Potholes’r’us

Did 2 four-mile loops of the Port Area this morning, before my weariness from yesterday’s run caused me to cut my work-out short. Descending the Lake Iroquois shorebluff (the remnants of a glacial lake) on a road bike with skinny high-pressure tires is certainly an adventure. Winter is tough on Toronto’s road, with bumps and hard-core potholes everywhere. As well, the wonderfully initialled Water & Wastewater Division were hard at work on Unwin Avenue, an unusual sight for a holiday-weekend Sunday.

It’s never a good idea to take your eyes off the road. Potholes and ridges appear unexpectedly. I bunny-hopped one chasm on Unwin Avenue, but my rear wheel caught it anyway.

It was chilly for this time of year, even tho’ sunny, and the usual crowds at the entrance to Tommy Thompson Park were reduced. Thompson Park has to be an unusual construct, the Brigadoon of parks: only a park on weekends & holidays.

62 miles of cycling this week (including commuting), only 18 miles of running, and a total of 9.7 hours working out (that includes my Pilates classes). Not great, really, but boy am I feeling it.

Yesterday I saw a frog (Mona thinks a leopard frog) on the Don Trail a few hundred yards below the Forks.

Are cyclists victims?

I don’t think so, but these folks do.

On Wednesday, May 18, at 7 p.m. local time I’ll be riding myself, doing the four-mile circuit of the Port Area—at somewhat more than 12 mi/h, I hope.

The e-mail I got from the local chapter of Self-Righteous Cyclists, ARC, gave the maximum speed for the Ride of Silence as 12 km/h, which I find rather amusing: hard to keep your bike upright at that speed.

No Mother’s Day for me

A week late, I know, but Nancy Nall’s column on Mother’s Day triggered this.

I’m glad I don’t have to write a column. But I have to suffer through gratuitously saccharine Mother’s Day references in our local papers and even on the Psychedelic Psunday programme on local hard-rock radio.

You could probably divide M.D. columns into two categories—those that are just out and out gush from the get-go (“You were always there …”); and Belated Appreciation (“I never realized how important you were …”), triggered either by the birth of one’s own children or the death of Mother Aforesaid.

One of these days I should write something for those of us with hateful mothers we do not remember fondly and that we do appreciate, unfortunately, for what they really did for us.

My mother had a sad and loveless life herself, but she hurt her five children a lot. Just this past March I was sitting in an Arctic Circle in a suburb of Salt Lake City while my fifteen-year-younger sister told me yet more horror stories—really horrible movie-of-the-week stuff our mom did to her. So no Mother’s Day sob stuff for her.