy we didn’t party with Dinos

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canadian politics, competing, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, journalism, training, working out

Live from Toronto, It’s Friday Night!

When I was a kid in university we amused ourselves on weekends with the usual, time-tested distractions, which given the family friendly nature of this space I will won’t bother detailing.

You all grew up and did most of the same things with varying degrees of effort/enjoyment/criminal prosecution.

Kids now do all that stuff plus – they go to parties at museums.

On the weekend, Chris opted to stay in town Friday night because he was going out with some friends to the Royal Ontario Museum to . . . party? Yes, party.

A travel day

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AUS Hockey, cape Breton, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey

Before leaving Ben Eoin I spent some time just sitting on the shore enjoying the quiet. It wasn’t cold. I was the only human in sight. It was wonderful.

I think I have to chalk up Monday as a travel day.

We awoke in Ben Eion after having a great evening visiting with Laura’s family. The weather was classic Nova Scotia indifference — cool but not cold, cloudy with a spit of rain now and then, sunny with dark rolling clouds, and then rain. A good day to drive the four hours back to Halifax.

Today is Day 6 with out working out for me and I’m getting a little twitchy, but I’ve got a bunch of things going on that are preoccupying my time. It just means I’ll be all the more motivated when I get back. Right?

Right.

Five for Friday, Vol II (Monday edition)

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AUS Hockey, cape Breton, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, Mother Webbs

The view from the shotgun seat.

Five for Friday seemed like such a clever idea 10 days ago. Then the combination of work, travel, and my diminishing memory conspired to override that thought.

So just to keep it going, let’s pretend today’s update is just a late version of Friday.  On with the show.

1. I’m actually writing this portion of the entry on Saturday morning. Dal lost 4-2 last night to Moncton. It was a decent game and except for about an eight minute stretch it could have gone either way. Our guy played well I thought and was certainly the most physical presence in the game, delivering one highlight reel open ice hit that was a show stopper. But he’d rather have two points for a win. Back at it tonight again St. Thomas and Dal really needs to win this one. Obviously I’ll update things later.

They met in a hurricane …

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AUS Hockey, Blue rodeo, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, jim cuddy, music

“They met in a hurricane,
standing in an Airbus out of the rain …”
— with apologies to Blue Rodeo

It took two tries, but we landed safely in Halifax, our Airbus pushed by massive tailwinds that were once a Hurricane Patricia in Mexico.

Rain lashed the plane on our final approach and winds buffeted the craft, moving the metal beast not just in a turbulent up and down bounce but also left to right. Wisely our pilot bailed out on his first attempt to land and circled and tried it again, this time with success.

Boarding the flight held its own adventure. The Canadian folk rock band Blue Rodeo were on the flight and crooner-in-chief Jim Cuddy was seated in business class, row 1 on the aisle.

To say Laura is a fan of Jim’s would be a disservice to 50-something women everywhere. She knows all the words by heart, has seen the band multiple times and likes the cut of his jib, shall we say.

She boarded ahead of me — the miracle of Air Miles may have allowed us cheap flights, just not seats together — and as she walked by Cuddy she noted the seat next to him was empty.

Five for Friday; Vol I

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blue jays, canadian politics, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, ropes, sit ups

A new, intended-to-be-regular feature. Let’s call it Five for Friday where I pontificate pointlessly on random, recurring and unrelated things. Or perhaps related. It depends. I won’t really know until I’m done.

– – –

Firstly, I did it again.

I was just past the entrance to Glen Abbey Golf Club on Dorval this morning when I realized I had forgotten my chest belt. Stop laughing.

For the benefit of the new and/or uninterested, we wear MyZone chest belts at ATC when we work out to monitor heart rate and gather data on the intensity of our effort. I had already forgotten my belt once this week.

And not that it really matters, but the computerized data base records your “effort points” so if you forget your belt, you get zero effort points even if you work your butt off. On a month-to-month basis, the cumulative effort points benchmark yourself against the group and against your own previous effort. And in a room full of competitive people, the points matter whether we admit it or not.

If I showed up without the belt again I was in for grief.

So. U-turn. Go home. Retrieve belt. Onward. I have no idea whether Laura heard me. If she’s smart she now knows I can show up just about any time looking for shoes or clothes. Mostly she just ignores me now because this is becoming so common.

I worked out three mornings this week and once at noon. For each of the 6a workouts I forgot something. My shirt. My belt. My suit. My shirt and my belt. My Shoes. A water bottle. My mind.