It took longer than anticipated, but I seem to have recovered from Friday’s dodgeball tournament.  It was a fun afternoon of dodging, dipping, ducking diving and dodging and hurling dodge balls, but I think everyone was feeling a bit sore afterwards.  My team was a bit of a rag-tag bunch, a lot of veterans from last year’s ‘Track + Mack” team and a few new recruits to round out the 10 person team.  Officially our team was called the “Prime$weg$u$pect$” (however you want to say that), but the tournament organizers couldn’t figure it out so we were dubbed “Thomas’ Team” – lame.  The rather lacklustre name was probably why we got snubbed out of the finals…

There were some other returning teams as well, the infamous “LTD” – who claimed the title this year, most noticeably, as well as another newly formed grade 12 team who coined themselves “Darkness”.  The name reflected their choice of attire – completely black, head to toe and could easily have been mistaken as having just stepped out of the movie The Matrix.

no joke they were dressed just like this, sunglasses and all

So an afternoon well spent.  Other than a few questionable calls by the referees and some unintentional headshots on spectators and grade nine girls, everything went quite smoothly.  A good sign off before the long weekend.

One of my plans for the weekend was to write a post on stuff, I went as far as getting points and recommendations from some friends, drafting the first post but ultimately ran out of steam and didn’t like the flow of it.  I generally enjoy writing but it doesn’t always come naturally.  So when I’m trying to put something coherent together (as opposed to just rambling on like I do when I blog) I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist… The ideas have to fit together nicely, the wording has to be just right – all that stuff.  yeah so basically I didn’t write the post I said I would and might not get around to doing it for a while… so in the meantime, I’ll chat about my weekend.

It was a quiet few days for me.  With my brother in Ottawa for a testing camp with the Ontario team, and my parents doing some cycling in Gatineau, I found myself not being woken up by the noisy coffee-maker or an alarm clock telling me to take Ryan to his 5am swim practice, or the whir of the blender and clatter of dishes as the sun rises.  It was kind of nice…  There were a few tasks left for me to complete during my family’s absence; namely tending to the newly seeded patch of grass in our backyard, laundry, dusting, catching and relocating squirrels (didn’t get around to that), napping, exercising and dealing with the plethora of ripe avocados left behind.

Getting out and doing some exercise was no problem.  The weather was phenomenal all weekend and I was loathe to spend any of it inside doing my designated cleaning duties.  On Saturday I got out for my first long road ride of the year.  I’ve never had a real road bike, but last summer my Dad helped me build up a slick looking single speed (I think the gearing is 39:15, not 100% sure though).  If you haven’t seen it before here’s a look.

I’ve been given some serious props for the blue handle bar tape and the chrome fork. Personally, I think the orange spray-paint frame is the best feature (not to mention most obnoxious).  Anyways, enough ogling over my bike.  I just like it a lot.

The ride itself was decently long – I covered 73km is just under 3 hours and felt good throughout it.  I made the mistake of turning down a couple hilly county roads that had me weaving across the road just to keep moving.  I enjoy riding a single speed for the sake of simplicity and it’s low maintenance nature, but boy do I ever hate it on those hills.

In the afternoon I got to show off the start of my biker tan lines (socks, shorts, jersey) at the garden centre where I picked up some topsoil for the new grass.  Not terribly exciting, but still an important part of my weekend.

loving the lawn care

On Sunday I hit the trails with Kieran for a long run and to catch up.  Long runs with Kieran usually go by quick because he’s such a good talker, but this one absolutely flew by. … probably because we hadn’t really talked since Nationals – which is an extraordinarily long time, all things considered.  A lot has changed over the past couple months so it was nice to be able to fill in the gaps.  With things at Hardwood shaping up nicely after a whirlwind of a season, and me getting ready to move up and out, it was weird to have different plans for a change.

I suppose that’s just the nature of things though, especially towards the end of high school when you graduate.  I’ve become kind of detached from the high school scene this year, which is a little bit sad because I think I missed out on some experiences that I would’ve enjoyed, and lost connections with people I used to spend more time with.  Hopefully I can tie up those loose ends before I leave, it seems like I still have a lot to do…

Sunday afternoon was spent fuming. I was really looking forward to watching a MotoGP race that took place that morning in France, and was planning on downloading and watching it that evening.  Unfortunately the uploading server was soooo slow and it took almost 5 hours to download an 870MB file.  Unless you torrent you probably don’t understand, and if you do… well then you know the agony I felt that day…  In the end I did get the file and it was an exciting race (almost worth the wait).  Before I got onto the training centre and committed to the team, I had tentative plans to go and see a race down in the States with my Dad.  It would’ve been super cool, but now that I’m on board for the NDC those plans kind of flopped. Maybe next year!

Monday. The Eastview track team has the traditional long weekend practice on Monday morning.  Most people say it’s crazy to ask a bunch of teenagers to get up and show up at school on a holiday, but there’s always a crowd for this one.  Even though I’m not doing track this year I decided to drop by and see how things were shaping up for people before the GBSSA meet (I believe it was today), the freezies the coach brought were an added bonus to showing up.

Yes, so a good weekend. I won’t lament any more about slow download speeds, or the pains of riding up steep hills on a single speed, because those things were really quite insignificant as far as the weekend went (I keep telling myself that).  One thing I now realise I didn’t mention was all those avocados I had to eat over the weekend.  I like avocados as much as the next skier, but 6 avocados in two days is a bit much.  There are only so many ways you can eat it!  I ended up doing a nice salad type thing and (of course) some guacamole. just a little FYI for y’all.

And that’s all for now folks.

JennOUT

perf weekend