Category: motivation

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My Random Yet Awesome Playlist

On the last day of March, the sun came out, and it was time for an outdoor run.  I was so happy to get some sunlight on my face, and simply the ability to get out without a scarf or mask meant the run I was going to embark on could do no wrong.



I was using my phone for music, and the truth is, I’ve never quite mastered managing playlists or loading music on it, so what’s on there doesn’t represent anywhere near my whole music collection, but I put it on random and figured I could take it as it comes… here’s what came out of my earphones that day:


Artist
Track
Notes
“Don’t Call it a comeback!” though it felt like one, running outside in pleasant weather. Great start to the run
A U2 Fave – awesome tempo.
I have tons of STP on my phone.  At least one of their songs was bound to come up.
80s! An urgent beat to keep me going.
A cover from their Renegades album.  More like old fashioned punk than most RATM (it’s originally by MC5)
One of their best tracks.  It’s baffling that this wasn’t one of their big radio singles.  Bonus: the quieter parts seemed to line up with when I had to negotiate ice/puddles and the chorus would come in just as I could go fast again.  Perfect.
Well, I don’t want to finish last… Bonus: The guitar solo came in right at the bottom of the biggest final hill, causing me to charge up at 100% effort.  I love it when that happens!
“Fight off the lethargy…” the hill is done, and the run is nearly over.  A good rhythm for plodding to the end.
Heh.  Well, I was heading straight back to the office a.k.a. ‘The Man’. Less on the tempo, good for cooling down.



Maybe it was just the positive attitude I had that day, but it really felt like serendipity to get such perfect tracks at random.  I made a point to keep track of what I’d heard (thanks to the last.fm scrobbling – tracking what tunes are played) so I could share it with you guys.

Would you ever trust the shuffle gods to do your running playlist?
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Gear Corner: Apps That Motivate (Earndit, Pact)

We live in awesome times.  Information and mobile technologies enable us to get the most out of exercise, track the activities and help us stay motivated.  Today I’m going to look at two apps that do the latter: Earndit and Pact.


Earndit is not precisely an app, more like a website that connects to various other apps.  The premise is to reward you for working out, and of course that means some tracking.  It awards points that can be accumulated for rewards; more of that in a bit.


There are two main ways that Earndit awards workout points: exercise that is tracked, and checking into exercise facilities like gyms, parks, community centres, ski resorts, and probably more that I haven’t discovered yet.  The latter is accomplished through Foursquare.


For exercise tracking, I personally use Endomondo, though I also linked my Garmin account.  Other possibilities include Nike+, RunKeeper, FitBit, MapMyFitness, EveryTrail, BodyMedia, Omron, Moves and Jawbone.  Points vary depending on activity, and you can’t rack up more than 60 points in a day.


The rewards tend to be discounts or gift cards (with spending minimums) to online retailers in the health/fitness/exercise space, though I’ve also been introduced to Cory Vines (Active Wear), Blank Label (Custom Shirts) and Hugh & Crye (Men’s Wear) through these rewards. (Full Disclosure: those links contain referral codes that award me extra credits for referral if you make purchases). 

Cory Vines Top



The rewards available to Canadians are a little more limited, and though there’s a nice check box to limit rewards to those available in Canada, it’s best to double-check the fine print to see if they’ll ship there.  Most rewards are one-time only, so the selection drops once you’ve used up a few.  Except my favourite kind of rewards which are Charity Rewards.  So far, through Earndit, I have:



These rewards seem to come and go randomly, but it’s always nice to be able to give.


Earndit links with Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  You can ‘friend’ people within the system too, but I found it hard to find people I knew in general (exception: The Purple Giraffe!)


The other app I started using is Pact (formerly known as Gym-Pact).  Using this app, you commit to working out a certain number of times per week, and any workouts you miss you pay a penalty for.  The penalties for a given Pact go into a pot, which gets divided up and paid out amongst those that achieved their commitments.  You get paid to workout.  As in cash-money (it goes to PayPal or a credit card, but other than that, it’s money, not gift cards, or discounts or whatever).

I only just started using Pact.  I signed up for my first one mid-week, and the default Pact was 3 times per week at $10.00 a workout.  In hindsight, that seems a little steep (I think Fitness Cheerleader uses a $5.00 Pact, which seems more sensible). Still, I doubted I would have trouble making it to 3 workouts a week, all things considered…

Not so fast! Not all things can be considered! Home workouts can’t be tracked; that just makes sense as money is at stake and people could fake it too easily. Still, when it comes to checking into a ‘gym’ the method they use seems a little…crude I guess. The geo-location function of your smartphone is activated and they take a satellite image of it, which gets verified by some person on their end before they will give you credit for it. My gym is at work which is a large corporate campus, so I wasn’t sure if I would get credit for it until it was verified; because I signed up mid-week, I had 10 days to accrue 3 workouts for the week’s pact. Not knowing whether or not I was going to be able to count that gym in was stressful, since the only way to play with these features is to commit to a pact. Partnering with another app like Foursquare or Yelp seems like a much more sensible way to go than inspecting satellite images to me. While those apps could theoretically be cheated too, any given location could be verified by seeing if other people are checking in to workout. A lot of gyms (like Crossfit boxes) are in industrial/warehouse areas and might not ‘look’ like a gym from a satellite image.


Of course, outdoor activities can be tracked too. Unfortunately, the only apps Pact syncs with are Runkeeper and MapMyFitness so no Endomondo for me (side bar: I’m shocked to not see Daily Mile on these lists as I thought that was an incredibly popular app). Activity tracker wristbands that sync with Pact are the Jawbone Up and Fitbit. The latter are good for tracking the over 10,000 steps you need to qualify as having worked out that day. For tracking runs (or bike rides or whatever) you need to rack up at least 30 minutes while moving an average of 2 Miles an Hour. That doesn’t seem too strict, but I was still disappointed to find that our weekend outing to go cross-country skiing didn’t count toward my pact, as we spent too much time waiting for Shark Boy (he’s doing great, but he’s only 4 years old!).

When Sunday midnight rolled around, I had my 3 workouts approved, and I waited till Tuesday for the payout. Well, I should have been paid on Tuesday, but it took till Wednesday to rack up…. $1.11. A buck for 3 workouts that could have cost me up to $30 for missing them. I think that means that few people miss out on making their committed pack, which is a good thing, I suppose.

We were going on our family vacation in the Mayan Riviera the next week so I put Pact on break (I was planning on getting exercise there, but wasn’t going to be messing around with the app) till I got back (review of the trip soon to come!)

While there’s nothing preventing me from using both (and I probably will, hopefully the weekly winnings will rack up to something I can treat myself with) I really prefer Earndit’s ease of use, accessibility and no downside.

Do you use Pact? Earndit? Some other motivational app?




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The First Monday of 2014

Hi 2014.  We haven’t been properly introduced, but you decided to open up your first  Monday and real workday by waking me at 5 AM (no problem, I was ready for that), dumping a heavy mix of snow and freezing rain on the area so I’d have to shovel snow (well, it goes with the territory, being Canadian I suppose) and finally having my bedroom door fall on me (NOT COOL – WAY OFFSIDE!).  Maybe you thought you could get my attention that way, and I could say Mission Accomplished, but I don’t want to give you the satisfaction.


Do you know what I told 2013 when it was getting started?


And 2013 was the year I turned 40.  You don’t have the advantage of a significant birthday of mine, so I wouldn’t get cocky if you’re hoping to grind me down or anything silly like that.  Maybe you don’t know who you’re dealing with… my mistake, as I said, we haven’t been properly introduced.


I not only graduated from one of Canada’s best Engineering programs, but I studied Electromagnetic Fields and other subjects in German.  By choice.
I’ve hiked the West Coast Trail.
From http://www.westcoasttrailbc.com/




Do you know 2003? It tried to get me by having me get dumped and laid off on the same day, then gave me melanoma a month later.  Low blows, and I certainly remember the year, but it’s been more than a decade and I can write the enormity of the entire experience in a nostalgic sentence like any other joke or anecdote.


I’ve struck, thrown and locked other human bodies and had them do the same to me until my neck couldn’t take it any more.

I’ve run far, and when running got too boring, I swam and biked too.  I married my running buddy, so as not to have to chase after her the rest of my life – I’m smart like that.


When I procreate, I make Sharks and Lightning.  The Lightning Kid was born with what they call a ‘disability’ – he’s walking, talking, going to a regular day care without assistance, and showing strong signs of being potty ready and he’s only two.

Do what you can 2014.  In another decade, I’ll still be raising my boys with an active, adventurous lifestyle, with a woman who could be described as some kind of cross between a Queen and an Angel by my side… and I’ll need to do math (but not Vector Calculus in German) to figure out which one of the twenty-teens you were.

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Just Running

I haven’t had much blog content over the holidays.  While I try to focus on the positive, Lisa at RunWiki has inspired me to open up a little about some of the negatives I’m experiencing.  It’s important for me to say that by no means did I have a bad Christmas or holiday season in general; I got to spend great times with my family, whom I cherish more than anything, and we created some great memories to cap off 2013.  This blog, however is about triathlon, fitness, and getting outside and December has not been kind.

One of the things I don’t talk about much is how poorly we sleep.  The Lightning Kid typically has 3 wake-ups a night, and what it takes to get him back to sleep can vary, as what can what time he decides to wake up for the day can swing between 5 and nearly 7 am.  Please note, I am not asking for any advice; we have two children who both have/had trouble sleeping and know everything there is to know about good sleep habits, we research on many Down syndrome forums and are always pursuing new and increasingly exotic methods to try and turn this around.  This simply isn’t a forum where I wish to discuss sleep issues, I just want to provide background information.   Add the extra stimulation of the holidays as well as cold and flu season (with undersized nasal passages more prone to congestion) and things get even worse.

Speaking of cold and flu season, I got knocked down by the flu in mid-December.  Weak feeling, achy bones, chills, you know the drill.  When all the symptoms subsided, I was left with a nasty cough that seemed to give me a crushing feeling in my chest every time I had a coughing fit.  I mean, it felt like a Sumo wrestler sat on me.  I went to the doctor and he gave my heart and lungs the all-clear.  His theory? That I pulled a chest muscle during a sudden onset of coughing.  Nice to know you can get an athletic injury without being athletic (while I had my doubts about the theory at the time, that pain eventually subsided and was replace by one in my right rib which felt a lot more like a pulled muscle).

Which brings this post from general complaining to the more central topic: I have not been active.  Every article I’ve ever read about training vs. illness says it’s OK until it’s in your chest (one such article for example).  At the end of the season I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do next.  There didn’t seem to be any goal looming that presented something new, while being attainable based on past performance and I found my attentions scattered in all directions.

I had tried to jump start my exercise habits a little toward the end of the year.  I tried to play catch-up and use my soon-to-expire Crossfit sessions at least weekly, sometimes twice a week.  DOMS and my work schedule kept it from being more, I guess.  I signed up for not one, but two Yoga challenges on Instagram.  I bailed on all of them, and though the illness is part of it, I have to admit I wasn’t really enjoying any of that.  Every Crossfit WOD, every yoga pose had to be modified for my limited strength and/or flexibility.  While the leaders were great at providing these, I found being the “can’t” in a sea of “cans” to be a motivational black hole.

So, once the holidays started, I had a routine that involved eating, going to holiday events (Santa visits, family get-togethers, etc) and working.  Just about any free time I got, I tried to nap (though sometimes I watched House of Cards on Netflix).  The holidays are almost over, and I’m still tired, and still coughing.  I’m not sure I can wait for the cough go away before I get active again, and I really think I need to rebuild.  I also need to keep it simple, so that I don’t get distracted, or discouraged.  What I think I’m going to do is take it only a couple of weeks at a time; first step: Running, Just Running.

Why running? I think running was probably the first exercise I ever did for myself.  In a way, it’s the first exercise any of us ever do as young children – run after something.  Being slower is not as big a demotivator – there’s always someone faster anyway and every time out on my feet feels like a gain.  Running helps me mentally and emotionally; it clears my head.  I want to run 7 times in the first 2 weeks of 2014.  I’ll use this to prove my body is ready for a little more and take it from there (don’t worry, the hopper is full of ideas, and if it weren’t, there’s always people like Katie and Morgan at WildlyFit making exciting quick-start fitness programs for the new year).

Is it possible to have goal-overload? Is a back-to-basics approach the solution? Happy New Year!

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December 12th: In Loving Memory

This is a tough time of year for me.  An introvert gets tired of the constant parties and gatherings that take place at the holidays, the lack of sunlight makes getting outside challenging and can bring on Seasonal Affective Disorder.  But more than anything else it’s when the emotional wound of losing my father to cancer (malignant melanoma specifically) is the most raw.


It was today 13 years ago that he passed, and in the time immediately following that day, I went through the obvious shock and grief and pain you might expect.  What I didn’t expect was that years later, I would have to fight back tears for no good reason in the weeks leading up to this date, even if I wasn’t consciously thinking about him.  The symptoms of depression would sneak up on me in late November/early December, and one of the best ways to cope was to acknowledge that I still felt pain, loss and grief – it’s easier to fight an enemy you can see coming.


Sometimes I wish I could know what he’d make of how my life turned out.  Scratch that, I always wish that.  When he passed I had just finished grad school and had taken my career in an exciting new direction.  In the next few years I’d fall in love then get dumped on the same day as being laid off from that job, and I got my own malignant melanoma for dessert a scant month later.  That last part I guess I’m glad he didn’t have to live through, nobody wants their kid to have cancer even if they’re 30 years old and hardly a kid.


Thanks to early detection and an aggressive excision, I’d beat cancer, and ultimately fall in love again (while being gainfully employed), get married and have two rambunctious boys who love to get outside and be active like their grandfather.  He’d have loved Shark Boy and the Lightning Kid for sure, and of course the other part of my life he didn’t get to see was my foray into endurance sport and triathlon.


When I did the Scotiabank Marathon in 2006, I thought of him throughout the course, but especially during the last quarter, as everything in my lower body started to hurt, and I found myself slowing to a walk more and more often.  He often preached for the ‘Endspurt’ – a German expression for the burst of speed and enthusiasm you get when you know you’re almost done.  I try to carry on the tradition by maintaining negative splits on runs, and finishing every race with a fast pace, even if the overall pace hasn’t been that fast.

I think he would have made a good triathlete, as he was strong in all three disciplines and would have had fun switching from sport to sport.  I have my doubts that he would be interested in following a highly structured, periodized training plan and would have done a lot of improvising – I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Every December 12th, my mother, my brother and I try to observe some of our values. We spend time with family; sometimes each other, sometimes apart with our own new respective families. We try to get outside and move our bodies. Today’s weather (and my work schedule) made that a little daunting, but this was important. I hit the Etobicoke Creek Trail for 5km worth of memorial running.


In trying to find some comfort with friends on Facebook who’s fathers had passed (on the same date in different years) I wrote:  Fatherhood might be the greatest gift a man can give and the greatest prize a man can claim.

Please make a little more time to cherish your families during this season, and as a favour to me, your Fathers especially.

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Where’s Your Head At?

I have been struggling, struggling, struggling with being able to focus lately –  in most areas of my life, but fitness and training especially.  I have had too much trouble deciding where and what I want to spend time on, so not only is my training all over the place, but I’m not in headspace to set goals, and as for blogging about it… well…

I’ll try to give you an illustration of the fitness/training part of my brain lately:

This probably plays fast and loose with the laws of the Venn diagram, but it’s the best I can do to sort through the jumble.  Let’s break this down some more:

  • Triathlon, comprised of Swim, Bike and Run.  This is still my biggest love, still a priority.  The temptation to let things slide due to the “off-season” is there, but there are also arguments that there shouldn’t be an off-season (Tridot calls it “Out-Season”) especially if you haven’t had a heavy “On-Season”.  On the other hand, maybe it’s the time of year to work on strength, like say through…

  • Crossfit.  Confessions first: with only a few months left in the year, I realized I’m in danger of the sessions I bought back in January expiring.  I’ve been even worse than sporadic up until that point, but I did manage to step it up in the last month or so, still falling short of the twice a week I wanted. What I like most is that I’m often addressing muscles in the posterior chain; easy to neglect, but very important muscles. 

    Big workouts have given me Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), which for me always sets in 2 days after the workout, which really throws off the idea of getting back in there for a WOD (workout of the day) 2 days later.
Besides that, the other problem I have is that it’s time consuming, which is a weird thing to say given that I’ve seen WODs that are 10 minutes long.  Still, I have to drive there (it’s short, but that’s still more than using the in-house corporate gym or my basement or running.  There’s the warm-up and skills portion (which I’m grateful for), yet they start when everybody is ready and there, not just when I want to get things moving along.  There’s no shower at the box, so after I drive back, I still have to shower and change.  The truth is, where there’s a will there’s a way, so these kinds of excuses shouldn’t be an obstacle if I really love doing it, but I guess I don’t.  I’d love to improve in some of the skills (pull-ups, dead-lifts, pistol squats and handstand push-ups come to mind), but I don’t get to pick what comes up in the WOD.  I recently tried (again) snatches, but I didn’t do so great with them; it just feels like flirting with injury.  Forty-somethings need to play it safe sometimes, which brings us to…









  • Parkour*.  The asterisk is for the fact that I’m forty (did I mention that already) and I don’t have the tolerance for risk that doing head-over-heels flips would entail, but I do like working on jumps, balancing and climbing during Burbathlon. What I’d really like to achieve is the Kong Vault (or at least the Monkey Vault). I just think it might come in handy, especially if I ever try an Obstacle Course race again. What I’ve been working on is getting my legs through with my hands on the ground (or any surface really). It’s an exercise in flexibility and discipline, really.



  • Nordic Skiing. This one is marked as being outside the benefit zone of triathlon, but according to what I’ve written before, maybe it shouldn’t be. At any rate, Nordic skiing is one of my favourite forms of exercise, and as they say on Game of Thrones, Winter is Coming. I got lucky finding a pair of roller-skis at a ski swap, and knowing that the snow hasn’t been reliable in recent years, I snagged them. When I get a chance to practice with them for more than 10 minutes, I’ll write up a little review, but based on my current experience, I won’t feel safe using them to commute to work any time soon.





  • Martial Arts. For reasons I can’t quite understand that myself looking through local places that offer Kung Fu like Wing Chun, and/or San Shou. I also have nostalgia for Jiu-Jitsu. The problem is I’m still in position where I can’t leave the house in the evenings. Most things that I have seen after work are right during the time when I’m helping the kids to bed, and they’re still not really putting themselves to sleep so that stuff it’s probably going to have to wait.
If I take a look at my accomplishments in October (for example) the calendar looks like this:
The Little Standing man is for Circuit Training = Crossfit WOD or Tabata Bootcamp

That could be worse. Some swims, some bikes… too few runs. At the very least, I joined a Govember Bike Challenge hosted by Jamie at From Couch to Ironwoman, and it’s gotten me on the trainer.

Are you madly off in all directions like this? Do you have “Fitness ADD” too?
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Fountain of Youth

Warning: This is going to be one of those navel-gazing posts that I always claim to dislike writing (and reading for that matter). Still, you guys are gluttons for punishment and I’ll bet you’re still reading.


In less than 3 weeks, I’m going to turn 40. Even though I don’t entirely want it to be, it’s a bit of a big deal, and turning into an even bigger deal the closer we get to it. I remember being 23 or 24 and I was at my first job out of university. I had a co-worker who I looked up to a little as a mentor who turned 30, and I asked him whether it worried or bothered him. He answered that he had a job he loved, a beautiful wife and baby girl, so everything was the way he wanted it in life, while he had friends who were living in their parents’ basements. I thought it was a very healthy attitude to have and resolved to try and confront my 30th with a similar one.

Flash-forward: six weeks before my 30th birthday, I got dumped, laid-off and I found out I had a stage 1 malignant melanoma in my leg. Having a good attitude about employment or relationships was tough, and I had my health – my very life, really, to think about. Still, I got through all that, and now, I have all that, especially the beautiful wife and family.

I guess I’m trying to take stock of where I’m at in a few other ways. A few years ago, there was a beer ad campaign where they welcomed twenty-somethings into the transition from undergraduate hi-jinks to the next phase (with more expensive beer): The Carlsberg Years. Well, even those are probably behind me, but I do find myself looking for little indulgences in the everyday, including better beer of course.

Somehow I’ve accumulated just enough vanity to start using some high-end skin care when I shave, and that in turn, has started getting me to expand skin-care in to almost a whole regimen. Besides their shaving gel, I have a cleanser, a moisturizer, exfoliant, eye-cream, and age/rejuvenating cream under my sink. I don’t have a real regimen for regular use, but I try to take care of my skin beyond protecting it from the sun and cursing pimples (yes, acne at 40 – pimples as stubborn as the man they belong to).

While my favourite thing to wear (and I often do) is still a hoodie and jeans, I have realized that one of the things that can make a person look old is an outdated and/or worn out wardrobe, so I try keep from clinging on to old favourites and bring in new clothes that are youthful in spirit without making me look too much like an arrested adolescent who doesn’t know what’s age-appropriate (there’s a What Not To Wear fan in my house). What’s more is that I have no patience for shopping. Even the one time in the morning I have to pull clothes almost feels like more than I’d like, so repeatedly trying on clothes is practically a punishment for me and when you tie in crowded stores and parking forget it! I’ve had some success with Frank & Oak and Hugh & Crye especially in shirts.



The Frank & Oak stuff fits well, but the Hugh & Crye deserves special mention since they do fits according to body type which is determined through multiple measurements. A fit is some combination of Short/Average/Tall versus Skinny/Slim/Athletic/Broad.   I even got one shirt done custom from Blank Label.



It’s not just the outside I find myself paying more attention to; I’ve been taking multi-vitamins (almost) regularly for a while now. I like to make sure I get not only all kinds of vitamins, but Omega-3s, chromium and zinc. After my experience with the Koge Vitamins Energy Pack, I recently ordered their Daily Essentials and I’m working my way through that container.

Still, the best way to try and live forever that I’ve found so far is triathlon. Every time I race, one or more of the following scenarios occurs:

  • I’ll start catching up on an athlete and start to feel good that I might over-take a peer or rival, when the body marked age on their calf reveals them to be in their sixties or seventies.
  • I’ll see a body in better shape than mine with firmer skin and tauter muscle, and when I want to chalk it up to the benefits of youth, I’ll see that number on the calf again, and find I’m actually dealing with someone my age or older.

Triathletes as a whole in my experience always look younger than they are. I said I was going to delve into more strength training and other more intense fitness activities in the post-season. That is not what I have done. Whether it’s post-race blues, work stress, dealing with a virus while simultaneously worrying about a procedure for the Lightning Kid, my motivation has be been close to nil. On the bright side, I’ve discovered that I can still run, even when I don’t think I really want to exert myself. It was so liberating. On my second of such runs this week, I discovered that I really like the band Japandroids, who I can remember reading about with a review that said something along the lines of “they remember what it’s like to be seventeen.” I swear their songs made me want to scream out loud (in a good way, of course).

 I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I fervently hope I’m still doing triathlons (or at least running) until the day I die. May Forty Be Sporty! 

Still time to Donate to the Levac Attack for 2013!  Click Here!