Work through it

Tags

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 . . .)

– – –

…keeping the winter at bay

Tags

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.

The challenge and the challenged

Tags

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

We started a new challenge at ATC this morning that is intended to change the way we think about and manage our diets as much as address our fitness.

I won’t bore you with endless details but the highlights are it’s a team concept – Coach Dave and I co-captain one of the five teams – and each of the seven members of the team can contribute points by adhering to rules like filling out a diet diary, not drinking alcohol (at all), only eating meat four times a week, eating no dairy products at all and showing up at the gym and working out, among other things.

You can get bonus points for doing extra challenges – which might be additional pullups or pushups or a long spin. We don’t know yet.

Most of the first two days this week are devoted to benchmarking where we all are so we can (hopefully) see how far we have come by March 31. Weight loss is not a vital component but it should be an inevitable result of working out regularly, eating lower fat diets and more vegetables, and cutting out beer/wine/etc.

March 31 is a long way off but I will declare some goals that can be mocked later if I don’t reach them (I will make them, trust me) – first, I’m going to weigh 214 pounds on or before March 31, and I’m going to be able to do 35 pushups, and I will move my visceral (belly) fat to 5 (from 7).

I have no clue what life is like in your world but I have tendinitis in my elbows so getting to 35 pushups will be some work — about double where I am now. I tried to do pullups today and it was ugly after the first one. I did one (1) in textbook fashion. After that, searing pain and I hung on the rack like so much meat on a hook.

Sentimental Xmas Memory #2

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christmas, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, ice wolves, junior hockey, kids hockey, la ronge, pond hockey, training, working out

No five for Friday today. Instead another holiday flashback.

–

With temperatures in southern Ontario hitting double digits for most of the last week, it doesn’t feel like Christmas is barely two weeks away. It makes it more palatable to drive a car in flimsy Under Armour shorts at 6am, without benefit of heated seats, and it sadly makes it impossible to skate on a pond on natural ice.

Which brings me to Sentimental Christmas Memory #2. Pond hockey.

Climate change deniers can deny all they want. The winters are shorter and warmer now. If you want to argue about something, argue about why that has happened. But the fact that it’s going on around us is irrefutable.

I remember as a kid practically exploding at the prospect of Christmas vacation. Christmas was, for sure, a very big deal in our home and my parents deserve a lot of respect and credit for making it that way for us. We didn’t have a lot of money but I never went without anything I needed. A lot of things I didn’t have, well, I didn’t need. Some of the traditions around my Christmas at home survive to this day with our family and I suspect some of them will move along with my sons when the time comes.

A weekend in Parentland

Tags

4k tv, AUS Hockey, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hdtv, hockey, junior hockey, kids hockey, training, working out

It was a pretty decent weekend, all things considered. I had two grueling workouts, we bought two TVs, Chris came home for the weekend, the peewees had TWO big wins and we had a couple nice meals.

If it wasn’t for Pad getting crosschecked in the mouth Friday night with 90 seconds left in the game, I might have elevated the weekend to great. But that’s how it goes in Parentland.

On Friday we replaced the late, lamented family room TV with a new 49-inch LG 4K model. I honestly wasn’t in the market for 4k — new technology with four times the resolution of a 1080 screen — but the price was good, we like LG, Chris approved and the rest is history.

A sporting life

Tags

AUS Hockey, baseball, blue jays, cycling, cycling in cold weather, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, junior hockey, kids hockey

Too much on the calendar this weekend. A high-quality, first-world problem.

There’s a junior A game in Milton tonight that I would like to see, because it’s Milton vs. Cobourg and there will be several kids in the game I know, not the least of whom is Will the Thrill.

But.

The Dal Tigers are on the road this weekend, playing at UPEI and that game will be webcast. Through the miracle of Apple TV I can stream the webcast from my iphone to the Apple TV box and onto the big screen in the family room. While it’s not HNIC, it is to us, and it’s free.

UPEI also has the best and most entertaining play-by-play and colour commentators in the Atlantic university conference, and that coupled with my personal interest in the game makes it must-see TV. Sorry Will.

Then, there’s also a baseball game of note tonight – the Blue Jays open the ALCS in Kansas City tonight and that is also must-see TV. And the Leafs host Columbus in what will be perhaps the least-viewed Toronto hockey game of the season. Both teams stink and the Jays are in the ALCS? Good luck.

So, tonight I will be grateful for the invention of time zones. The 7p start for Dalhousie in Charlottetown is 6p here and the hockey game will be almost over when the Jays take to the field for a scheduled 8:07p start.

Ch-ch-changes

Tags

birthdays, blue jays, colds, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, kids hockey, man cold, parenting

It’s a funny thing about family and kids. I can’t get enough of mine.

When the kids are born, as any parent will tell you, all they are is work for the first few months. They don’t do much other than scream, sleep, execute normal bodily functions and create gobs of laundry and lineups of people who “want to see the baby.”

But in short order, the actually start developing personalities, then they learn to sit up, crawl, signal when they are hungry, smile . . . and from that point on, it’s 24-7 fun. No, really.

There were multiple stages of watching our two boys growing up that I said to myself, geez, I wish I could freeze this moment in time forever because this has got to be the best. And that might have been dragging one of them around the rec room in a cardboard box while he giggled crazily, or skiing, or tobogganing, or snuggling on a sofa watching The Lion King for the 4215^th time on a cold snowy day.

Or it might have been a moment of victory or loss in a rink or on a field. Or it might have been a band concert or school grad or an assembly. Or it might have been Christmas morning or Halloween night or watching one of them with a group of friends, happy and confident and articulate and smart.

My point is, I have learned that every great stage in parenting was followed by one that was just as great, or even better.

Commitment

Tags

cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, journalism, junior hockey, kids hockey

The people who show up for 6a workouts on weekdays aren’t special, but they are motivated.

Where I sweat, there is a core of about a dozen men and women — give or take — who make it at least four days out of five. Saturday is an optional throw in, but I understand that people with young families need to actually spend time being a dad on weekends. At my age it’s easy to forget the whirl of birthday parties, play dates, minor sports, and general hanging out that comes with that territory.

Monday to Friday has to occasionally suffer the intrusion of early meetings, GO train schedules, work travel, illness and family commitments, late business dinners, and more. No one in our group is being paid to train; everyone has to figure out a way to be there.

It’s commitment, but it’s only a commitment to yourself. No one is going to call if you don’t show up. If you sleep in and don’t train, the only one who loses is you.

Fifty minutes

Tags

cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, junior hockey, kids hockey

Lately I’ve been thinking about sports and kids and why we go to the rink. It’s no surprise that it’s on my mind – minor hockey has started again (does it ever stop?) and I’m fortunate to be part of that familiar parade.

I’ve got a son on the east coast playing Canadian university hockey; the son of one of my best friends is on a top junior A team. And I’ve got 16 house league kids to help coach this weekend in peewee for 50 minutes that mean more to them than I allow myself to remember sometimes. So I have lots of exposure to the hockey development spectrum.

We adults should never, ever lose sight of the importance of those 50 minutes, ever. One hour, less 10 minutes to flood the ice. Fifty minutes.

Way back in the last century, I took my first coaching clinic and something the instructor said to us has stuck with me through nearly two decades, dozens of teams, hundreds of players, and moments of punishing heartbreak and soaring, screaming triumph.

He said that the time those house league kids get on the ice each week is, with very few exceptions, the highlight of their week. It is the most important hour, or two, in their lives for seven days. They may not look or act engaged but they are looking at you as the most important voice they hear outside of home.

Starting over

Tags

hockey, kids hockey, Minor hockey, new season

They don’t have jerseys or a team name but we have 16 kids and 16 families and a lot of optimism about the road in front of us. That, and 200 feet of freshly flooded ice will take you a long way in September.

House league hockey is back.

On Sunday night our team split an hour of ice time with the team we will practice with all winter (the same coaches we practiced with all last winter, too — no coincidence there) and put the boys through some light skating and then scrimmaged for 40 minutes or so, followed by a shootout where all the kids did breakaway drills on the goalies.

I have no great insights or witty tales from the hour or so we were on the ice. It appeared that even though we started at 630p we may have been the final act at Joshua Creek on Sunday night — the lights weren’t even on over at the Red rink. But that being the case the rink attendant let the 720p deadline slide a bit and our guys got a little bonus ice.

It was nice to see all the kids smiling and having fun (there was one serious grimace when one of our defencemen scored on our own net, but I told him that was a good play to get out of his system at a pre-season scrimmage. The grimace didn’t go away.)