Hugh Trenchard

In view of a lengthy absence in blog-posting, the Tour de White Rock this past weekend seems to mark an appropriate time for an update. The race is one of the oldest and well-supported races in the B.C. and Canadian road-racing calendar. It has been around for decades now, though I haven’t done the Google search to determine exactly how old it is. It predates my racing days, and I’ve been bike racing since 1988, so that makes for one helluva an old bike race!

For the Pro/Cat 1,2 field, the race is an omnium format, meaning points are acquired for placings in each of three races, but each race may be completed individually, and there is no requirement to complete one before being allowed to start the next, as in the case of stage races. I have never done the short hill climb on the Friday evening, but have now many times competed in both the criterium on the Saturday evening, and the road race the following morning. It has frequently marked the highlight of my road racing season, and it comes at a time when the weather can be counted on to be good and when I am generally in good form.

The Tour de White Rock is sufficiently prestigious to attract professional teams, including, this year, riders from Garmin-Transitions (Svein Tuft and Christian Meier, who ride on the same team as Ryder Hesjedal), Kelly Benefit Strategies (Ryan Anderson and others), Jelly-Belly (Will Routley, 2010 Canadian road race National Champion), Health-Net (Andrew Pinfold and Roman Kilun). In addition strong BC based teams like Red Truck Ale, Team H & R Block, Total Restoration, Garneau-Evolution, among others, made for a very strong field all around.

My road racing season has actually been quite sparse this season. Since running the Vancouver Marathon on May 2, I have done only a handful of cycling races. Though the races have been sparse, I have found reasonably good form in recent weeks.

For the criterium on Saturday, at first I found the fast pace manageable, despite the hard efforts up the incline on one side of the 1km course (done 60 times). However, just past half way I made the bold mistake of taking a hard pull on the descent when the pace had eased, and paid the price by being unable to recover over the next two laps when the pace was high, at which time Svein was soloing off the front at 1′07 laps, or something around 55km/hr. At that point I popped off the back, and rather than riding around off the back, I retired immediately, partly to save myself the ignominy of riding past the start-finish line off the back in full view of all spectators, but also with the remote hope that by retiring immediately I might save my legs a little for the monstrous 134km road race the next day – a course which Svein Tuft himself has described as one of the hardest he’s competed on.

Not feeling terribly optimistic about my chances for finishing the road race, let alone garnering any sort of respectable finish, I discovered to my pleasant surprise the legs were reasonably fresh on the morning of the road race. Off the gun it was fast, and the first two of the long loops marked perhaps the fastest first two laps of that race in my experience of 7 or 8 times racing this race, which consists of 10 of the long loops containing the tortuous 16% Magdellen climb and the 9% Columbia climb, and 6 of the short loops, with only the Columbia climb to sap the spirits, for a total of 134km. With the likes of Tuft, Meier, Routley and Pinfold (one of the winningest riders on the North American continental circuit), in attendance, the race was predictably painful. By the second time over Magdellen the field had shattered, and I was fortunate to find myself among a group of 14 who were slipping behind a small chase of about ten who were, in turn, chasing about three breakaway riders, including Routley and Christian Meier. Tuft stayed back in the first chase group.

We were told prior to the start that those who fell beyond 4 minutes of the leaders were in danger of being shut out of the short loops. This is literally a physical barrier, which, if erected before you are inside on the short loops, your day is done. It has happened to me before, and it is the most disheartening feeling to come up against a wooden barrier on the road while all the spectators have their eyes on the short loops as if you were never part of the race in the first place. But this year I made it in.

At about lap seven of the long loops, commissaires informed my group we would be allowed onto the short loop, while those behind us would surely not make it. There were less than 15 riders ahead and the next group on the road was still reachable if we continued to chase. But somewhat enlivened in morale by this news, our speed dropped inversely to the mood, and to my chagrin much of the remainder of the race for us was like a training ride as few chose to contribute to any sort of chasing effort, despite that we were still in the running for top 10-15 placings if we could have sustained the pace.

When we hit the short loops we were actually neutralized for a portion while the leaders finished their race, and we were told to stay together as a group so as not to confuse finishing places. Despite these instructions a few of our group had slipped away and passed the group of 10 that were just ahead of us on the course, which group was a short lap ahead.

In the end, as Svein Tuft, Will Routley and Christian Meier took the top three places, I gave one last effort to escape over Columbia from the few riders in my group, who seemed content to ride comfortably to the finish. With 20th I am happy with this result, particularly after not finishing the criterium the day before. Most of the field of about 55 starters dropped out or did not make the time cut. The road race is perhaps the hardest of any course I have done, and to make the finishing circuit and to be counted among the finishers is, for my humble aspirations, a fantastic result.

results

Here’s a little tribute to bicycle racing. Apologies to Bob Dylan, whose lyrics from his great song “The Times They Are a’ Changin’” I have adapted somewhat (and possible copyright issues noted). I had some fun with new software that allowed me to add a little reverb and some percussion to my version of Dylan’s song, as well as fun with software that allowed me to create the photo/video collage.

One photo of me and others in a tumble, and another of me being helped off the course, were acquired from Tony Austin. The rest of the photographs are Duane Martindale’s, from his site www.duanebc.com, who has, in previous conversations, indicated his photos are currently public domain.

Many of Duane’s photos were from races last weekend, which included the 145km Provincial Road Race Championships, and the Bastion Square criterium. Other photos are from other provincially sanctioned races, Victoria Cycling League, or BC Masters Association races.

As a note, I competed in the road race last Saturday and hung on to finish in miserable conditions, which was all I had hoped to achieve on the day, given that I’ve just begun training this month (of course with a lot of aerobic fitness acquired from my running season). Came down with a with a cold on Tuesday which I am still fighting.

Not ten days prior to the Vancouver Marathon yesterday, I tweaked my left Achilles tendon. The term “tweaked” of course could mean any number of things, depending on one’s tolerance for pain and relative tendency toward understatement or hyperbole, but in my case it means some kind of slight tear, likely to the tendon sheath – no where near a complete rupture, but sufficient to cause discomfort and require treatment to prevent deterioration.

For me this tweaking followed on the heels, so to speak, of a kind of oscillation cycle between plantar fasciitis of both feet – as it cleared from one foot, it seemed to switch to the other and back again. Nonetheless, over the course of a year of tolerating a general sort of annoyance with the condition and various treatments, I have managed to keep running pretty consistently. The Achilles issue was one that I had actually staved off for a few years, and it finally returned following a hard session of 200m sprints, which in turn followed a couple of weeks after a few weeks building toward one single week in which I logged over 200km.

After tweaking my Achilles in a new pair of shoes during a fairly easy run around the lakes two Fridays ago, I eliminated from my thoughts the possibility of running the Times-Colonist 10k, and considered there to be a high chance I could not run the Vancouver Marathon yesterday, which had been my focus for a few months prior.

But with another switch of shoes, and some taping and icing and easy treadmill running, in a few days the heel seemed in reasonable condition to go ahead with the marathon, though there was measured trepidation and only a slight denial of the game of Russian Roulette that I played: possibly a complete rupture which could sideline me for weeks from not just running, but from cycling too.

It has been my plan for some months to cease running after the Vancouver Marathon and to begin my cycling season. In recent years, I have made the switch to cycling sooner, in late March or early April. This switch from running to cycling is not calculated to stave off injury, but rather occurs because I yearn for the bike when the days are long and warm. Still, the change has in past probably helped to keep me fresh for running when I have returned to it by the fall. This year I was lured by the possibility of prize money for the top Master at the Vancouver Marathon, sufficiently so as to experiment with high volume and to keep me running straight to the beginning of May.

The marathon itself began to a light drizzle that turned to hours of incessant rain. This played havoc with my clothing decision and, in the end, I wore too much, I think, as it all became soggy and heavy without helping much to keep me warm. Together the extra insoles I use, which became like lead beneath my feet, the gloves, hat, long sleeve undershirt, singlet and underwear to prevent inner-thigh chafing, made me feel like I was stumbling through the race and could barely keep myself from tumbling face-first onto the road. Of course everyone was in the same boat with the rain, but I’ve never felt comfortable dressing with minimal clothing when it’s cool, and so for me it seemed wise to err on the side of warmth rather than lightness. Whether lightness was preferable over cold wetness, for this race I will never know, though there were certainly plenty of people who opted for only a singlet and shorts.

From the start I slotted in with Paul Slaymaker and Thomas Tissel, two Masters whom I knew were aiming for the prize money. Funny how we ended up together, since I had not seen them on the start line – it was only that we happened to be running the same pace at the start, and only from the lick of gray on their necks did I realize they were Masters runners.

When the top woman came up from behind at about 5km and gradually pulled ahead, Slaymaker went with her, while Tissel and I held back. Slaymaker paid the price though, since he fell off the pace when Tissel and I reeled him back at 10k, which we were through in about 36.40. Tissel gradually accelerated, and by about 19k on the uphill into Stanley Park, I could not hold his pace, and as the pain in my heel and Achilles increased, so did my water-logged clothing feel incessantly heavier and my speed diminish.

I lost seven minutes in the second half. Granted there were more hills in the second half and it was, well, the second half of a marathon. Even so it’s usually a bad day when I slow from a 1:17 half to 1:24 second half. I think in Georgia last year I was 1:18 at the half and ran 2:37, and in Victoria I was 1:17-high and finished in 2:38.

The course in Vancouver, a new one since the old one I enjoyed in the mid 1990’s that crossed the Lions Gate and the Second Narrows bridges, now snakes through downtown, through Stanley Park back through the West End, over the Burrard Bridge, along English Bay nearing UBC and then back and over Burrard to the finish. There is a lot of off-camber road in the last 10km and with my heel and plantar tightening like vices, it felt like was tip-toeing along the off-camber pitch. Finally, around one corner at about 35km, there was a twinge in my Achilles I could not ignore and I nearly pulled up then. Slowing, and then continuing on I realized there was no other way to the finish line but to keep on running.

And so I finished in 2:41.30, happy to have made it and glad to have held off Paul Slaymaker for the second Master and to be in the prize money, but within a few strides of the finish I was reduced from something just over six minute miles to no-minute miles and virtual immobilization.

Today I limped around straight-legged with the painful incapacity of a very old man with spinal stenosis and generalized arthritis. Fortunately I discovered that the Achilles is not in fact ruptured, since by squeezing my calf with my foot relaxed, there is resulting movement to my foot. If there is no foot movement in response, the Achilles is likely ruptured, I learned.

So now there is only hope for a quick recovery, and I am fortunate in that now I think I can at last spin the wheels of my bike, and no longer the Russian Roulette.

Since I have just managed to complete my highest ever volume of running in a seven day stretch (204km), it seems I might as well document the process.

I had decided to take this week off work specifically for the endeavor, though with a flex day Thursday and a stat holiday Friday, I was fortunate only to need three vacation days for the week. In any event, the goal was 200k of training in one week. Leading up to this I managed a couple of weeks of fairly high volume as well (for me, that is), though I haven’t gone back to tabulate the exact figures.

Here are the figures for this last week, beginning last Saturday:

Saturday: 32km, consisting of 20k am, easy; 12k pm with 5×500m on treadmill at 3min/km pace.

Sunday: 39km easy, consisting of a run from home out to Elk/Beaver lake, one loop (10k) plus a little over 6km; then run home. Having checked Google distance maps, I discovered it is little over 11km from home to the Lakes.

Monday: 20km, consisting of 11km easy am; 9 km easy pm

Tuesday: 37km, consisting of 25km easy in the am, and 12k pm with 5X1000m at 3:15 pace on treadmill

Wednesday: 30km, consisting of 15km easy am; 15km easy pm

Thursday: 26km, consisting of 16km morning with 1X18 min tempo and 1X15 min tempo in the morning; 10k easy in pm

Friday: 20km easy.

Total: 204km.

So, in that period most of the mileage was at a slower pace, but I did get three interval sessions in as well. For recovery I had cold water baths after each run, and on a couple of days I also had cold water baths immediately upon waking. I avoided ibuprofen for the most part, though I did take it on at least two of the days. I managed to get naps in between runs, though any stretching was pretty minimal. I avoided a lot of extra walking. Generally, my legs feel quite good, and my plantar fasciitis seems well under control for now.

In any event, we will see what becomes of it. The primary objective is the Vancouver Marathon on May 2, with the Merville 15k this Sunday, and the Gibsons Half marathon next weekend. I may consider a 10k in there somewhere as well, but the idea from this point will be to take a mostly easy week after Merville, and then, with substantially less weekly mileage, to increase the length of my tempo runs leading to the Marathon over the next three weeks.

As this event was veritably in our backyard in Kamloops, I am glad to have taken the opportunity to participate. Though the majority of events, held between March 1 and March 6, took place on a 200m indoor track at Thompson Rivers University, there were a handful of outdoor events associated with the indoor meet, including an 8km cross-country race, a couple of race walks, and a half marathon.

My event was the half-marathon, though at one time, a few months ago, I thought there may have been a full-marathon as part of the meet, which I would have preferred. In hindsight, I’m glad it was not a full marathon, as I would not have been ready, although I find myself intrigued by the possibility of the full-marathon at the outdoor Master T&F Worlds next year in Sacramento, in July.

Due to a continuing battle with plantar fasciitis, I was arguably only marginally ready for the half itself, although sufficiently ready to be in reasonable shape for it. In February I attended Synergy Health Management for three sessions of shockwave therapy (very painful!) for my now one year long battle with my foot, and with a resulting reduction in mileage, it was not possible to train optimally to be in the best shape possible. Still, my fitness was reasonable enough so as not to embarrass myself.

I had also given some consideration to competing in one or two other events, as many did, like Mark Sherman, for example, from Vancouver, who ran, impressively, the indoor 3000 in 9:38 and the 800 in 2:04, and then the half marathon, finishing just ahead of me. However, it made most sense to stick only to the half-marathon on the last day of the meet, given my work schedule and that I am not trained to run shorter events. In any event, it was not necessarily my intention to peak for the race, as my sights are more focussed on the Vancouver marathon on May 2nd, although the state of my foot will certainly dictate my degree of readiness for that too.

There were no qualifying criteria for the event, and so the event was really an international festival of athletic participation for Masters competitors (over 35 years old), but it was this international flavour that made it so much fun. The United States had a strong contingent, as did the British, Mexicans, Germans, Australians, and the Spanish; there were also noticeable contingents of Algerians, Moroccans, Norweigans, Russians, Brazillians and Japanese, among others. In total there were 48 countries represented.

Still, there was an air of greater formality than simply a festival of competition. Competitors were required to sign a declaration of intention to compete and to abide by the rules of conduct, including the possibility of drug testing. This was witnessed by an event official. For most of the track and field events, this was required to be done by 6:00pm the day before, although an exception was made for the half marathon, for which competitors could make their declaration the morning of the event. I found the formality of the declaration interesting, as I don’t recall making a similar declaration prior to the duathlon world championships, in which I competed three times, although I suppose I must have made a similar declaration in one form or another.

The course for the Half was a flat out-and-back, done twice (5k out, 5 back, 5 out, 5, back, plus another km or so on the ends), along the Thompson River near the Kamloops airport. In the blazing sun, across the river was the ever-present white smoke-stack plume of the pulp-mill, and in the bright cool air there was a residue of the odor, though it was not overwhelming. It was about 4 degrees at the start, which is much colder than I like it, but in the sun and, with a slight tail wind on the way out, it seemed warm enough for singlet and shorts.

Off the start I was surprised that Don King of Calgary, Mark Sherman of Vancouver, and me, settled into a group of three off the front of the group. Having seen some of the seed times, it appeared there would be a couple of foreigners who potentially could handily run away with the win. Perhaps some of the seed times were outdated, or the runners I saw on the list did not run.

As it was, Jose Navarroe of Spain, who is over 50, hung back just behind the three of us, with the rest of the group in tow. Soon after the first turnaround, near 7km, Don pulled away from Mark and I and never looked back, and gradually put distance on us to finish in 1:13.39. For a few km I had put a few seconds on Mark, but he stayed near, and with about 4km to go pulled past me, finishing in 1:15.22 to my 1:15.44, after Jose Navarroe had already passed us both, finishing in 1:14.55. A Norweigan was 5th in 1:17+ and Maria Castro Solino from Spain won the women’s event in 1:23, with Cindy Rhodes from Canada in second in 1:27, and Piedad Rodriguez from Spain 3rd in 1:28.

I was surprised that on a flat course we didn’t run faster, but perhaps the cold sapped us all a bit, though granted, I have not run any races this year that would indicate I should be faster than 1:15+ for a Half.

It was fortunate that Don King collected his gold medal, as some of us were given erroneous information that the awards ceremony was delayed, although it turned out to be right on time for the first time in years, apparently. I missed that presentation, as did Mark, although I was on hand to collect a gold medal for the team standings, which was nice, but neither Mark nor Don were there at the time, and I declined to get on the podium without them.

Later Kristin, who was nice enough to travel with me, and I watched some of the 4X200 relays to close up the meet. Great fun, though we obviously missed some fantastic competition during the week: a quick perusal of some of the results and you see, for example, there were numerous sub-4:15 1500 metre times, sub-52 second 400m times (remember these are on a 200m indoor track), and the 8k cross-country to open the meet was stacked with some times in the 24-26 minute range (though it appeared the course may have been a little short), with most of the top runners being non-Canadian. The meet was a serious international event, and the calibre of the competition extremely high for most events.

Finally were the closing ceremonies, at which time the event flag was passed to a town in Finland for 2012. Next year are the outdoor championships in Sacramento, which due to the fun I had in Kamloops, I will give serious consideration to attending.

Final medal tally was, for top 5: U.S. 326, Canada 281, Germany 115, Great Britain 71, and Australia 63.

For two weeks I have been hopelessly unable to articulate my guarded enthusiasm for the Games. True, on the one hand I was, in the evenings after work, focussed on finishing a course which took me away from the Olympic spirit, and there was certainly a part of me that longed to see more of the fine athleticism of the Games.

But there was also a creeping, muted, cynicism which, if not for the nearness of the event and my otherwise occupied mind, perhaps would have been overshadowed by the hard work of the athletes who trained so hard to be in Vancouver these last two weeks.

My restrained sentiment, as it were, ultimately found it’s fullest expression in the face of the near loss by the men’s hockey team to Switzerland, and the steady stream of rhetoric that abounded about hockey and little else, it seemed, and finally about “the Game”, yes, the one between Canada and the United States, which seemed of ultimate importance to many. The horns and the hollaring in the streets post victory demonstrated this clearly; I heard none on any other day.

Indeed, people talked about The Game as if nothing else was happening. For example Devon Kershaw’s 5th place at the 50k x-country was completely overshadowed; I did not hear his name uttered at the water coolers today. And the emphasis on the medal count and the number of golds in the end I found to be quite nauseating: yes, maybe the sponsored programs in the last few years leading to 2010 were helpful for the athletes, but will the programs remain tomorrow? Will there be any benefit for the athletes who will pay their own way at their next World Championships, in whatever disciplines they may be? I make no apologies for my cynicism: there are many politicians and sponsors who can gloat over the success of the Olympics, but unless there is continued support, not only by the government and corporations, but by the Canadian public for the athletes of the future, my cynicism remains.

And to me, the game between Switzerland and Canada well magnified the support issue: the millionaire hockey stars were nearly beaten by the upstart Swiss no-bodies from the little country of seven million. Many of the Swiss players no doubt earn very little through their sport. True, the Canadian players are millionaires because hockey is well-loved by North-Americans, and the players are paid what the market will bear. But the lop-sided emphasis comes, it seems to me, at the cost of Canadians generally caring relatively little for so many other sports. That is the nature of our culture – I accept that – but it doesn’t mean I am unpatriotic by questioning it.

Which raises another question: what does it mean to be patriotic? I contribute to a nation whose citizens, I hope, will continuously strive for the health and happiness of their fellow citizens, as well as for the citizens of the world; I love that we have Canadian representatives who raise awareness of the place I, like so many, work hard to make a good one in which to live. But nationalist pride also takes on hideous forms, and we only have to look as far as the Bush regime of the recent past to see its ugly consequences. I truly fear a Canadian nationalist pride that could rival that of our American neighbors.

I say let’s be confident in our accomplishments, whatever they may be, but be careful not to gloat too much, lest we begin to believe the rest of the world ought to live the way that we do.

Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night upon snowswept hard packed Siberian tundra in 1872. As an infant, from his Russian father and Mongolian mother he was thrust into the backpack of a Welsh traveller who saw Vygotsky’s blue almond eyes and golden skin, and who, over the course of two days as guest at the Vygotsky mud hut, was gradually transformed from an honest but childless traveller, into a desperate thief with a longing that shredded all her Christian teachings, a longing that shucked all meaning from every synapse of her conscience from the moment she saw Vygotsky’s perfect skin and eyes that lit like sky the longest of December nights. In her fury of desperation, the Welsh traveller raced for two days and nights on a horse without rest or food to St. Petersberg, abandoned the exhausted and dying horse and took a train from there, and tumbled through unforgiving nights begging for food, and finally made her way back to Zurich, where she gave Vygotsky his middle name.

Years passed and Vygotsky received the ovation of a crowd, and he said to them, quieting their adulation: “I returned in the middle of the night to complete my story. In the hours that preceded, I was bereft of imagination and inspiration. But then it came to me:

My true mother and father were not known to me, but my Welsh mother and Swiss father raised me on a diet of mathematics and linguistics, and I became a professor of physics at the age of twenty six, established the scale relationship between the expansion of the universe and the propagation of economies and human languages, and hence the constant that underlies all the cognitive processes of the human brain, and finally proved the existence of the universal property of analogous consciousness.

But then when 37 years old I was rejected by my lover, my universe was a vacuum of meaning, and every discovery I had made shriveled to the sharpest point upon which I wished to thrust my heart. Then I was forced to return to the beginning again, and I shouted out in vain to the multitudinous night: “Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night!”

And at first I could not complete the story, for the point upon which I sought to impale myself transformed into a vast fog of feelings, and I cried out to the infinite cosmos: “Would all that I feel could be compressed into a ball for you to crush and shatter, and scatter all over you. And if you would, then there are no analogous mathematical properties of the universe that would dare to fill the synapses of my mind to crowd you again. Come back Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky, come back and abandon the infinite stars so that they will no longer leave you empty again. Come back my lover, come back my Welsh mother and Swiss father, come back to tell me and my lover of the story again of how you took me from my Mongolian mother and Russian father, and how I ended up here; for at last I know who I am, and I am no one without you.”

Then as the audience cycled their tremulous ovation again, finally Vygotsky completed the story with these words, his voice loud with conviction: “Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night…”

Recently I’ve learned of a Facebook campaign that is underway to send a message to the B.C. Liberal government that funding for sports is important. Some of my discussion here is from comments I posted to the Facebook page for Thumbs-Up-For-Funding-Sports.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thumbs-Up-For-Funding-Sport/245709219290

www.thumbsupforfunding.ca

While I agree that the goal itself of increased funding (or at least no reduction in current levels of funding) is a laudable one, I also find myself wondering if the approach to seeking funding should be refined somewhat.

Firstly, we need to identify why funding for sport in Canada is not a priority for politicians and policy makers, and is only marginally supported by the public. My own sense is that funding for sports is not a priority in Canada because sport suffers from an image problem. It seems the Canadian public, politicians, and the makers of public policy by and large perceive athletes to be self-interested competitors whose egos and vanity are nurtured in the pursuit of domination and superiority in their drive to be number one. Ours is an egalitarian society, so the argument goes, and we seek to foster participation among those who simply wish to participate, but we should only marginally support competitive activities because competition develops a cut-throat win-at-all costs, dominate thy-neighbour and oppress-thy-lover mentality. Following the argument further, professional athletes are overpaid in any event, and tax dollars are not well spent on funding sport when it should be the purview of private and corporate sponsorship.

If there is any truth at all to this public image, then, as supporters of funding sport, I believe we must not only overcome the “image problem”, but we must also convince the public and the policy makers that it is actually in the best interests of Canadian society as a whole to fund sport. My discussion here focuses not so much on how to overcome the image problem, but on what we must do to convince the public on the how it lies in the best interests of society to fund sports.

To me a useful way of approaching this issue is to ask what are the costs to society if we do NOT fund sport? Sport provides youths and adults alike a focus on physically healthy activities that keeps them out of prisons and hospitals and fosters a degree of self-discipline that enables them to be highly productive contributors to society. The financial and social costs to taxpayers of a physically unfit population – which includes those whose lack of focus and self-discipline allows them to swayed toward drugs or other criminal activities – are enormous. This obviously applies only to a small segment of the population (i.e. that segment of the population with a propensity toward crime), but the argument goes that by supporting sport we also support the opportunity for kids to find a constructive focus and outlet for aggression and competition, rather than a destructive one.

Similarly, athletes exhibit a sense of positive self-awareness and control that is encouraging and inspirational to others. I believe the athlete’s positive lifestyle and attitudes propagate through all the spheres of influence in which athletes find themselves. So, an investment in sport is, in a very real sense, an investment in the future of Canada. Indeed, I do not think it’s an unreasonable stretch to say that an investment in sport is an investment in the future of humanity.

What we need to do, then, as sports-funding advocates, is to gather
statistics that show the overall benefits to society as a whole in terms of savings to the health care system, the education and justice systems; to show the increased productivity in measurable contributions to society as well as less measurable ones like how athletes also foster positive attitudes among their children, who also carry forth into future generations the capacity for healthy self-discipline and productivity.

Questionairres given to sport participants are a good way of establishing these statistics. The results need to be presented to the public, politicians and policy makers so that it is clear to everyone that the benefits to supporting sport are enormous.

A questionaire could include such questions as:

How long have you been involved in your sport? What sacrifices did you make? Were you ever involved in criminal activities, such as illegal drugs (including performance enhancing ones) and if so, how often? How often did you access health care? Do you think your example of discipline has been inspirational to others? What do you do now for a career, or what do you plan to do? How successful are your children in school and if they are grown, what do they do?

That is a start, but the idea is to establish what the costs and benefits of the athletes’ lifestyle is to society. My hypothesis is that overall athletes’ savings and contributions to society are enormous, and that funding sport is not at all about supporting egos and a win-at-all costs mentality.

So the question is really, how can we afford NOT to fund and provide resources for athletes?

In 1816, George Brabantjieff’s fragile genes allowed him only to be carted in a wheelbarrow, at the age of eleven, through London streets by Alexander Poole, a vegetable gardener who lived by the Thames among a grove of Mulberry Trees, which he brought from Armenia and cultivated with care.

No one troubled Poole where he made his home and grew carrots and potatoes and beans, ate them for himself and fed to Brabantjieff, and sold them in the markets. But Poole frequently resented Brabantjieff, who was left to his caretaking by a young Armenian woman when Poole travelled to Turkey and then to the Mountains of Ararat with Cortezza, Portuguese dancer, whose scar beneath her lip was the mark of an earlier lover’s overzealous passion, from whom she escaped one night in Lisbon with nothing but a shred of her life. It was during that visit in 1804 when Poole acquired his Mulberry seeds and finally returned to England, in the spring of 1805, with Brabantjieff.

On a winter afternoon when Poole longed for the orange dusk of Armenian nights; when, for the sixth day, the London sunset was obscured by obstinate rain and clouds; when the cold and his fever stretched thin the meninges of his brain and spinal chord, the wheelbarrow in which Brabantjieff sat, and the carrots beside him, struck an obstacle and propelled Brabantjieff onto the stony path. In the ubiquitous darkness, Brabantjieff’s head struck a stone, and he could not be saved. But before his quivering body ceased all motion, Brabantjieff said this to Poole, his voice clear and emanating from the darkness, for his mouth could not be seen: “Thank you, my dear Mr. Poole. That I have been half of you, half of all people, save for the little boy we saw yesterday with no arms; I have been one portion of all people. Like you are too, Mr. Poole, one part of all mankind. I can leave you now, for without my legs you cared for me like I was part of you. Thank you Mr. Poole, go now and take your part in mankind, and remember me, that I was part of you, and all of you.”

Poole was never certain whether the wheelbarrow pitched against that stone in the darkness entirely by accident, but when he eventually returned to Lisbon and found Cortezza, travelled again to Armenia to stand at the foot of the Mountains of Ararat, only then did he at last understand Brabantjieff. By happenstance he passed a grove of Mulberry Trees, and he was with Cortezza beneath the orange light of dusk; then he forgave himself and all mankind.

Assuming there is an odd handful of people who do come to take a peek at these ramblings, it is probably a reasonable assumption that most come to read about my latest running or cycling endeavors, which, for what they are worth, are of some interest to the running and cycling community. I don’t doubt there is truth to this, but to what degree, I am largely unaware.

In recent months, however, I surely disappoint those readers, few in number though they may be, since the reflections here are much less about describing such exercises of the body, than they are about engaging in the exercise of the literary, or academic, or purely speculative mind and, where-ever possible, exalting one of my favorite themes: self-referential paradox.

Having said that, I am willing to reach into the shifting sands of all the errant words heaped here that distract from the efforts of my body, and extract a kernel of reference to my latest bodily endeavor, that being the Pioneer 8km running race, before, during, and after which my legs felt like bricks, or lead, or cement and the effort like running in sand, or water, or snow, and the desire to cease the effort after 5km, intense, and the feeling of great fortune for having stayed the course to collect the top Master* award and one hundred dollars, bitter-sweet. Bitter, because the time was nigh 40 seconds slower than last year when I was sixth Master in a much deeper Masters field, and sweet because the reward was unexpected and, in a sense, at least some objective validation of the hard work, regardless of my own perception of the result. Bitter sweet too, because there are others, younger and much faster, who linger on the precipice of becoming Masters runners and who instantly will shift me down the ranks of that category.

But why the effort should not simply be satisfying in its own right and nothing less, I am amazed now even as I write these words that I still must ask myself this question after twenty two years of relatively serious athletic competition. But at least there is always the ever pervasive sense of hope, the sense that the body, if properly rested, or sharp, or peaked, has much more to offer me. But there is also acceptance and elation, muted though these emotions may be, for it is certain that I could not keep doing this if after every effort there was not, buried somewhere, a kernel of these too.

Having said all that, we, like the ouroboros, come around again: we may write about the exercises we engage in, or we may, by writing, engage in exercise and speak of our exercises, ones of the body and ones of the mind, analyze them, speculate upon their origins and their trajectories, and then stop here… because the last word written reflects the cycle within the cycle; it is the last one read by an odd handful of people who come to take a peek at these ramblings: this one, here.

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*Craig Odermatt won the 40-44 year age category, but is 39 at this time. He turns 40 this year, and so for the purpose of the race series, he is in the 40-44 category. To qualify for the top Master award, one had to be at least 40 on the day of the race.