hills | The Dubious Monk

biking and the inevitable decay of all flesh

I neglected to ride my bike to school on Wednesday. No, not neglected. I chose not to, because I wanted to finish the book I was reading on the bus. Which worked out, but man oh man I get frustrated waiting for overcrowded buses to get me home when I could be moving. I decided to bike on Friday to my 8am class to make up for the frustration (even though my schedule works well for comfortable Friday busing).

Part of not biking on Wednesday was because I failed to make it the whole way up the hill on Monday. Now, I was never really in shape as a younger man, so I don’t have any real notion of being past my peak. I have friends who complain about being sore after playing sports that they used to do without ill effects. I have always had ill effects from sports, so I don’t have some better time to compare things to. Due solely to never pushing my physical limits when I was younger, I still feel like I have room to improve my strength and fitness and whatever. Anything I did yesterday I should be able to do tomorrow.

So on Monday when I had to stop and walk my bike up the last 10 metres to my normal “pause to survey the city” point, it sucked. And because it sucked I was scared that maybe that had been it, and I’d never be able to climb that hill again. But on Friday at sometime after 7am I did climb it in my normal fashion, and it was a bit of a relief.

Tagged age, biking, bus, class, crowded, fitness, health, hills, peak, physical activity

12.02.10 [Friday]

2 Comments

school, travel, vancouver

what passes for contemplative geography

One of my profs is in Toronto for the iConference this week (where people from the iSchools get together and do informationy kinds of things) so I didn’t have to go to my normal 8am class today, which I appreciated, but it’s making me feel like school is entirely an illusion. And since that means unlike every other library school student in the history of the world apparently, I have lots of free time (still being unemployed) I got a good pile of stuff done the last couple of days (most of it very boring, like catching up on my book reviews).

This afternoon though, I went walking up the seawall and looked at the cargo ships sitting out in the Burrard Inlet (or Salish Sea or possibly all the way out to the Strait of Georgia). I like being able to do that. It’s some sort of connection to the world in terms of physical objects that’ll be crossing the ocean and I get to see them as they leave. I guess a lot of them just have oil or some other planet-killing thing in them. Or they’re just going down to Seattle and not on a real voyage at all. But still.

Another thing I love here is how the mix of hills and water give you great views of the city. When I bike home from school I get to fly down the terrible hill I’ve fought my way up already once that day, and there’s this gap created by English Bay that lets me see all the lights of downtown, and up in North Vancouver and way out east. I don’t have to pedal and I can just look at the city as I speed down into it again (well, into Kits, but close enough). And then when I’m climbing up over the Burrard Bridge you feel right in and above all the lights. It’s these bits of perspective before getting swallowed up in the urban canyons that I love.

I don’t know if I’m staying in Vancouver past my degree’s end, but if I leave these are things I’ll miss.

Tagged biking, burrard bridge, burrard inlet, cargo ships, downtown, english bay, geography, hills, iconference, kitsilano, librarianaut, north vancouver, ocean, perspective, salish sea, seawall, stanley park, strait of georgia, unemployed, water

11.12.23 [Friday]

we haven’t watched miracle on 34th street yet

I’m in Virginia with Holly’s family for Xmas. We got into Dulles airport yesterday morning after taking the redeye from Seattle. Tim and Krista, Holly’s brother and sister-in-law, picked us up at the airport and drove us the couple of hours to Harrisonburg and Holly’s home.

Holly’s family (including parents Nancy and Harry, sister Amy) is really comfortable to hang around with. Everything’s real relaxed and Holly’s Virginia accent is strengthening by the moment. They have cows wandering the property. Yesterday after our (much-appreciated) naps we went up on a hike through the woods up the ridge behind their house. Out on the neighbours’ property they have a firing range set up for shooting at targets from a hundred to a couple of hundred metres away down a hollow.

Today we drove into town to run some errands and it’s kind of weird how spread out town is. It’s a bunch of scattered little settlement areas around hills from each other with farms in between. We went to visit Holly’s grandmother, got eggs from a dairy farm (I suppose there are also chickens around somewhere and these weren’t artificially-shelled cow ova), and got cinnamon buns at a place Holly might get a job. We also saw the town’s library, which was pretty decent, in a nice new building with friendly staff who recommended decent movies when they saw our stack of DVDs we were getting.

I think what I like best is seeing how happy Holly is to be home. I’m never this excited about being in Winnipeg. She’s enjoying the smells of her town and how beautiful the different drives out to her parents’ house are and running into people she hasn’t seen in a long while and being able to tell them she’s staying indefinitely.

The weirdest thing about being here is the lack of snow. It’s like 11 degrees Celsius and there’s no snow. I expected it to feel like fall in Vancouver, but this is a bit odd. The days are still pretty short though, so I don’t quite feel like I haven’t left Oz.

Tagged amy, cinnamon buns, cows, dairy, dulles, dvd, eggs, farm, firing range, grandma, guns, harrisonburg, harry, hills, holly, home, krista, nancy, snow, steiny, tim, virginia, winter, xmas

10.09.08 [Wednesday]

best proselytizing ever

I biked to school today. It was not too terribly hellish with hills, so I’m not sure what that bodes for my ride home in a few hours. Now, when I say “not too terribly hellish” I mean there was only one hill I was ready to slit my belly on the side of the road to apologize to the universe for my failure to climb it but please please please I just want to die. And this is where the evangelists came in.

So there’s this two-stage hill climbing W 8th up to UBC. Two thirds of the way up there’s a church. As I climbed up to be level with the church there were three or four retirees with beards out standing and cheering their fool heads off. I saw the cyclist ahead of me give them a high five as he went by and I dragged my carcass along towards them. They had a table saying “St. Someone’s Juice Stand” and they weren’t just giving out high fives, but juice-boxes and granola bars wrapped in a little “Here’s what our church does” pamphlet. It was actually kind of awesome. They just come in when you’re at your weakest and give the weary traveller sustenance wrapped in an inoffensive (as in, no hellfire and damnation of nonbelievers) message. Pretty slick.

Tagged bike, church, evangelism, food, granola bars, harakiri, hills, juice, ubc, w 8th ave

The Dubious Monk

chinese curses since twenty aught two

Tag Archives: hills

biking and the inevitable decay of all flesh

what passes for contemplative geography

we haven’t watched miracle on 34th street yet

best proselytizing ever

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