A friend of mine recently asked, twice, why I stopped running. Paranoid, I wondered if that wasn’t some kind of a hint that I should resume a training regime because I’m getting round or something. Actually, he asked because runners usually have a hard time leaving the sport and I laughed and told him I never liked the physical act of running and I got so intensely bored of training in Vancouver (and getting beat down by the rain).
At the same time, I think a half-marathon 21.1km is the perfect …

We did not train for this one. In the days leading up to the race, I started feeling sick to my stomach. It was not dissimilar to a few races in the past where race day approached and I knew I wasn’t prepared. How not prepared? We hadn’t run more than 30 minutes and my original goal was 70 minutes, more than double the time. How one earth did I let this happen?! Well, first off, I didn’t make a schedule–how could that have happened?! I’ve been dealing with other issues …

Someone I know always has a story to tell you. She really believes in ardent socializing (or “networking”) and perhaps lives vicariously through other people. We were kicking back after dessert and the topic of the upcoming Sun Run (10K) race came up and who would be participating and burning (600) calories to burn off the dessert? I had to timidly raise my hand–we are ready to go for 5K, just not so sure about the back 5.
She added with great relish that a mutual acquaintance of ours is doing …

I missed the first Fitness World Groupon, thinking my local Fitness World had not gone Steve Nash, but got onto the second one that was even cheaper! The gym got the last laugh, of course, because I got convinced to sign on for 15 more months with an attractive back-to-school/corporate rate.
It just goes to show that my life goes in cycles. I’m back to haunting a gym and now reminisce that I’ve been a gym rat at two other periods of my life.
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Back in 1999, I joined the YMCA in …

Following a moment of inspiration, I laid out my marathon/race bibs on my coffee table and mulled over how they will fit on a poster board in a way that information was not lost. But pasting it onto a board seemed too permanent, and the idea to scrapbook my marathons was the next idea to float by me. I have a sketchbook with hundreds of heavy stock pages that I never used since purchasing it quite a few years ago. And I finally had something worthwhile to scrapbook, something …

Congratulations to TJ, TLT, Ann, the others who overcame personal expectations and did a full marathon in Vancouver (VIM) yesterday!
Last year, I did VIM kind of so that I would have it out of the way and it beat me so badly. I relived some of those memories yesterday and calculated how far back from the finishers I had been (i.e., when the 3:30s finished, I was still at the farthest end of Kits the route extended, still an hour out). It’s good to see that while VIM licked me, …

I can be such a poser. Given a wall of girly magazines as choices for light reading during a flight, I skipped over Cosmo, Marie Claire, Glamor, and the like for the latest issue of Runner’s World. I’m not that ardent a runner to devour every issue of RW but I certainly have an interest in a given issue’s contents and it’s far better for my “image” for the cover story to scream “Lose 10 Pounds (The Right Way)” rather than “6 Moves to Drive Him Wild in Bed (and …

After three years of seeing me run like one possessed, NPY started running for fitness and we did a 5K “fun run” together in October. Not satisfied with not knowing exactly how long it took us, I suggested we do another race… or a longer race. I originally wanted to do the 10K Sun Run with 40,000+ other runners and walkers; a lot of our friends would usually participate in some way, and it’s really fun for that aspect, but I’m not in town that weekend and I found the …

What an upheaval the Olympic Games in Vancouver in February has caused on the local running schedule!
The First Half Half-Marathon, usually taking place in February, would fall smack-dab in the middle of the Olympics and had to cancel their 2010 event for lack of venue. The world’s 2nd largest timed 10K run, the Sun Run, has been bumped from the usual end-of-April slot to taking place after the Vancouver International Marathon, in mid-May. However fun it would be to gather our friends together for NPY’s first 10K, I probably will not …

a.k.a. “The race I nearly forgot was a race and thus nearly forgot to blog about it….”

As is plainly obvious (or is it?), I haven’t been running much since my May marathon nor do I have a race to train for. Wait, I did have one. No, I didn’t really.
Over the summer, NPY and I went for many walks. As a runner, I would disparage this slow-going past-time, casting it as something old people do. But it was a really nice summer and we had to do something since in …