Well, Hello There!

What's up, friends? Been a minute. Been a long minute, if I am being honest; I have not posted since August which is inexcusable.

It isn't like I haven't been posting anything at all. I've been curating and sharing odds and ends on Facebook, Instagram, and Strava; I just haven't been writing.

The latter half of 2017 finished up reasonably well. I did eventually get out of my cast and was able to compete in Penticton, finishing both duathlon events that I qualified for way back in 2016. It wasn't pretty, but I got both done.

Who wears compression socks during a road ride? Seriously, dude.

Like I said, it wasn't pretty. The socks were a necessary evil, as the previous six months in a cast turned my lower leg into a collection of aches and pains that could not be ignored during the sprint and international duathlons held one day apart. They worked well enough, but look silly as hell in the cycling photos.

​That said, I did manage to run.

Again, not pretty.

No PR in any run segment, a lot of risk management in the first duathlon, and a lot of soul searching in the second one a day later. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw my post about risking injury to prove a point; if you don't, you missed out on some wicked good wisdom.

Regardless, I closed out the summer of 2017 with two finishes in two different duathlon events of varying distances after a near three year journey that also saw a concurrent weight loss of 30 kg over that time. Yay me, right?

Let's just leave out the dozens of injuries that nearly made the whole thing impossible to complete, not the least of which being a comminuted fracture of my second metatarsal thanks to incompetent coaching during an indoor track workout. A story for another day.

With the summer finished, I got to relax for about 10 minutes before I returned to university and, of course, I tried out for the cross country team. Guess what? I made it and officially became a MacEwan Griffin.

As you can tell from my photo and bio, it's all very glamorous; the paparazzi are relentless.

It was a fun fall, though; I truly missed training and competing, as well as getting outside of myself and being part of a team. Lots of running and a desperate attempt to regain some of my former speed and glory in time for the series of races the Griffins competed in.

The blurring makes me appear much faster than I actually was. Don't kid yourself, I got my ass kicked in cross country. Having never done XC before in my life and jumping into university level races was not so much humbling as it was sobering. 

You cannot be a generalist in a specialist's arena. Nobody at the finish line cared that I could lift more than them or beat them in a fight; powerlifting and mixed martial arts do not a runner make. Even a full contact runner.

However, that is also a story for another day.

By the time Christmas rolled around, the closest I got to another running event was emceeing the Turkeys on the Trail charity run. I wasn't the first choice to keep the crowd entertained, but I did my best and had a great time.

Nobody threw rotten fruit at me, so I couldn't have sucked that much. Also, who throws rotten fruit at Christmas? Good lord, people.

Well, that about covers it. You are now up to date, at least inasmuch as I'm willing to share. Plenty of other things happened and there were lots of cool moments that made me genuinely appreciative of this life and the connections I've made in it.

If you're one of those connections, thanks for all the support; if you're not, I hope you can be one day.

Thanks for checking in on me.

​Talk to you soon.