Family weekend

We had our granddaughter in Toronto for the weekend. She had a short visit with her dad on Saturday afternoon, but he had forgotten it was her weekend and was hosting a party that evening and working on Sunday. Work is good.

On Saturday evening we picked up a possible Hallowe’en outfit for her at Value Village, a for-profit thrift store that stocks new and used costumes for Hallowe’en. On Sunday we went back to Value Village for a very nice charcoal-grey satin formal that was just a little big for her but should be perfect about the time she graduates from elementary school.

On Sunday morning LotStreetWiz headed out for an 8-hour bike ride with only two protein bars in his pocket. If biking burns off a few hundred calories per hour, you have to eat more than that to stay caught up! Eating enough to stay fuelled is one of the challenges of the longer triathlons. After dropping off our grand-daughter, I drove on and picked him up in Niagara Falls, rather cold and tired but triumphant at riding 100 miles.

Jens Voigt crashes out of the Tour de France

In one of the toughest mountain stages of the 2009 Tour de France, Jens Voigt, of the Saxobank team, suffered a severe crash and was taken for medical treatment. He’s out of the tour. Here’s one of the less grisly pictures.

Stage 16, Martigny, Switzerland to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, had very long slopes, with climbs and descents more than 20 km long. That lets a rider get exhausted on the climbs and reach dangerous speeds on the descents.

The profile for Stage 16 looks like this:

Biking Saturday

Today we had a fun ride. LotStreetWiz, AtheticKid, SilentLight, and I all biked down to the Leslie Street Spit, around the outer road (three times for L & A), and back again. We put in about 17 miles plus a few extra for our athletes. We took the Don Trail both ways to find a gentler slope. I generally brought up the rear. At the entrance to the park SilentLight and I hung back to have something to eat. I felt more energetic after that.

The Spit had a community event with nature lookout points and bird boxes for swallows or perhaps bluebirds. Apparently it was part of Doors Open Toronto. At our turnaround point, just before the road turns to gravel, there was a display including some bird skins, so we were able to compare herring gulls, ring-billed gulls (a little smaller), and common terns (a lot smaller). We learned that a pair of great egrets are nesting, or at least hanging around, past our turnaround. That was about our only stop as the emphasis was on letting AthleticKid get in some training time.

still, we saw a lot of birds: cormorants, Canada Geese, gulls, terns, swallows–barn swallows?–and lots of smaller ones. We heard a lot of robins. The red-winged blackbirds are everywhere.

The beaver lodge in the big pond is higher and we saw freshly gnawed and felled trees back by the park entrance. So either there are two beavers with different territories or one wandering animal.

Biked to dinner

We biked to the Keg Mansion on Jarvis Street for dinner with family. Although it was only about 4km each way, I was quite warm by the time we got there. I missed the rain showers–or they missed me.

Bike ride, Leslie Street Spit

We biked along the north shore of Lake Erie Ontario to Leslie Street Spit. We avoided the gravel road at the tip. So we took the right branch out to the end of pavement, back to the junction, then up other arm of the spit, and then back home.

Looking across beaver pond and other branch of the Spit to Toronto

The weather was fine and sunny, but a little cold. First ride of the season for me: 14 miles. I’ve forgotten how to change gears on my bike.

Exercising for health

It’s increasingly clear that to feel good and be healthy, a person has to get some exercise.

I’m trying to add some more activities to my modest mix of swimming a couple of times a week and doing Pilates once most weeks. For one thing, I can practice Pilates exercises at home. And I can switch the swimming from 1-hour skills sessions to 1.5-hour, coached lane swims.

I would like to add regular walking and regular bike rides, at least until the snow is on the ground. By that time my walking should be jogging or running. And I can switch to an indoor bike trainer.

There’s also contra dancing about three times a month, for the price of a movie and a snack. Indeed, there are other regular opportunities for folk or country dancing.

That’s one of the things I like about Toronto: whatever you like, you can find people to do it with.

I probably won’t be keeping detailed notes here the way I do with swimming. But in the background, I hope to be working out more. I’ve made a modest start with a very slow bike ride of about 14 km (9 miles) this weekend, in the Don Valley.

Old bikes

I had an old bike once. It was a heavy, old delivery bike with balloon tires, very stable.

It looked sort of like this, only mine was red:

Invisible unicycle

see more funny pictures

Kids’ tri

Andie leaves on the bike portion of the triathlon.

Cyclon 2008, Sunday

Cyclon 2008: cyclists at the Welland Canal

I had a most interesting ride from Brock University: over east to the canal, down the canal to the lakeshore trail, across that trail to Port Dalhousie, an extended lunch hour there, and finally back south to the University.

Cyclon 2008: Cyclists at the 1905 carousel in Port Dalhousie

Much of the way was on bike paths, about half of them hard gravel. We rode near the lake and along the old canal.. The last effort of the day was a climb up the Niagara Escarpment on a gravel road. That brought us right to the university’s back door.

LotStreetWiz and Andie did a longer ride and were the first ones back from it. I hope their group didn’t wait for them when they didn’t show up.