Back in the city and missing the mountains: a mid-July weeknote

We’ve just survived a two-week heatwave in Montréal and I can’t stop thinking about how, not even 15 years ago, the city would have declared such a long, suffocating heatwave a crisis. And I get that I spend far too much time whining about the weather, be it IRL, on social media, on my blog. But our increasingly unliveable summers and the decimation of Montréal’s fluffy snowy winters is just depressing when I compare it to my childhood and teenage memories. I’m a creature of habit: when the usual seasonal markers change, I feel it keenly. Plus, my heat intolerance makes me a particularly bad frog for the slow boiler.

But! Let’s indulge in some gratitude for a moment, because the heat finally broke. Everyone I’ve spoken to in Montréal has mentioned what a relief it is, and my own mood has greatly improved. So has my motivation to get back to this bloggity blog.

I’ve been trying to focus on a few different projects this week: half-marathon training, forging ahead on my Yoga for Athletes course, and returning to my NaNoWriMo 2023 manuscript, nicknamed Codename Sapphire. I’m trying to remind myself that I’ll be studying full-time this September and handling a much bigger workload than I have in the past 18 months, so I’m trying to re-familiarize myself with busy days.

Half-marathon training updates

Weeks 6 and 7 of training have been underwhelming but not without their high points. Despite the heat keeping me from training as often as I want — I have some hard limits around minimums of food and sleep I’m allowed to train on, factors in my life that are extremely heat-sensitive — there have been some notable runs that show that progress is being made, if slowly. I can finally handle 5km on road (with the occasional break on dirt path through alleys and parks) without the pain in my right knee messing with me during or after. And, during my last canicross outings on mountain trails, Pippin’s working hard to convince me to run way faster than I usually tend to run. That encouragement has definitely had a really good effect on my pacing and endurance.

While I try to only run once a week with Pippin at the moment (he’s still growing, and I want to make sure he’s also getting adequate rest in all this heat between big outings), I’ve noticed that I look forward to our runs even if I know they’ll be so exhausting. He’s such a happy, motivated running partner, his enthusiasm is contagious! I’m still a slow runner by anyone’s standards (my pace can settle anywhere between 8:47/km to 6:13/km), but my resilience and recuperation times are greatly improving.

Yoga for Athletes teacher training

When I was doing research into various certifications this summer, I stumbled quite by accident upon the Yoga Medicine foundation’s Yoga for Athletes teacher training, which is a virtual training tailored to helping a yoga teacher use the physical (and more) modalities of yoga to assist athletes in their cross training and recovery. Through my ballet training of the last three years I have spent a lot of time thinking about active stretching, passive stretching, range of motion, and my own hyper-mobile and grumpy joints. I had a feeling this training would complement and round-out a lot of my own knowledge and practice. Though I’m about a quarter of the way through this classes’ lectures and practices, I’ve already learned several techniques that I’m using in my daily recovery and mobility routines. My big goal is to finish the 25 hours of lectures, homework, and written exam before my session starts at UQÀM in September. This sounds very doable on paper, but I also have the terrible habit of getting distracted during studying and going down internet research rabbit holes about all sorts of topics related to cross training, mobility work, and recovery. Hopefully my brain is storing all of this information somewhere easily accessible for future me!

Back to writing! Sort of.

Besides having a completely rubbish time in this heat, the puppy usually allows me 100 to 200 words of writing or journalling or computer time or reading before he starts acting up and demanding my attention, so I’ve just not been productive on the writing front.

See the following graph? The green line is my writing goal for rebooting my Codename Sapphire manuscript throughout July so far.

And that blue line? That's what I’ve actually accomplished. It’s completely laughable. I’m honestly really annoyed with myself, and hoping that some light public self-shaming will spur me to do a little better next week.

Books n' Stuff

After the merited self-flagellation above, here's the more lighthearted slice of life portion of the blog post. I got some reading done when we were in the mountains. I was utterly absorbed by two books, both sequels: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine and Apostles of Mercy by Lindsay Ellis (I talked about Axiom’s End, the first book in the series, here). I actually liked both these books better than their prequels, which is always an enjoyable experience. While Desolation is perhaps a little more trope-y and predictable than Apostles, both had fabulous pacing and were real page-turners. I’m looking forward to rereading both series soon.

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains (!)”
— Bilbo to Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring

On the videogames front, I’ve been replaying Firewatch. This was actually spurred by a dream I had a few weeks ago about finding an old abandoned fire-watch tower, which was particularly intriguing because we don’t have fire-watch towers in Québec (to the best of my knowledge). After that depressing introduction (oof — I don’t love that narrative choice), Firewatch is also a lot more fun than I remembered. It makes for a very enjoyable evening, when the puppy choses to sleep (aaah, peace) and the ice tea is freshly brewed. Speaking of, because Pippin is so young we haven’t done a ton of hiking this summer. Firewatch also scratches that itch of wanting to go on adventures through the mountains!

I’ve also had the attention span to finally return to Baldur’s Gate 3. I finished a Tav play-through last summer, and have been just waiting for Pippin to grow up a bit to try a Dark Urge run. In the near-year since last September, it’s also really cool to see how many bugs have been patched, especially when it comes to interacting with companions and various NPCs. I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach to play Dark Urge all the way through, but I’ve heard such amazing things about how it affects Act 3, so I want to try. It may also take me a year, because since returning from the mountains I’ve mostly been able to play an hour a week. But being busy and having the motivation to read too many cool books and games (including Koriko!) for my limited free time is a good problem to have.

So that’s been life this past week (and a bit more). I have lofty goals this summer and I’m trying to make sure my training-Pippin-reading-writing-life-balance is not completely thrown out the window. Cross your fingers especially that this relatively more clement weather endures into August — it’s been such a relief, and makes my endless to-do feel so much more achievable.