Giving It Another Go

   According to my Garmin, the last time I ran in earnest was March 27. So, give or take a day or two, I have not run in two whole months.
   The hardest part about this realization is that I had very few reasons not to. A couple of little physical hiccups kept me off the road for what only needed to be brief periods of time but the reality of it is that I have simply not felt like running and nothing much was really going to force me to get out there. Yes, I have been feeling guilty about this.
   So today I got out and ran. Technically you could call it running only because it didn't fit the "walking" definition. I ran as slow as I possibly could because the only goal for today was to run. A dedicated speedwalker would have passed me.
   About half a kilometer into it, I developed a sharp pain in my right knee. This kind of popped up out of nowhere and I was a little perplexed as to its cause. Then I remembered---the infamous "falling down the stairs" episode about a week ago. You can read about it here, chronicled in my "other" blog. It had nothing to do with running so that's where it went. At the rate I have been falling down the stairs lately, I could probably start my own blog dedicated to falling down, but that's a whole other story.
   Because of the knee pain, my run at least momentarily turned into a walk. After a short walk, the pain seemed to have disappeared and I returned to slow running.
   It was a beautiful and sunny day today, temps around 25C (77F) and was the warmest weather I'd been running in since last summer. My original plan had been to run the usual 5K route I'm accustomed to but, because of the knee pain, I changed my plans and decided instead to head for Warbler Woods and maybe shorten things up a bit.

Love all the little flowers lining the trail.

   The last time I'd been in the woods was early Spring and none of the leaves were out yet. Today, however, nothing but greenery! Really should have taken a few more pics but at this point I was more in survival mode. I was forcing myself to run up the hills in the woods and there are a fair amount of them.
   At one point I ran into a woman who was hiking who said she was having a hard time handling the hills walking, she couldn't imagine running up them. Told her I'd be walking again in a minute and she'd probably catch up to me.
   Unfortunately, the people who run the parks here in London have closed off the section of trail I normally run on, so that it can "regenerate". I guess this is good for  Warbler in the long run but it does kind of screw me up....

New boardwalks!

   Before I knew it, I was out of the woods and back to sidewalks again and back home again for a 4K run/walk.

This was obviously a checkpoint...

   It always feels like starting all over again every time I'm away from running for an extended period and then start up again. It's times like these that I find myself remembering what it was like back in the old "Learn To Run" days, when I could barely run for two minutes straight. This makes me feel a little better...
   Hopefully, I'll be able to get out a little more regularly now and not spend so much time procrastinating and rationalizing. As hard as the work was today, it sure felt good! 

Random Thoughts

  I haven't run in well over a month. The first couple of weeks of that time period were taken up with healing a strained back. The rest of the time I have not run for no reason whatsoever, I just haven't.
   I've had plenty of opportunities to get out there but I've managed to rationalize my way out of all of them. Occasionally the weather's been iffy but even when it's been perfect I still don't run.
   Because I'm not running, the pounds are slowly creeping on, as well. I think I was up to 232 the other night.....
   Okay, no real running to blog about so I think I'm going to toss a few random thoughts out there!

1. Watching skinny people run by

   We've all seen them, their lithe bodies effortlessly gliding along the road or sidewalk, breathing easily, looking like they weigh about as much as your leg. What I would really like to do sometime is run up alongside one of them and give them a fifty pound back of cement to carry, just to even out the weight differential!

2. Being able to lose weight easily

   Knowing you can lose weight reasonably quickly and easily is a dangerous thing sometimes! Pretty well anything you want to will go in your mouth if you know that you're not going to have a problem shrinking it away later on. I actually got giddy once when I stepped on the scale and had maxed out at 235 (the heaviest I've been in years) because of the fun I was going to have losing it all again. Which is okay if that's what you actually do...

3. Falling off the vegetarian wagon

   I managed to maintain a vegetarian diet for about four months late last summer and early autumn. I was eating lots of vegetables and running consistently and actually feeling pretty good. But I was sad! It wasn't that I was craving the meat so much it was that I had somehow abandoned an important and enjoyable part of my life for what a lot of people likely thought was no good reason. It affected me in social situations where I had to be the one different guy, the guy other people had to out of their way to accommodate. When Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled around I desperately needed to be a part of what my family was doing and that's when I fell off the wagon, huge. And when that happened, I wanted every kind of meat there was, seemingly! This does disturb me, I hate the fact that animals suffer so that I can be fed food I don't need to be fed. Grrr

4. I think I'm supposed to be a sprinter instead

   Intellectually, I like to think of myself as a distance runner. My gut feeling, though, is that I just want to run fast, for about a hundred meters at a time. Any sport I've ever played has always involved short bursts of speed with an accompanying recovery time before the next burst. I have always kind of lived for this. In my twenties, on the football field, I was the guy you were going to need to make allowances for if you were going to cover me. In my sixties, on the ball hockey floor, I'm the guy who you're going to need to work a lot harder at running past than you thought, if, indeed, you can run past me...

5. I need to run in the mountains 

   I follow a lot of bloggers from out in western Canada and get to see a lot of pics of people running through forests, on mountains. I was born out west and it kind of eats me up watching runners do this. There is something about forest trails!

6. I am kind of a beast (for short periods)

   Yes, I'm a slow distance runner, at least right at the moment. I'm big and heavy but I have legs that get me where I want to go and, occasionally, they get me there quickly. This is no mean feat and sometimes they amaze me!

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   So there you have it, a short post of mainly random thoughts, a couple of which might have something to do with running!

Catching Up and A Bit Of A Photo Dump

   When I take a look at my Blogger stats and discover that there were zero pageviews today and zero pageviews yesterday, I take that as a bit of an indicator I need to get off my butt and get blogging again! (the irony, of course, is that I blog on my butt...)
   So, winter has finally arrived here in London, Ontario. While many other parts of Canada have been enveloped with snow and sub-zero temps, we have been blessed with unseasonably (and mildly disconcerting) high temperatures. Christmas Eve, it was actually hovering in the mid teens (high fifties, for those of you who do Fahrenheit!)
   Because of this, the late fall-early winter running has been awesome!
   Lately, however, I find that most of my running has been relegated to the weekends---it seems that by the time I get home from work, there are either too many other things to do or I am simply too tired. The change back to standard time also would have me running in the dark, not my fave thing to do anymore. This, of course, will not do and I hereby resolve to force myself to get out there on the occasional (and regular) weeknight.
   The scales tell me that the holiday season was not as bad as it has been in years past but they have also gently reminded me that all is not as it should be and that it's time to get back to work. Sound familiar, anyone??
   I suppose a significant thing to report is that I seem to have fallen off the vegetarian wagon. Well, I didn't actually fall off, it more or less exploded from underneath me, bits and pieces of the wagon flying all over the place. I, of course, am struggling with this, but that's probably a whole other blog post...
   I have also decided to take a slightly different approach to my running. There was a time back in the fall when I was running pretty regularly and my times for the 5K (my distance of preference) were dramatically falling. This, of course, took much effort and it got to the point where I was totally exhausted at the end of a run and if I hadn't bettered my time by at least a few seconds then it was also a wasted run. It got to the point where I was dreading going out, knowing the stress I was about to put my body under. This was probably foolishness.
   My new approach now has me going out for a run with no expectations whatsoever as to what my time might be. I also try and run slowly enough that I can do the whole thing without need of a walk break. This has meant really slow runs! My hope, though, is that by not scaring myself into not running, that I will actually get more running in. Then, gradually (and hopefully), the times will come down all on their own. This sounds do-able!
   Okay, so now for a bit of a photo dump~random pics from the last few weeks, some of which have nothing to do with running!
  

First run in the snow this winter!

The incredible "Penis Potato"---further proof of the ravages of GMOs....

Two of my stepsons now have vehicles. This is what our
2-car driveway looks like, every other week!

The amazing "Upside-Down Backwards Book" You can read about it here

Puffer decided to come to rest on top of our pile of Santa hats---so we took advantage of the opportunity!

Cat and Buddha(s)! Woke up from a nap, looked down and this is what I saw!

My regular 5K run happens to take me past this house every time
out. This also happens to be the house my wife grew up in and is just
a bit of a reminder while I'm out running as to how lucky I am!

Back in the summer, we decided to totally -re-do our front garden.
There used to be all these big bushes we could string our Christmas
lights on but now, with all the bushes gone, we needed to improvise.
So I took some dead evergreen branches from our backyard and
"planted" them in our front garden. Then I hung Xmas lights from them!
Kind of a Charlie Brown sort of theme!


  So there you have it, a bit of an update and a handful of pics I might have used in blogs past, if I'd ever gotten around to it! And while I'm at it, would like to take the opportunity to wish you all a Happy New Year and hoping that 2016 brings only wonderful things!

Wherein I Encounter A Viking Ship (But No Hobbit House)

   I finally headed out for a run today, after a little over a month of only occasionally throwing in a long walk or two. My only goal when I left the house was to run---it didn't have to be fast and it didn't need to be continual. All I really needed was to run.
   This was kind of a refreshing approach because any of the last runs I'd done that month ago were all performance-based. I'd been desperately wanting to get my 5K times down and, slowly but surely, that's what was happening. And then I stopped running. Not sure why.
   It's still very autumn-like, weather-wise, here in London and today was a great day for running. I wore shorts and just a couple of layers up top. For some reason the top of me gets cold much faster than my bottom half and I need to be warm at the beginning of a run but still be mindful of the fact that I will warm up, eventually.
   There are a couple of cool things I wanted to be able to show you all today so I took just a bit of a detour from my usual 5K route. I wanted to show you the little hobbit house but when I ran by there was a pickup parked right in front of it, so that was kind of a no-go. Too bad, too, cuz I had to run up a freakin' hill to get there.
   There is, however, a miniature Viking ship right around the corner and I was able to get a pic. I'm a little far away due to the fact that there are no sidewalks on that side of the street . As have most viking ships, it's fallen into a bit of disrepair, its sail lies, bedraggled, atop its stern.

   From here, I just continued to run along at my very slow speed and was kind of loving it. I did time it and it ended up being a little over 42 minutes. I could not have run any more slowly but that was fine with me!

   I needed to make sure I took pics today because Crystal of Running With Rhyno fame had strongly suggested I run yesterday. But I whined and fussed and she said I could run today but needed to provide pictorial proof. So here it is, Crystal! Even a tiny bead of sweat on my left cheek, a bit of a foggy-breath effect, and a dilapidated Viking ship in the background...

   I can always tell when I've gotten into a better headspace with my running---I feel like going out again the same day. Today was one of those days because tonight I definitely feel as though I could run again. My plan is to hopefully feel like that again tomorrow and to maybe go hunting for that hobbit house I told you about!

A happier-looking me!

 

Thanksgiving Weekend running recap

   This past Thanksgiving weekend was one of the best ones, weather-wise, these parts (SW Ontario) have seen in a long time---for the most part sunshine and temps in the twenties.
   I took this opportunity to get out a couple of times, once for a timed 5K run and the other for a little session of forest-y hill repeats.
   I have been working diligently at trying to lower my 5K times from somewhere in the low forties back to somewhere in the mid thirties. Lately, I've been having a fair amount of success, generally being able to carve off 20 to 30 seconds at a time.
   Lately my 5K runs have been marked by sections of slow running, tempo running and walking. I run the same route all the time and it is somewhat hilly so I find that these different running speeds all were occurring round about the same portions of the route. What I've been doing is trying to go just a little faster on those sections when I reached them and restrict the amount of walking time whenever I felt like I needed to walk.
   This seems to be working! The nice part is that it means I'm running with a little bit of a plan which has fairly realistic goals attached. Here's what my Garmin's been telling me:

Just getting under 40:00
was psychologically huge!

And a little lower...

Still a ways to go!

   I don't listen to music when I run so what eventually happens that I either have the same few lines from a popular song running through my mind or, more often than not, it's a line of gibberish which pops into my head after I've established some sort of regular run cadence. As I was running on Saturday, though, I found that I was at some point simply counting my steps. Every time my right foot hit the ground, I'd count it. I'd go all the way up to a hundred and then start all over again at "one". This helped immeasurably with cadence and, psychologically, just kept me going. It also occurred to me in a flash that this is what I used to do, way back near the beginning, when I was running in the mid-thirties. Thought this was very encouraging! Later on this morning I'm headed out again and so will give it a try.

Hard to make it look steep in the pic...

   On Sunday, I knew I wanted to run but didn't want to do the usual 5K route so I headed off to Warbler Woods to do hill repeats. I've picked this spot to do repeats as it's quite scenic and features a string of steep hills throughout. Each hill is different and this only helps with the enjoyment aspect of it.
   There's about a kilometer and half of residential area that I run through before I get to the woods and it in itself is fairly hilly so I run to where the hills start and then I run hard up them and walk down the other side. This is kind of my modus operandi once I get into the woods, as well. 
   We've had so much summery weather this fall that the leaves have only just started to change so here's a bit of a photo dump of the forest and then coming out of it on the other side.

Warbler is just in behind
these purple whatever-they-are's

An extremely popular place! So
lucky that I live as close as I do!

Through the woods...

...but not this part...

...over one of the boardwalks...

...and at the gates at the other end!

Climbing up out of the park.

London is known as the Forest City,
so fall is a pretty time of the year.

Awesome colours!

Ooops! I may have said "Forest City"
just a touch too soon!

    
   So there you have it, a little bit of what the running long weekend was like! I'm headed out shortly and am aiming at perhaps cutting another 20 or so seconds off my time. Wish me luck!

Biding My Time...Barely

   Last year, dead in the middle of a Canadian winter, I became a runner.
   I had taken my first tenuous strides toward this in the summer, at the beginning of August. Doralyn had registered us for a ten week Learn To Run course at the local Running Room and I spent August and September learning to do just that---run.
   I was pretty sure when I began that I would make it through this course and then just stop running. Really, I had never run before, found it kind of boring and could not see myself becoming a runner. Then a funny kind of thing happened when the course ended. I didn't stop!
   I kept on running, partly because I was starting to feel the health benefits and partly because I was amazing myself.
   Along the way, I began to ask myself the same question all of us runners have asked ourselves at one point or another. Am I a real runner?
   This question was answered for me in the middle of the aforesaid Canadian winter.
   I was running at the tail end of blizzards. I was running

One of my run days last winter...

through sleet storms. I was running through fog and rain. I was running on slush which turned to ice which turned to slush again, all in the same run. I was running in snow above my ankles. I was running in temps cold enough to bring tears to my eyes.
   This, then, was when I knew I was a runner.
   No casual jogger would have done what I did. They would have taken one look out the window and found something else to do.
   I actually put on the bulk of my miles over the winter. This is also when I lost the most weight. At some point, it occurred to me that running was something I was always going to be doing and I desperately began to look forward to Spring. Because now I was a runner.
   Unfortunately, Spring and PF arrived almost simultaneously. There were bare roads and sidewalks to run on but I couldn't. Gradually, the PF healed and I was able to more or less get back to where I was but then, all of then sudden, I've got biopsy stitches that need to heal and then, right after that, a three-week face treatment which also requires me to be on the sidelines. And I am still in the middle of that...
   I am anticipating that sometime in the not-too-distant future I will be running once again, unimpeded by outside forces. And when that time comes...it will be Winter again!

Anonymity

   I've been weaving in and out of multitudes of running blogs for the last several months now. Like I'm sure many of us have done, I've developed a few favourites and blogs I eagerly gravitate to whenever I am notified of new posts.
   In this way, I have formed a certain level of comfort and familiarity with this blogger and that blogger, their interests, their families in some cases, their occasional pains and occasional triumphs.
   A few weeks ago, I was happily faced with the task of nominating ten fellow bloggers for a Sunshine Award. This was not particularly an easy job because there are just so many good writers out there whose work I enjoy.
   What I found though is, after I picked which blogs I wished to nominate, that even though I was familiar with the blog, I didn't necessarily know the name of the person whose blog it was!
   At my age, little lapses in memory aren't too terribly uncommon but what I then discovered was that with some blogs the author's name was not first and foremost (or even necessarily there for that matter).
   I knew that I very much wanted to list the blogs I was nominating along with their authors' names so I scoured peoples' blogs from head to foot, checking through all their "About" pages and contact info. I ended up digging through their Facebook pages, if they had them, simply in search of real names. Finally, I was able to nail down all ten.
   At some point, though, I did begin to wonder if I was being perhaps overly investigative. I wondered if perhaps there was a reason why names weren't more prominently displayed. Was it a privacy issue? And were people going to be annoyed with me for going above and beyond in my search?
   The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that people weren't overly trying to be secretive if Brian (Who Only Looks Like Tech Nerd) Baker was able to track down their info using just his laptop and questionable skills. This made me feel a little better.
   All this did lead me to ponder blog anonymity.
   Some bloggers are happy to publish their names, their family member's names and pictures of all of them. Some will publish pics and only nicknames or sometimes just initials. Not surprisingly, people are a little more protective of their kids' identities, a bit of a sad commentary on the state of the internet today.
   For my own part, I'm pretty open with identifying myself and family members on both my blogs. The kids are all active on social media for the most part (which is not to say they're past the point of getting into trouble on it) and have had some schooling on safety and some of the pitfalls involved with what's appropriate or not.
  

In pondering the seeming anonymity of some blog authors, I have come up with a bit of a theory. I now wonder if perhaps the act of running somehow or other takes us outside ourselves and changes, in a small way, both our self-perception and perhaps even the way other people see us. I then wonder if shedding the names which have always tied us to our jobs, our homes, our schools and the humdrum of daily life allows us to more easily be apart from all that routine, if however briefly. It would be almost as if, having discovered that we have this superpower of RUNNING, that we now need the pre-requisite secret identity. "You seem to be running pretty fast today, Clark." "Oh, Lois, you say the most preposterous things!" 

Aah...the Batman I grew up with!

   A couple of times lately, though, I've kind of run into a reverse sort of anonymity issue while blog surfing. A couple of blogs I read regularly employ one of those widgets which keep track of visitors in real time and identifies them by the city they live in and more or less when they logged on. At first, I thought this was kind of cool, being a "visitor from London, Canada" on someone's blog. I remember once, though, when I left a blog and then went back to it and saw my previous visit still on their counter plus my new one! All of the sudden I felt like a cyber stalker lol! I consoled myself with the fact that there are actually three or four running bloggers from London (which, come to think of it, might be a blog topic some day) and that my visits could possibly be attributed to people other than just me showing up so often! Whew!
   Part of the whole anonymity issue for me as an old man who gets easily confused is the fact that there are so damn many of us and that there also seem to be so many recurring themes to peoples' blogs. Many of them concentrate on their fave colour (which, in a lot of cases, seems to be pink!) How many variations of the "Eat. Drink. Sleep. Repeat" style of blog title do we run across in a single day? Is it just my imagination or at some point about 25 years ago did a lot of parents start naming their little girls some variation of "Jen" or "Kristy"? And it really doesn't help me when two different bloggers end up using the same blog template! Not to mention the blogs that are written by anywhere from three to six different people and trying to sort all of them out...can't tell you how many times I've been reading a post I thought Dave wrote, only to find out it was Andrea (names have been changed to protect the innocent)! And, as an old man, I also have a hard time trying to keep track of which working mom it is who's also trying to raise a family, promote a healthy lifestyle and train all at the same time and, occasionally, with the help of God.
   All of this then, seems to contribute to an overall sense of anonymity.
   Now don't get me wrong, if any of these sound familiar or maybe even if they sound like you, then please don't be hurt or offended (I love you all), I point all of this out simply to demonstrate how 1: easy it is to confuse the elderly and 2: when once we thought we might be alone, we find that we are way more interconnected than we thought. I know that when I began to write my running blog I thought to myself hey, this is a pretty cool idea, I bet no one else is writing a running blog! How wrong I was! 
  

A Different Perspective

   I may be wrong but more than any other time since I started following running bloggers religiously, it seems as though right at the moment we are all injured. I cannot remember such a litany of fractured feet, strained quads, wonky knees, bad hips, PF and burning shins.
   With all of this, we have been stopped from running. Some of us are only missing our daily runs, others have lost out on races they'd placed many of their recent hopes and dreams on.
   There have been tears, anger, depression and, if none of those, then at least a sense of wistfulness and loss.
   All of this over not being able to run.
   As difficult as it might have been for me to understand this over a year ago, now that I am a runner myself and have also been deprived of that ability for periods of time, I fully understand.
   From time to time, I have offered whatever advice, support, or encouragement I thought I could to any of my fellow bloggers who were out of commission and struggling with it. I have what I think is a fairly analytical mind and I believe I offer well thought-out opinions.
   Here is an opinion I have not offered before.

   Get over it!

   I know how that sounds. I know the harsh, dismissive ring the words seem to carry because, believe me, I apply it fully to myself as well. Hang on, though, and I shall explain.
   I know three people who are unable to walk, either as the result of an accident or due to a rare neurological affliction.
   These were people who, for most of their lives, had been as spry and able as any of us. They walked, they ran, they played sports. And, I'm certain, took all of this for granted.
   One of them, a high school compatriot, became a paraplegic as the result of a car accident which was not his fault. Another is a person the agency I work for supports. His decline has been very slow and agonizingly deliberate and is nerve-related. The other is my brother-in-law who severed his spine in a mountain biking mishap.

   We who have been briefly deprived of our ability to run are, I'm sure, still able to walk to the doctor's office, walk around the grocery store, head upstairs to put the kids to bed, take the dog out in the morning and step outside for the mail. These three people I have mentioned have not only been deprived of this briefly, they have been deprived of this forever.
   I can assure you that any of them would be happy to be able to walk gingerly down steps, worried about whether your knee might give out. There is no doubt in my mind that feeling that searing pain in a heel as you step on the floor first thing in the morning would leave them breathless and ecstatic. To be out doing their weekly long run and all of the sudden feel that all-too-familiar twinge in the hip would leave them dancing for joy, pain or not.
   Yes, these three people (and millions more in the world) would love to feel your pain because what they feel now is nothing.

  
  
  

Goals

   Now that I've completed this past weekend's race and currently have no races on the horizon, it feels like time to sit down and do a little self-evaluation.
   With this race fast approaching, I had more or less (and probably stupidly) given up on the cross-training I had been doing in order to concentrate on the running. Now, perhaps, I can get back to a combination of the two. Apart from that, though, right at the moment I really have no idea what I'm doing with this running thing.
   I wasn't particularly happy with my results in the race but I was pretty bang on with what my expectations were. The time I ran, 35:33, was pretty well what I'd been doing in training and this had me placing 144th out of 180 runners. I can rationalize this in a whole lot of ways (relatively new runner, in his sixties, lost a couple of training months due to injury, etc.) but it still doesn't sit too well.
   Part of the problem is I don't know what a realistic goal is right at the moment. I don't know whether to stick with 5k races or maybe start thinking about longer distances. I guess I'd be happy enough to be down in the twenties with my times on the 5k, rather than the mid-thirties, for starters.
   Sunday's race seemed like the most "professional" I've been in to-date although I've been in races that had more swag, better food and better-run prize announcing. The runners seemed more well-seasoned, for one thing, and it was a bit of an eye-opener for me to just be there, watching them. I guess the other part was that it was one in a series of races, with overall points being kept and prize money being offered. It was also my first experience with race photography. All-in-all, I want to look (and run) like one of the good runners.
   To this end, I train. And train. And then train a little more. And watch what I eat (while I drool over what I'm not eating). More than anything, I suppose I need to remember where I am on my life's journey.
   My Dad passed away last year at the age of 85. He was only in ill health for the last month of his life and prior to that he was one of the healthiest 85 year olds you'd want to run into. I don't work on Mondays (or very hard the other days of the week) and our Monday morning routine consisted of getting together with my Dad and playing nine holes of golf. We did this every Monday morning for about 8 or 9 years. At his ripe old age, my Dad was mystified by why he couldn't hit the ball as far as he could when he was in his thirties. I always explained to him about the aging process but he would have nothing of it. He was an old man who, simply, still felt like a young one.
   I am a bit of the same way. Honestly, I don't feel any different in my sixties than I did in my twenties. Common sense tells me otherwise, obviously, but this is why I sometimes have a hard time setting realistic goals. I see all those half marathon runners coming down the homestretch, still maintaining good form and not appearing as though they were even terribly exhausted. I think this could be me someday...
   In the meantime, here are:

What I'm looking forward to doing!

A Handful Of Race Day Observations

1. I didn't leave it all on the course. I know I had reserves I didn't even bother tapping. Shame, Brian!

2. There are photographers. Pretend you're not tired, especially the closer you get to the finish line...

3. If you're two feet away from another running blogger, say hi!

4. Check (no, double-check) your orthotics. There should be two.

5. Take a selfie, for goodness' sake! Do it yourself or there's lots of other people there who would be more than happy to oblige.

   Well, there you have it, another batch of running ruminations. I've had a couple of recovery days, I'm feeling good and itching to get out again and just run.
   It will be kind of cool simply to be running for the fun of it!

   Okay, I thought I was done with this post but, suddenly, I have decided to set some kind of goal.
   I will:

   1. Be running 10k once a week by the end of 2013
   2. Sign up for both a 10k and a half marathon in 2014.

   Now I've done it.....

   And in the meantime, happy and healthy running to you all!

  

My 8K Photo Essay

   A few of us have posted their "favourite runs" here in the past and this is what I offer you today.
   Not only is it one of my favourite runs but you could almost call it the running hub of London so popular is it. It utilizes the roadways in Springbank Park and the paths along the Thames River. I've been running it a lot lately as it is also the venue for a 5k race in the Springbank Road Races I'm running a week from today.
   Here's how it looks:

Flint Shelter

   I start from the same starting line they'll be using for the race and I then simply follow the course. The course begins at the Flint Shelter, one of the oldest buildings in this end of London.

   We head from there down the roadway to one of the two main park intersections. The park is full of wonderful flowerbeds.

   You continue on past this intersection toward the far end of the park where it then curves around and heads back in the same direction you came in, but on the other side of the park. At this point, a nice little downhill.

Nice, little downhill section...til you run back!

   Not too far after this, the roadway heads on down to the riverside, the first major hill.

The damn dam's busted!

Scenic

   At this point, there is a long stretch which runs along the river and past the ill-fated dam. They tried to make some improvements to the dam a few years ago but the first time they tried to use, it broke! All sorts of lawsuits that still aren't resolved and, in the meantime, the river is way low.

   Shortly after you pass the dam is the first major hill going up you have to contend with. It's pretty enough but it is a hill...

Storybook Gardens

   After this, there's another long stretch which takes you down to one of London's longest-running tourist attractions--Storybook Gardens. It's the site of the castle and I remember going there as a kid (fifty years ago). They re-did it a few years back and the debate these days is whether it was better then or better now.

The merry-go-round hasn't changed

   At this point, I stopped and took a pic of the merry-go-round. I did this more for nostalgia's sake--I spent the whole Spring and Summer of 1972 running the thing, to make enough money for university. In 1972, my wife was 5, lived right near the park and used to ride on the merry-go-round all the time. I was likely the guy that helped her get on the horse...

Turnaround point.

   Just past the merry-go-round, is the turnaround point for the 5k race. Here we turn around and run back past all the things I just showed you. For the purposes of a better photo essay and to give you an even better idea of where London runners run, I continued on past the turnaround point.

The Pumphouse

   Next stop, the old pump house. Way back when, it used to be a sulphur spring and the water you would get from the fountain there was, essentially, undrinkable. Smelled like rotten eggs, big-time.

The footbridge...

...and the view from the footbridge

   From there, it's just a short jog to the footbridge over the river, my chosen end point. The running path continues on much farther, however, essentially traversing the city. I have included a view of the beautiful Thames River, taken from the middle of the footbridge. In years past, it was much fuller and no rocks could be seen along the edges.
   At this point I turned around and re-traced my steps, all the way back to my car which was parked at the Flint Shelter. The Garmin had me at almost exactly 8 kilometers. Much of this was running, with some walking portions interspersed. At the same time, it is three kilometers farther than any distance I've run since the end of March. My knees are sore and my heel is suggesting that it may be acting up in the morning (BAD heel!), time will tell. In the meantime, happy and healthy running to you all!