Boot camp and beyond

Unlike the Scissor Sisters, I do (or did, a few hours ago before I began to turn into a pumpkin) feel like dancin’. The end result is the same, though: No sir, no dancin’ today. Due to the weather I’ve spent the night lying in front of the so delightful fire instead of heading to the Legion for Stomp it Off! Driving on snowy Vancouver roads is a losing proposition I try to avoid. It’s not that I can’t drive in the white stuff: I’ve lived in Ottawa and Montreal. It’s the other drivers that freak me out.

Behold the snow coating the roofs of neighbouring buildings:

And look at the difference in visibility towards the Granville Street Bridge between these two pictures:

I really can’t wait to head to the Philippines. Mon pays ce n’est pas l’hiver, c’est la plage. Which won’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know the song, but my country really ought to be the beach.

Come the revolution, I’ll be claiming beaches for my own. Also, first up against the wall will be people enforcing anti-grunting policies in fitness clubs. What’s next, no sweating policies? My Adventure Boot Camp has a no swearing policy but if you break it you do pushups. You don’t get kicked out.

I don’t grunt or groan often, but sometimes it’s the only thing that helps me push through the last ten seconds of holding plank position. It’s a good thing I don’t belong to one of the gyms in the article, as my response to people whose delicate ears can’t handle grunting would be “Suck it up, princess.”

Also of interest in the New York Times, distance runners may have an increased risk of skin cancer. Not that surprising, but I did wonder about “Even though, by chance, the nonrunners had more benign moles and freckles and significantly higher sun sensitivity as determined by eye color and skin shade, the runners had more solar lentigines and more lesions suggestive of basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, two less aggressive skin cancers.”. They say it’s by chance, but I wonder if those more prone to burning tend to self-select out of pursuits involving a lot of sun exposure? Maybe that’s why, even though I no longer hate running, I have no desire to become a distance runner.

Sometimes I worry that this will be a liability some day, when evaluating scenarios like “what if I’m in a situation where I have to run for hours on end to survive a zombie attack or something”, but it’s not a big enough motivator. (In fact, such thoughts just remind me of this this ‘a softer world’.) Of course, my dream life of living on the beach doesn’t make much sense from an avoiding skin cancer perspective either, but I’d be willing to trade a bit of longevity for always being warm and near the ocean.