Perhaps like a comet I'll make a brief appearance here every few years? No, I'll find time for this blog again... This morning I spotted a post on Bad Astronomy about NASA's EPOXI spacecraft taking pictures of the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 from just 700 km away. Amazing.
 |
| EPOXI travelled 24 million km to visit Hartley 2. |
Not much to else to report. I'm ending a de facto vacation from triathlon. I haven't swum or cycled since my last race back in September. This week I've returned to the pool and started spinning again. I'll also add a few trainer rides or CompuTrainer workouts into the weekly mix. I've got a lot of ground to cover again.
I've been nursing a pinched nerve in my neck since Christmas Day, which has made training a bit unpredictable lately. It's also made my Shopping Channel appearances using various fitness equipment a bit dicey. Thank god for back pain medicine!
I took time off this Fall partially to refresh my mind but mainly to spend more time with my 16 year-old son Chris. Unfortunately that part of the plan didn't work out as he's been fairly distant and moderately hostile, choosing to spend large periods of time at his mother's house rather than live by the rules here. Frustrating and quite sad for me, but perhaps this is part of his search for independence. I hope we find a way to enjoy time together again.
2009 comes to a close with a bit of a whimper this year. I've been under the weather for the last few weeks, with a bad head cold and then a pinched nerve in my neck. Miserable! Needless to say very little exercise has occurred, but there has been much consumption of sweet and fattening food. I dread getting on a scale.
Tonight that changes though, whether I like it or not. I'll be doing my live Shopping Channel thing all day on January 1st, starting at midnight. Seven fitness shows! I hope my stiff neck holds up, I've been taking muscle relaxant pills for a few days now. Yesterday I went for a steam room session at my gym and added a short 20 minute treadmill run to see how that felt. Not too bad. I'm not quite sure what I'll be demonstrating, it looks to be a variation on kettlebells.
So how have the holidays passed? My parents and sister met up in Florida for Christmas Day (my sister's family got caught up in the travel confusion produced by the "underwear bomber"). My brother's family stayed home in up-state New York, at least partially because of some family tensions. I visited my new girlfriend and her kids on Christmas Eve, while my son spent Christmas Day with his mother.
I drove down to my brother's in the week before Christmas as a sort of courier, delivering everyone's presents and returning with just as many. My son declined to come with me at the last minute, citing his disinterest in his family but requesting that I pick up some Pokémon items from the Nintendo store in NYC. I was pretty stunned by his attitude. I really hope it's some kind of teenage phase rather than a frankly sociopathic perspective!
I saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on Christmas Day and Avatar a few days ago. I enjoyed Imaginarium; another crazy, imaginative Terry Gilliam film with great production values and intriguing performances. Avatar I'm a bit more mixed about. I enjoyed the visuals immensely, but the plot and depiction of the "alien" culture were pretty trite. Strip it down and you have a modern cowboys and indians procedural (cowboys = bad, indians = good). There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you're going to spend $300 million making it, why not siphon off $1 million to make the story a new one worth the effort? It brought to mind a seventy minute review of Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace I saw recently on YouTube that crystalized a lot of things for me. (Yes, a critique almost as long as the subject film. Trust me, watch it if you like critical analyses of pop culture.)
My son saw Sherlock Holmes with some friends at the same time in the same complex, he grudgingly accepted a ride to the theater but asked to be let out a block away and didn't acknowledge us as we passed them in the lines. That's more normal for teenagers.
Listening to: Thriller (YouTube link) by Imogen Heap from a live solo performance cover on piano. Wow...
Today was an epic training day. Up at 6:00 and on the go until 2:00 PM! Fabulous weather, sunny and hitting 30C, and I got in a great workout for all three sports: 2.1K, 33 minute open water swim. The City strike has closed all the pools that I usually swim in, so it seemed like a good day to get up early and add a swim as you can't lock the doors on a lake. 127K, 4:12 long ride (all the way up to Jackson Point). A short 20 minute quick 4K run. The bike ride was beautiful, especially along the shore of Lake Simcoe. I rode almost the entire distance solo but kept crossing paths with friends.
When I got back I just dumped everything into the house and joined Sheryl, Tamara and their family at their Club's pool. Nice to float in the cool water... Tamara took advantage of my dehydration to buy me a couple pints of Stella Artois and watch me get loopy. Her toddler daughter thought I had become her new best friend forever!
Other triathlon news: last weekend I helped officiate at the Guelph Lake Triathlon. Steady rain during both races (a Give-It-A-Try and a Sprint), no rain between races... The transition area, where I was working, and the parking lot were both grassy fields which became absolute mud pits! Strangely, it was good fun. I kind of fell into the officiating thing when I saw in interesting e-mail from OAT (Ontario Association of Triathletes). Nice to give back. This race was my first training session.
The week before was my own race, the Muskoka Long Course triathlon. 2K swim, 55K bike, 15K run. The swim and run are disproportionately long at this event. I enjoyed myself and saw lots of friends before, during and after the race. Here are the numbers:
3:41:16. 230/672 overall, 30/76 in my age group.I felt good at the end of it but my time was almost exactly the same as last year's. I want progress! I had good fun with Paula, a fellow Toronto Triathlon Club member, on the run. I passed her just after the run turn-around and about a kilometer later came to an aid station that a grade school-er was staffing. The girl had left a tray of water cups on the ground to do something else for a moment, so I stopped to pick up a cup and ended up handing out water for a few seconds to the runners behind me, including Paula. Then I gunned past her again! As seems to be the pre-race theme this year, as we were all floating around waiting for the start I grabbed her feet and threatened to suck on her toes. My winning ways seem to have worked though, she's letting me stay in the townhouse she and some friends have rented for Ironman USA. Paula has been dealing with a recurring brain tumor; she races to raise funds for Leukemia and Lymphoma research through Team in Training.
Swim 32:29 1:38/100m. 64/672 overall, 6/76 in age group
Bike 1:48:29 30.4kph. 297/672 overall, 43/76 in age group
Run 1:15:12, 4:01/km. 297/672 overall, 41/76 in age group
Listening to: Ain't No Rest for the Wicked by Cage The Elephant from Cage The Elephant.
I drove down by myself but ran into a surprising number of friends before, during and after the race. I had planned to run a pretty steady pace of somewhere between 4:15-30/K. In the end it was actually 4:38/K which was pretty close. I also managed to hold a steady pace most of the way. By chance I started right beside a friend with the same pace goal, Cindy made it stick and finished in 1:32. My final time was 1:37:40, which was good enough for 183 out of 2259 overall and 32 out of 206 in my age group of M45-49. Maybe I should have spent less time "high five-ing" kids along the course and barking back at excited dogs? Nah, that's half the fun. The bowl of chilli after the race was fantastic too. :-)
So how did I prepare for the race? One day of rest, which was occupied by driving 45 minutes to Burlington and back to pick up my race kit as well as those of half a dozen friends, and an evening circling around the Pearson International's Terminal 1 endlessly (defined here as 90 minutes) waiting for my parents to emerge from the baggage area after their trip to Mexico... Edit: I also donated platelets for a cancer patient on Friday. That's got to easily account for 3 minutes of my time!
Adrian coaxed me back out of bed with an offer of a roast chicken dinner with friends, but now it's time to crawl back in.
I've just started teaching the Running Room's winter Marathon clinic. We have a great turnout of 37 people and they're all experienced enough that we can do some good runs together. There is lots of running ahead of us, the goal race is the Ottawa marathon on May 24th, with the Chilly Half on March 1st and the Around the Bay race on March 29th. This will be the third time I've run the Around the Bay race - 30K with plenty of hills and often cold, wet conditions. It should be a good clinic, especially as I have drafted a friend as co-instructor to help out.
A friend of mine who is in two of my worlds sent me an e-mail about my modeling. She's a Running Room clinic instructor and also responsible for the Ontario Tourism photo shoots that I've done. It was a surprise for both of us when our paths crossed at the Running Room. Anyway she just sent me a proof of my first cover shot! Hurray! Now the fame and accolades will begin to pour in! It's a travel brochure for "Elderhostel, Adventures in Lifelong Learning"... :-)
We had a brutal winter storm today, and I ended up arriving late for my booking on The Shopping Channel. Ugh. Fortunately it was a show where we swapped back and forth so my modeling partner did the first half and I did last. The other two shows were fine and as the equipment was pretty conventional cardio equipment (a treadmill and an elliptical) I could actually log it as real training time. Training is going well, I'm getting some good indoor rides in, taking the swimming seriously again, and getting lots of running done in spite of the poor weather. I just need to increase the cycling volume a bit.
Gee, kind of forgot about the blog for a while. In spite of the thousands of e-mails begging for the thrilling details of my life. Not! So what have I been up to? (This simply is so I can document any needed alibis because no-one else reads this.)
First of all, Christmas. My present came a few days early unfortunately. I was at the gym a week before Christmas chatting with a friend on my iPhone and he was goading me about my "obsolete" iPhone with it's cracked screen. I adamantly defended it; no replacement as long as it keeps working! Ironically that was the last time the damn thing worked properly. An important strip of the touchscreen stopped responding and all I could do was answer calls. I mulled it over for a few days and bought a replacement. That was the end of Santa's generosity to me this year...
January means New Year's resolutions for most people and since losing weight is almost always at the top of the list the Shopping Channel has been providing lots of fitness buying opportunities. I'll probably have been on air more than ten days by the time this month is out. I got off to a bang with three days back to back starting with January 1st. With between three and six hour-long shows each day that's a lot of working out! My right shoulder (rotator cuff?) has been a bit tender for months now, at the moment it's extra sore from all the punishment.
Lots of activity on the computer front. My parents bought a new laptop to take with them on a three month trip to Mexico. I got it set up for them and moved over all my step-father's writing from his ancient PowerBook. I ended up having to buy a USB floppy drive to download floppies into their new MacBook! The new MacBook is a bit of a mixed blessing, We can all stay in touch better now but they're inundating me with news and questions. These trips used to be a sort of "time out"... I also helped another friend get set up on her new old Dell desktop which was a bit of a stumbling around in the dark. I got there in the end though.
Professionally, I've landed a contract to re-do the web site for a local gym. Nice to make some money from all my computer monkeying! I'm going to use an interesting Content Management System from Squarespace so they'll be able to do most updates themselves. I've also had to troubleshoot a problem with a web site I helped set up for a friend, irisimages.ca. The hosting company, bludomain, seems to have overwritten almost all the files! Kind of the opposite of what they're supposed to do. I'm doing a bit of forensic work to recover it.
Here's an iPhone photo of the Christmas wreath on my front door, this past Saturday morning. We are still blanketed with lovely white snow, so it will be a perfect white Christmas this year. Click on the photo to see it at higher resolution.
Listening to: All My Bells Are Ringing by Lenka from The Hotel Café Presents Winter Songs.
My son stayed over at a classmate's last weekend for a birthday party. On the following Sunday morning they walked across the road to run around in a junior school playground to slide about on the ice and kick chunks of snow at each other. Some teenagers approached them there, pulled out a knife and robbed them of cash, cell phones and iPods!
Chris didn't lose anything and wasn't harmed, he actually seems pretty unaffected by it. He happily took the subway back from the Royal Ontario Museum that evening with a friend.
Toronto has historically been called, often disparagingly, "Toronto the Good". In the last ten years this has been displaced by media hysteria over violent crime, but Toronto is still one of Canada's safer cities and dramatically safer than most American cities. Still, crimes happen and sometimes very close to home...
I discovered a few days ago that the music video I was in has been released and the song, 21st Century Christmas, is on a country music Christmas compilation. It's probably getting airplay on country music stations and on country music video shows. Here's how you can see and/or hear it:
No posts in a while... Maybe, like my triathlon training, I'm taking a bit of breather? But now it's time to ramp up again because in 2009 I'm determined to hit the starting line of Ironman USA this coming July in excellent condition and in a competitive state of mind.
So today is "Black Friday", the day after American Thanksgiving when all the retailers turn their focus exclusively toward Christmas. Big one-to-three day discounts on electronic goods are the order of the day to stimulate consumer enthusiasm. There's always some desirable item at a crazy low price but only for a very limited quantity. Crowds form waiting for those retailers to open and the pour through the door in a frenzy creating excellent news coverage and "mind space" of who has the best Christmas pricing. Well this year a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by the stampede. But someone got a fantastic deal on a 42" flat panel TV, so its all good.
Politics: In the U.S. Barack Obama is acting as de facto President while George W. Bush wanders aimlessly toward the end of his term, effectively fiddling while Rome burns as the monumental economic crisis largely produced by his policies devastates the U.S. economy. Luckily "President Elect" Obama seems to be hitting all the right notes as he selects his cabinet. George seems to be focussed on all the brush that needs clearing back at his ranch in Crawford, TX. The right-wing bloggers are however reading everything that happens as proof that Obama's Presidency is already a failure. Good luck with that one!
Here in Canada the newly re-elected Conservative government is trying to slip a bunch of ideological and partisan measures into an economic stimulus package promoted as helping the Canadian economy cope with the expanding world-wide financial crisis. Effectively Harper is daring the Opposition to bring the brand new government down over it. However the stimulus package looks weakly designed and ill-conceived and this maneuver may backfire, perhaps resulting in an embarrassing retreat or as an abrupt end to Harper's government. It should be an interesting few days.
Culture: The Art Gallery of Ontario has just re-opened after years of reconstruction. I'm aching to get a look inside, it's architectural makeover is getting great reviews. I've seen a few films lately, Clint Eastwood's new film Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, was pretty good. Jolie's performance was great but the last third of the story, an amazing true story about the disappearance of a boy in the 1920's and the LAPD's cynical response, seemed a bit disjointed. Before that I saw Rachel Getting Married. Also a good performance by the female lead, Anne Hathaway as a recovering junkie/bridesmaid, but I found the whole wedding scenario irritatingly chaotic. So no thumbs up. Too bad, I usually enjoy Jonathan Demme films.
Two other bits news: I've been elected Vice President of the Toronto Triathlon Club, and have passed at least part of the web master duties over to a new volunteer. Also, the music video shoot I was recently in seems to be getting ready for release. There's an official "behind the scenes" clip out on YouTube, although sadly there is no footage of the supporting cast...
Lots of facebook birthday greetings today from friends. Not much celebration of my 48th otherwise. I had a nice lunch with Sheryl at the Senses cafe (spelled "Sen5es"), a family meal on Sunday at my sister's, got a few calls from friends, had a little supermarket cake after dinner with my son.
Final bit of adventure last week; I drove to Buffalo and back on Friday before heading out to my friend's cottage. My sister-in-law asked me to carry some of her Maya Kaimal Fine Indian Foods gourmet sauces over the border for a potential distributor to evaluate. 412K round trip, seven hours of sitting in my car (and then two more getting to the cottage). Whew.
Still recovering from my recent marathon. I'm looking forward to a bit of down time before I start scheduling the 2009 training regime!
So my son's Grade 9 exams are over and he has his "preliminary final" marks for all his courses. He went into exams with five failing subjects out of seven, but he managed to pull himself together enough to get to a passing grade in all of them! Who knew I'd be celebrating my gifted-program son not failing? Well there you go.
In other news, I finally watched the Canadian Grand Prix on Monday, eight days after the race. I'd managed to remain completely ignorant of the result until the following Saturday when a friend let some details slip before I could plug my ears. What an interesting race! Drivers complaining about the track surface, last minute track repairs, spin outs galore and race-changing drivers errors...
This week was another Ontario Tourism photo shoot, this time with "my wife" and another couple. We spent three days "shopping", dining, wine tasting and playing golf, all for the camera, down in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Ironically Sheryl and I were there just a month ago, but we weren't paid for doing it. I didn't know who else had been cast, but my "wife" turned out to be the same woman from the last shoot and the other wife was a friend from The Shopping Channel.
Turning to my crazy "nine weeks to Ironman Canada" training program, this morning I rode out of the city at 7:00 AM for a three and a half hour ride, where I encountered all kinds of triathlon club teammates out for their rides. This was followed immediately by a 48 minute "brick" run and then a long nap...
What the episode boils down to is that Aldrich was a selfish, deceitful egoist that badly damaged everyone around him. Wow. Not to draw too close an analogy, but it brought to mind some of the things I've learned about my own father since his death... I leave you all to chew on that for a while!
To the right I am pictured fleeing from my father's influence. Actually it's a race photo of me near the end of the Around the Bay race last weekend. I was one tired puppy.
I ran in the 2008 Around the Bay race last Sunday in Hamilton. A cold day, but actually better conditions that usual... There were 4485 participants, I beat 3963 of them! Not that I'm competitive or anything. I ran a 2:22:48, about 2 minutes slower than last year, but I was a ultimately too hot with warm layers that weren't easily adjustable. There was a headwind for the last 3 K which was tough. I traveled out with two friends who were running the race as a relay, 15K each. They were a lot fresher than I was after it was all over. Myself, I had some very sore calves and a small almost-blister on the inner side of my left foot.
Here are my stats:
| Bib# | Place | Time | Chip | Pace |
| 4270 | 522/4485 | 2:23:55.4 | 2:22:48.0 | 4:48/km |
| Category | Category Place | Gender Place |
| Men 45 - 49 | 78/485 | 457/2394 |
| 10km Split | 47:06 | (46:13) |
| 20km Split | 1:34:32 | (48:19) |
| 30km Split | 2:23:55 | (49:23) |
Listening to: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk from Discovery.
Boy it's been hard to get back into blogging... I enjoy it, but it takes so much time. I've spent the last week battle a stomach bug that has kept me very close to the toilet, so I suppose I've actually closed the floodgates. Now I need diarrhea of a different kind!
So yes, I did spent three weeks in Australia last month. Way too much to put in one post, so I'll leave that on the agenda, perhaps even with a "table of contents" entry to organise it. Instead I'll start with Christmas and fill in the gaps later.
Christmas this year was at my sister's place. Chris was with me Christmas Eve and Morning, and my parents came in to town and stayed at a hotel for several days, which let them visit their town friends and eased all our travel plans. Very civilized, I thought. My brother had no respite though, they came up from New York state with their twins and they pretty much all got sick as soon as they started traveling. His girls are growing up fast and were fun to have around when they happened to be healthy.
So what did Christmas bring for everyone? Lots of technology, lots of movies, lots of books. Chris got a new iPod nano, some spending money in his iTunes account, and the new Simpsons and Futurama movies. Sheryl got an iPod nano too, while her daughter got an iPod Touch. I got a nice sweater that I've been wearing almost on-stop, and an iPhone! Too bad I can't hack my iPhone to work as a cell phone in Canada (yet), but it's a groovy iPod, camera, and web browser. Santa brought Chris and I a new 32" Sony Bravia flat panel TV too, which Chris in particular loves...
New Year's Eve was an interesting variation on a theme. I spent all New Year's Day, starting right at midnight, demonstrating Bowflex fitness equipment on The Shopping Channel. Seven hour's worth of muscle building! Personally I've usually chosen to spend New Year's Eve quietly at home.
Since then I've been pretty busy with my triathlon club getting plans together for the coming season, leading another Running Room 5K Clinic, and other Shopping Channel gigs (January always has a big fitness focus apparently).
Last week I went with Chris to see Juno, a film he's already seen with his Mum. A fun film with entertaining dialog and a fantastic lead from Ellen Page, but I think the teen pregnancy thing was handled a little too lightly... Still, worth seeing.
Dear friends and family,
It's been an interesting year with Chris starting high school, our move into a new home and my completion of an Ironman triathlon in Australia(!). I hope that you are all well and I look forward to catching up with each of you soon.
Sadly my father Bruce, battling cancer for the last few years, suffered a stroke in March and passed away in August at the age of 73. My triathlon in Australia at the beginning of December was timed to coincide with a family memorial service in Perth.
I'm treating this photo as a Christmas image owing to the presence of the colour red... It was taken a few minutes after I completed my Ironman race in a time of 10:46:01, about an hour faster than I had expected and good enough to place 15th out of 70 in my age group! Chris earned his wings as an "Iron Spectator", spending just as long waiting to see me flash past nine times.
All the best,
Ben
Listening to: I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (Stuhr Remix) by Kay Starr from Christmas Remixed - Holiday Classics Re-Grooved.
I saw the new Wes Anderson film, The Darjeeling Limited, with Sheryl last week. I enjoyed the quirky tale of three estranged brothers on an "enforced spiritual journey" in India. Interesting performances and great cinematography. Sheryl wasn't so enamoured with it. Annoyingly, I can't watch the Hotel Chevalier "intro" on the iTunes Store as it's only available to US customers. So maybe I missed something.
Listening to: Dancing on the Jetty by INXS from The Swing.
Why was I running? Well I'm in training for my first marathon, just a few weeks away on October 14th. This morning I ran 33K in training (a marathon is roughly 42K). Yesterday's run was just 5K because it was a "brick". That's triathlon lingo for bike-then-run. The bike component was 108K, my longest to date. But isn't my triathlon season over? You might think so and I might have agreed with you a few weeks ago. But my father's Australian memorial celebration is coming up in Perth and there's an Ironman race just outside of town on December 2nd! I've decided to go down for the memorial, bring Chris along to show him Australia and also enter Ironman Western Australia.
This leaves me with just two months to go through most of a year-long Ironman training program. I've got to get my cycling mileage up fast (but not too fast), keep the running up and get back into the pool. The training for my Half Ironman last July gives me a good starting point, but there's definitely ground to be made up.
I know it's a pretty ambitious goal... I'm going to need lots of good thoughts directed my way over the next ten weeks. Wish me luck!
In other news, Brian and I are still watching the Formula One races. Life conspired to fill the PVR with unwatched races though. Over the last few days we watched Turkey and Italy by ourselves, tonight we got together to watch Belgium. Not much to say about the races, Ferrari has been coming on strong while the rivalry between McLaren teammates Alonso and Hamilton is getting more intense. The big news in Formula One circles is that McLaren has been found guilty of spying on Ferrari and been fined $100 million as well as losing all their team points for the season. Yike.
It's been hard to find time for blogging lately. My father's wake, moving into my new townhouse, a general flurry of activity and a bit of an emotional dead zone have conspired to keep me away from the keyboard. So here's a ten minute summary of the last few weeks...
Chris returned from camp having ultimately enjoyed himself but missed his "second life" in World of Warcraft. His mother has bought him a MacBook laptop in the belief that this will help him with high school. Jury's out on that one I think. He's been at my place for a few days but has mostly been with his mother since getting back from camp. He returns Monday for his week with me although the house is still mostly heaps of boxes. He's also finished his first week of high school, which seems to have gone well. I'll need to pump him for details tomorrow. While he was with me he had an "introduction" morning to get familiar with his classmates and get the lay of the land and seemed to be comfortable with the prospect of high school.
What about me? Well I've been busy ignoring the piles of possessions scattered throughout my townhouse. I've also been teaching my Running Room clinic and trying to stay on top of my own training. I've got the crazy idea of going down to Australia for my father's final wake and doing an Ironman triathlon at the same time. It's also Toronto International Film Festival time. This year on top of my usual volunteering I've got a paying job helping operate one of the Festival's box offices. For the last week I've working from as early as 5:30 AM until early afternoon as a Box Office Line Supervisor. In the afternoons I've been a Volunteer Captain at various theatre venues. This will continue for another exhausting week. Didn't help that on Opening Night I went to the Gala party and stayed out until 3:30 AM, leaving just 90 minutes for sleeping before the next day started!
Speaking of the Toronto International Film Festival I've managed to see two films so far, which surprised me given my wild over-commitments; When Did You Last See Your Father? and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Both are excellent films with great performances, camera work and scripts. The first film hit a bit too close to home, dealing with a man coming to terms with the impending death of his father. These films will undoubtedly be released widely, I generally try to get to films at the Festival that are unlikely to show up on North American screens but these happened to fit my free time slots.
I'm just back from Regina again, where I attended my father's wake. A sad occasion, but I did learn a lot more about my dad from his friends... Apparently he wasn't adverse to the occasional joint!
Posts
All Comments
