Everyone falls

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

I finally stopped painting for a bit and bought a new bike. Yes, it was a self-indulgent exercise but I had the all-clear on the home front, I bought it literally with found money and it was something I wanted to do.

For the people out there who care and ask (and there are some) it’s a 2016 GT Grade Alloy Tiagra. It has two wheels that go round and round and handle bars and … Look. It’s so far advanced from my 25-year-old Bianchi that it’s hard to explain the differences. But I took it out last weekend for a 55-km shakedown and it was great.

The rider was less than great, but better than he was a year ago. Maybe I’ll talk about that another day.

But for now, here’s where the story gets fun – for you at least.

For the first time I’ve bought a pair of cycling shoes. People who don’t cycle or spin will be surprised to learn that cycling shoes serve a purpose beyond making you look like some faux-Euro knob clicky walking through Starbucks. No, the actual purpose is to allow you to lock your feet onto the pedals of the bike. (An aside: for the record I don’t drink coffee so I don’t clicky walk in Starbucks, and I also don’t wear the lycra cycle shorts. Mine are baggy even though I’m skinny enough now to get away with Lycra. I just don’t want to cause a scene, right?)

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Remembering Mr. Hockey

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family, gordie howe, hockey

I’m repeating something I wrote here nine years ago about one of the greatest nights of my childhood.

Me, my dad, my cousin and Gordie Howe.

Howe died last night. We are not likely to see anything like him again and I wish my boys could have seen the way he played the game. The word “great” is used too easily these days. Howe really was great.

I remember . . .

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.

11

Tags

cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, spinning

I was all ready to go this morning, just like I always am. An almond-milk-and-fruit concoction in the fridge and my day’s clothes hanging in the mudroom to minimize disruption to those I love most as I exit home at 530a.

Which is a bit of a canard. In the universe that is our home I am the most disruptive force, a belt of careening asteroids at the best of times, colliding gracelessly with objects both inanimate and organic regardless of proximity to my path. And at 520a, brace for impact.

Anyway, to get to the point, they had to get by without me this morning at the gym and I am confident they did just fine.

Today is my first down day in the last 27 – the sprint run to the end of the challenge motivated me to forego a couple of dates that normally would have been rest days, but the nasty weather and a couple creaky joints made it an easy call this morning. Me and the asteroid belt called an inaudible audible and I slept (sort of) for an extra hour.

A first

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AUS Hockey, competing, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, training, working out

Well, that wasn’t so bad.

I completed the World Vision Canada 6K Run for Water on Saturday morning, under brilliant sunny skies and comforted by the chill embrace of sub-zero temperatures. Moments of it were actually fun and rewarding.

There were about 200 runners at our location in north Mississauga. I’m not a runner and now I remember why. One kilometre into the run, we passed a sign marking the distance. It was one of the most demotivational moments I have had in recent times.

Really? I have to so this five more times? The first kilometre was the worst.

My route strategy was simply to run until I felt uncomfortable and then walk a bit. I never needed to walk.

The six people I ran with, all also members of The Athlete Training Centre, were younger and faster and better runners and I was content to let them sprint away from me. The fastest finished the run in about 33 minutes. I toddled in about seven minutes later, respectably in the middle of the pack.

Work through it

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

Dinner time conversation in our house.

(Fade in, scene of someone opening the Advil.)

G: Knee?

L: (Getting ice pack for knee) Knee.

(G takes the Advil, opens it again, with heating pad on elbow.)

L: Elbow?

G: Elbow.

Both: We’re falling apart.

L: Stay home or work through it.

G: Work through it. I’ll get you wine.

L: There’s sparkling water in the fridge.

(Fade out as theme music for House of Cards rises . . .)

– – –

One day more

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competing, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, Minor hockey, training, working out

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store!
One more dawn
One more day
One day more!

— One Day More, Les Miserables, Boubill and Natel

It’s March and that means playoff hockey in Oakville.

Our team – the peewee red Packers – faceoff tonight in a semi final with the season on the line. There are no best-of-five or two-game-total-goal series in house league. It’s one and done. Win, and you get to be sweaty on the blueline after the championship game, win or lose. Lose and your season ends.

It’s not life or death and Donald Trump won’t show up and make fun of us if we don’t get the outcome we want. But it’s still a big deal.

Our opponents are a solid squad. They have beaten us, we have beaten them (the last time just two weeks ago in the last game of the regular season with 2^nd place on the line.) But after nearly two decades of this I know that in a one-game playoff, expect the unexpected and stuff will happen.

Win or lose, we are already proud of our guys.

It’s hockey, man

Tags

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.

Andy Bathgate

Tags

andy bathgate, family, hockey

I’ve been missing in action from here for so long I’m not sure it’s worth my while to even try, but I’m going to tell a story I’ve told before.

Andy Bathgate died a couple of days ago. He was a gentleman. A former captain of the New York Rangers, a Hart Trophy winner, a Leaf, a Penguin, and a Red Wing. And I’ll never forget the day he won me over.

In winter 2000, Toronto hosted the NHL all-star game and I took Patrick out of school for the afternoon to attend the fan festival. He was only seven and we had a ball. He got to play roller hockey, have his shot clocked, and lots of other cool stuff. And we lined up in a snaking, slow-moving queue to meet two hall of fame members.

We didn’t know who would be at the table when we got there because they were replacing them every 20 minutes or so. But when our turn came, it was Steve Shutt (certified dick) and Andy Bathgate.

Super Bowl stuff, other stuff

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AUS Hockey, budweiser, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, super bowl, training, working out

There wasn’t a whole lot “super” about Sunday’s Super Bowl, at least not from my perspective. The game was not exciting. It bordered on boring.

I’m not a hardcore NFL fan. I’m just a guy who likes watching elite athletes do their thing on a big stage. I’m also a journalist so I enjoy the stories within the stories as much as I enjoy the game line. I like the buzz, even if the Super Bowl has more manufactured buzz than any event outside of a manned Mars landing deserves.

It will not surprise you that I was hoping Denver would win. The aging quarterback going for something big perhaps for the final time, versus the brash up-and-comer. I will always tilt way more toward the Peyton Mannings of the world over the Cam Newtons. And lately, more towards the aging guy . . .

But off the field Sunday, both of their performances were not something I would commend my sons to emulate.