Once again with feeling

Hyper extended describes my life most of the time but at the moment it also describes my left knee. It is perhaps ironic that this knee injury did not come about as a result of running but as the result of badminton play now that the badminton season is over and the running season is just underway. Erring on the side of caution tonight became an impromptu night off which was spent changing the bedding for a guinea pig and helping my daughter with her French homework. Fortunately for me the French homework was about democracy in Quebec so there wasn’t much to do.

This week has been a great week sports wise at school. This years iteration of the track and field team (only the second year that our school has had one in recent memory) did very well at the local level qualifying almost 40 athletes for the city championships. This was the first year we took on the field sports and with the help of a teacher who used to coach discus, shot put and javelin our field athletes did very well with all of them qualifying and in some cases winning their events this week. All our runners did very well in everything from the sprints to middle distance events. Next week we will have the city championships and for the first time in over thirty years our school actually has a shot at winning the entire event. If that happens I will be unbearable for weeks.

Thallium is mostly used for cardiac exams but it turns out it is also used for examining brain tumors. My wife went in for a thallium test today which came about after her 3 month CT scan showed that the tumor appears to be exactly the same size as when it was originally operated on (my wife and I disagree on whether the comparison is from the stereotactic surgery or craniotomy). Thallium is barely detectable in necrotic tissue, does not show up in scar tissue but lights up like a torch in the night in an active tumor. Essentially today’s scan is the quickest way to find out if the tumor is indeed still active or something more benign. As with all the tests in the past six months both for my wife’s health and my son’s health the hardest part is waiting for the results. Fingers crossed.

The boy’s bantam badminton team too the silver in the team championships which was really cool for only the second year of our rebuilding program. One of the doubles teams scored a bronze medal in the individual championships. The midget boys managed a 4th place finish in the championships which is nothing to sneer at.

Track and Field practices have been going well. My Friday night and Sunday afternoon practices actually pulled out some of the competitors to work on their relay skills. The field athletes have been working hard on javelin, discus and shot put. All in all I think we have put together a pretty good team for a school that doesn’t have a track.

Running, as usual, has been injury plagued but things are managing to be in useable condition if I stick to a 3 days on 1 day off schedule and sometimes take 2 days off doing cross training instead of running. It is sad, but I just cannot manage to run every day anymore without threatening the season.

My son’s 14th birthday is on Saturday. Hmmm. I guess I should be thinking about what to get him for a birthday present.

Well if being swamped at work is an excuse for not posting then I have a perfect excuse. Spring time is the confluence of badminton and track and field ergo finding time to think let alone write is at a premium. Today we finished the badminton playoffs for the midget and bantam teams. This is the second year of a five year building project for badminton so making into the playoffs was huge as you have to win your division to qualify for the playoffs. The bantam team took silver in the round robin tournament and the midget boys came in third. Over the next two days we will now have individual badminton finals.

The individual finals differ from the team finals in that an individual player’s (or doubles team) record is considered for qualifying for the tournament. We have qualified two bantam doubles teams and one bantam singles play as well as a singles midget player and a doubles midget team for the individual tournament. At the same time I am supposed to be prepping the track and field team which means that I have been doing a lot of clerical work while three other teachers I roped into helping actually are doing all the work of getting the team ready at the moment. I hope to make up for it later this week with some track workouts and of course taking them to the meet but the cross over of the two sports has taken its toll.

Even more incredible is that when I look at the calendar I can’t help but marvel that the school year is almost over. Only about 6 weeks left before final exams start – amazing. Tempus fugit.

I don’t know how I feel today. It is a blah day - a little hail, a lot of rain, 2 degrees. On Monday I pulled up after only 7K of speed work and jogged the last 2K abandoning a workout that is normally 14K. Abandoning a workout doesn’t happen often. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent cajoling my ankle and knee into something approaching normalcy while managing to throw out my back. Thursday actually saw me back on the road again easing into a 12k run which went well. For the first 6K I ran a 5 minute pace then picked it up to 3:50 for 2K then coasted home at 5 again. Upon awaking this morning my back and knee were complaining bitterly (especially when going up or down stairs). On the way home the hail started and I decided to wimp out on working out today rationalizing it as getting two days needed rest before racing on Sunday.

It could be that I am being smart by taking off some time to recuperate before a race (even if it is only a 10K). It could be that caution is the better part of valour and there is wisdom in resting muscles and tendons that are complaining. The more likely answer though is that laziness is just taking hold in the face of yet another inclement day.

Television quotes are sometimes difficult to track down - here are some of my favourites from over the years.

From Northern Exposure: I don’t give a damn if Walt Whitman kicked with his right foot or his left foot or that J. Edgar Hoover took it better than he gave it, or that Ike was true blue to Mamie, or that god knows who had trouble with the ponies or the bottle. We need our heroes. We need men we can look up to, believe in. Men who walked tall. We cannot chop them off at the knees just to prove they’re like the rest of us. Now, Walt Whitman was a pervert, but he was the best poet that America ever produced. And if he was standin’ here today and somebody called him a fruit or queer behind his back or to his face or over these airways–that person would have to answer to me. Sure we’re all human. But there are damn few of us that have the right stuff to be called heroes. And that closes the book on that subject.” -Maurice Minnifield

From M*A*S*H: Allow me to take my leave before you decimate me with another “says you” or an “oh-ya”. - Charles Emerson Winchester III

From M*A*S*H: Without love, what are we worth? 89 cents. 89 cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. - Hawkeye Pierce

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: “I laugh in the face of danger! Then I hide until it goes away.” - Xander

Not having a lot of hair left pulling it out in frustration is not one of my favourite things to do.

Bell Canada - or Bell Business or Bell Global or whatever manifestation of “Bell Services” it comes under has been driving me to distraction.

A friend moved his two business domains onto a server in the U.S.A. from the Bell servers because he wasn’t getting the service he wanted. Five days later every DNS in the world had been updated but not the Bell DNS. I had to phone, beg, cajole and yell for about 2 hours to get someone there to update the DNS at Bell. Once that was accomplished business customers using Bell could email my friend again - or so we thought.

Aside from refusing to automatically update the DNS (which is standard practice in the Internet industry) Bell seems to have blackballed email coming from the new hosting company to Bell customers. It is truly something amazing to watch. If we reply to an email sent to his Google account it goes through without an issue. If we reply to an email sent to one of his domain addresses then any reply to the Bell client is bounced - timed out by the Bell servers. On one of his email accounts (which has 200 mb of space) any email from a Bell client reports back that his mail box is full even though his mail box is empty. We have experimented with it and ONLY Bell email servers are doing this to his accounts. If it were simple incompetence it would be understandable but no one at Bell will do anything about it. The problem is not on our side as far as we can tell - Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Videotron and everyone else in the world not on a Bell email server is having no problem at all sending email to or receiving email from him.

Normally this would not be a problem but business services, as far as the Internet is concerned, is the sole domain of Bell in Quebec. There may be other small players but they are all leasing lines and server time from Bell. So Bell’s failure to even talk to someone about the problem or look at the bounced emails is problematic for anyone wanting to do business. This is one of the main arguments against monopolies: They are subject to abuse.

Racing is fun most of the time. It was fun today with temperatures creeping up to about -4 or so at start time for the Lasalle 10K. Lasalle is a flat course with a bottleneck turn at the 3K and 8K mark that easily takes 10 seconds off runners time as they negotiate the turn. Ten seconds may not seem like much but it is surprisingly difficult to make up ten seconds.

Racers run at race pace. Anything that interferes with race pace has the two fold effect of slowing down the runner and causing the runner to momentarily lose focus on their main concern - running. Small things can make a big difference in a race. Today everything looked good to go until arriving at the start line because there was no clear start line. This year was a new course for the Lasalle race and the organizers seemed to have forgotten that they ought to have a clearly marked starting line. To add to the confusion some medical personnel on the ATV’s that follow the runners thought the race was moving in the opposite direction to the direction that it had gone in previous years. As it turned out the medical techs were wrong. Eventually the runners were sorted out and the start line established.

The race was ten minutes late getting started - another problem for all but the runners standing at the very front who could keep warm by doing strides the rest of the runners who had warmed up in preparation for the start ended up just as cold as if they hadn’t warmed up for the race. When the race finally started the first kilometer and a half were a problem for me. Once I start running when I stop my right adductor starts to seize up - standing in the cold for 10 minutes after running a 2K warm up caused a great deal of difficulty trying to get into a pace of some kind. About 600 meters into the race I briefly thought of pulling out of the race which would have been the first time I had ever done that. Fortunately I kept with it and started to settle into a race pace around 2K laying down a 5K split of 21:30 which set me up perfectly for my predicted time of 45 minutes.

The rest of the race was reasonably uneventful. No twinges, no pains, just one annoying runner who I couldn’t lose that kept making loud throat clearing noises and incredibly loud huffing sounds. As we cleared the bottleneck at 8K a runner behind me yelled at me to pick up the pace because he needed a rabbit to chase. As much as I wanted to tell him where to get off I just ignored it and he passed me about 200 meters later and finished about ten places or so ahead of me - he must have found a rabbit. I ended up finishing 44th out of 117 in my age category (40-49) still not able to crack the top third of competitors in my group. In the race overall I placed 117th out of 364 ironically roughly the same position overall as in my age group.

All in all it was a good race and with any luck foreshadows a good season to come with nine more Endurance Circuit races on the season schedule along with a few club races and the Montreal marathon in the fall a little positive news at the beginning of the season is a good thing.

One of the caveats of writing a blog is never to inflict your poetry on others. I am breaking that rule because I want to. This is a poem I had forgotten about - it is about my wife - and I thought I would share it.

Lynn

Alone
home is beyond reach

With her

I am there

On Easter Monday the kids and I set off for a one day holiday in the tropics. Well actually we drove out to the east end of Montreal and spent a few hours at the botanical gardens. Every year between the end of February and about mid April the botanical gardens has a kind of butterfly festival. Thousands of butterflies in one of the environments are just flitting around on plants, flowers an plates of fruit. The voyage to the butterflies is through a host of botanical garden environments from desert to tropical. To help keep the kids engaged I gave them each a camera and told them to snap away. The best selection of pictures is in the gallery here.

Yesterday we went tubing at Glissades des Pays d’en Haut which is a tubing / snow rafting place in the Laurentians. It was a blast and the hills - not surprisingly for a Tuesday - were practically empty. I took a few pictures which are also in the gallery here.