My Wife…

…means everything to me. She had a significant Birthday today and we celebrated a wonderful day for a wonderful person. Happy Birthday my darling wife.

This sunset from tonight after the rain shower is yours forever. I give this to you.

We spent last weekend in the mountains to celebrate Traci, and to spend some quality time together. It was just great. This is what it looked like.

Our Cabin at Storm Mountain Lodge.

Castle Mountain Junction.

Lots of Snow…


Storm Mountain

Rundle Mountain in Banff


Cascade Mountain in Banff


Lake Louise

Not sure… what is happening here.

People ask us if they can take pictures of our Pugs. One foreign lady actually asked if she could take a picture of Andrew.

Um. No.

Green Camera! and a 16k longest run of 2012

Yeah. I made my return to the Running Room, not invited, but because it was handy, and just what I needed today. I was actually supposed to be at a FlyFishing boot camp today, but since it was so cold out at –5c and snowing, I decided to run instead.

It was my longest run of 2012 by 7 kilometers. I knew I might be pushing my luck but it turned out fine. I am tired now, was tired on the run, but kept up and am only a little sore. I guess the TKO workouts are helping. It was a really challenging route as well. Long LONG uphills and quick short downs. I was nervous as we headed farther West as I knew the climb out of the park gets more and more challenging.

(I paused my garmin by accident early in the run)

The group was a mix of runner friends I know and new people (to me), so it made for good conversation.

Question: When people ask the question about barefoot running I am allowed to answer right? Or are you asking just to be polite? Hmmm. My answers seem to getting shorter and shorter, to the point of being dismissive. People seem ok with that too.

I wasn’t even barefoot. I wore my Vibram KSO’s today. I found myself wishing for the little bit of extra cushioning that the Spyridons have by the time we hit about 13k and were heading very downhill. I figure it’s just early season lack of footness. (Foot fitness). I will certainly be stiff tomorrow but the TKo will help work it out fo sho. But generally the KSO were just fine.

Oh, and I decided to take the little green camera out on a run again too. I got 6 shots before the card I grabbed was full, but got a couple nice ones nonetheless.

Ran into quite a number of run buddies too! Peter (here’s his blog) turned around and ran with us for a while. He is worried that the Boston Marathon allowing deferments for this year to next because of the weather will affect his chances to get in to the race in 2013. He has no problem qualifying, just the spots taken up may leave less room in the entry categories. We’ll see I guess.

One of my favourite spots to shoot runners! (0-Insert witty rhetoric here-o)

Start of the evil hill. It just kept climbing, culminating in a really steep last 100 meters… blech. Got a lot of work to do before Moose Mountain at the end of August.

Otherwise a maintenance weekend around the house as we are busy for the next number of weekends. Good Luck to everyone running Boston stay safe, and to everyone else, have a great week!

Doe a deer… part of a trip to Saskatchewan. Naturally.

I posted this deer Picture on Twitter. @Neil_Zee if you are into that sort of thing. I thought I posted it here. It’s been a fairly popular pic there and on Instagram too @nzeller_evs.

What do you think of this one?

Here are a few more from our trip to Cypress Hills Saskatchewan back in February that I never got around to writing about.

This one is still in Alberta. (can you guess how I can tell?)

The rest are in Saskatchewan.

One of my top 10 favourite pics of all time.

Hiking and running and planning and PICTURES!

Well. We are settling in very nicely at the rental house. It really feels like home and I don’t ever really think about the old place. Traci feels it too and Andrew just plain loves life in general. 

Today a big box came. It was 3 sleeping bags I ordered from MEC online. $140.00 bags on sale for $35.00 each. It’s the beginning of our camping kit. Between running races, we will be spending weekends hiking and camping in the greatest outdoor playground in the world, Kananaskis Country. Traci and I are going to a “be prepared for Backcountry Camping’ lecture that will help us learn the right ways to cook, sleep and be safe out in the wilderness. We really won’t be random camping as there are many established campsites that are maintained by the provincial government. They are all equipped with rustic toilets (read: not having to bury your makings), food lockers (read: not having to hand over your food to a bear in the middle of the night) and flat tent sites complete with firepits and supplied wood. The key is they are nowhere near roads. You gotta get there under your own steam. Andrew is stoked for tent camping and is already a pretty accomplished hiker with 4 ambitious day hikes under his belt from last year when he was just barely 4 years old.

So far this year we have gone on a 4 hour hike which showed that he was ready to carry his own water. Last year he found the full 1.5 liter camelback a bit too heavy. Last weekend I filled it right full, plopped it on his back and never heard a peep about it. Good news for sure.

It was a great hike down in the Weaselhead Natural Area. It’s in the City, but you might as well be anywhere but.

You can click on any of the pictures to see full size. You can use any personally as wallpaper etc, just let me know you did. If you want to buy any (it’s happened, I had a theater company in San Francisco buy a picture for a background in a play) just let me know and we’ll work something out.

We went 5 for 6 in finding geocaches but there are probably 20 more down there.

It was pretty muddy in places. mud = fun, right? right!

Andrew is great fun to hike with. A real card at times.

It’s really pretty here.

Whoops. Dumped out the contents of a cache. Good thing there were no muggles around.

Water break!

Jus a cool shot me thinks.

Another geocache FTW!

Hey Daddy! watch me SMASH this snow!

So he takes a stick and puts a dot in the dirt. “Daddy, this is where we are”. then he walks a few feet and puts another dot. “Daddy, this is where we need to be, so lets get going!

This area is about 3kms from our inner city home. Fortunate doesn’t begin to describe how we are choosing to live our lives now. So blessed.

We pretty much gave up everything we owned to gain the life we wanted. It seemed like a nightmare while we were down, but now that we have come out on the other side, it feels like it was supposed to be exactly this way.

We have all been running again. I took a week off from the TKO gym as I was feeling like I was nearly broken, so some rest was a good thing. I go back tomorrow. I ran 3 times and had 2 nice hikes in the last week  and it really refreshed me. Traci is running 3 days a week and is loving it again, and Andrew is just running. everywhere.

I have started to train for my Mountain run in August. It’s 14.5kms and 3000’ up to the turn around. I will run hills and trails every chance I can get. These are only 150’ high hills, and it’s only 5k, but I felt good enough after to give me hope that with a good amount of hill training I should be good for the race.

Yesterday I got home a little early and we just packed a few tasty snacks and headed a total of 8 blocks away for a great hike in the Sandy Beach area of Calgary.

The Elbow River is as low as it ever is during the year. In a month this will be almost to the underside of that bridge for a few days. There is an extraordinary amount of snow in the mountains and this is one of the places is floods when it all melts.

This is one of the hills I run.

From the top. under that juniper is a Geocache!

As sure sign of spring. Crocuses are all over the hillsides!

Just another one i liked.

POWER! Woo!

Otherwise, work is a grind, but a great grind. Andrew loves school, Traci is doing great with her custom jewellery business.

Life is good!