I broke up with running last year. I don’t know if it was the monotony, the occasional achy knee that didn’t bode well for our future together or the lack of zombies (see below), that put an end to our relationship. Since then, I’ve flirted with kettle bells, Lotte Berk and stair climbing using this cool app.

So when a pal sent out an email looking for people to join her in a 10km race, I dismissed it. But the universe had other ideas….It put enough weird coincidences in my path that I became convinced, nay, excited about running again.

Disclaimer: I am in my cozy house with a cup of tea and six inches of snow outside.

No actual running has been done yet so this excitement may be temporary and hallucinatory.

The 10km is the day before my birthday. This birthday is going to put me within spitting distance of 50, so there is something appealingly macho about doing a big run the day before. Also, did I mention that the last time I ran 10km was on this same friend’s birthday? Spooky, no?

That birthday run is the single time I have run a 10km. I signed up for that race, not realizing it was at night. You know night, don’t you? It’s where they keep the dark. The route was along a wooden boardwalk on the edge of Lake Ontario. There had been a large storm the day before which had blown small sand dunes onto the path. Have you ever tried running in sand? Have you run in sand in the dark? Try running through pudding surrounded by kittens and you’ll get the idea.

I was running 10+1s (that is hip, runner talk for having a one minute walk after ever ten minutes of running.) You can maintain your overall speed while reducing your chance of injury. You can also enjoy a moment of calm to wonder why the hell you aren’t sitting in that Starbucks you just ran past enjoying a venti half sweet shaken black tea lemonade, my post run drink of choice.

I’m a fairly low-tech runner so, even though I have a running watch with a interval alarm, I have to be able to see my watch to figure out when 10 minutes are up. I couldn’t hear its tiny beep over the Donna Summer blasting on my iPod. A hint from me to you; disco is the best running music ever. Coordinate the beat with your feet (see what I did there with a little rhyme?) and get a nice, consistent speed going. Normally, glancing at my watch poses no problem but at night, with the aforementioned darkness, it was a problem. Squinting in moonlight has never improved any runner’s time. I’m ashamed to say I was well into the seventh kilometer when this sentence floated through my brain; “They should really put little lights on these watches.”  Luckily, the aforementioned darkness hid my red face as I tried each of the previously ignored buttons on my watch to find the light switch.

So far, we have birthday-coincidence as the only motivating factor to getting back to running. The next nudge I needed was provided by the fine folks at Reluctant Runners “A site for people who love running – just not while they’re doing it.” That would be me.

If you look under their Motivation tab, you will find a terrific little film called 23 ½ Hours. It was one of my favourite things even before I visited this site, so I was instantly predisposed to feel warmly towards these two. Instead of asking you to exercise for 30 minutes a day, which nobody is going to do, this film asks you to limit your sitting or lying down to 23 ½ hours a day. This little twist has wormed its way into my brain and robbed me of my ability to say I’m too busy to exercise. Surely 23 ½ sedentary hours are enough?

Under the same Motivation tab is a mention of a soon to be released app, Zombies, Run! that I backed on Kickstarter. I have been patiently waiting for it to be ready and to receive my copy. But with half a foot of snow outside and, up until now, no real interest in running ever again, my patience was pretty bountiful. You may ask why I even bought a running app if I didn’t plan on running again. Oh, the heart is a maze. Perhaps I knew I would make my way back to running eventually.

Hmm, another small coincidence; Taylor Stanton’s favourite project right now is by my buddy, Jeff Harris, a photographer who has taken a photo of himself every day since 1999. On the days when he is too busy, he gets the likes of Geddy Lee, Al Gore or Michael Stipe to take it instead. These Reluctant Runner guys seemed like my kind of people.

I could feel a little flutter of interest in running beginning to stir in the back of my brain. That last time I ran 10km I was 30 pounds heavier. It’s gotta be easier to run 10km if you aren’t carrying this.

So folks, it’s official. We’ve set the date. Running and I are going to kiss and make up. The road ahead may be bumpy but with the help of Donna Summer, I know we’ll make it.

The Kiddo interrupted my work to lodge a complaint a while ago. She said I was cooking the same stuff over and over. It’s true, I couldn’t argue. I have a weak spot for big stews; just throw a whack of veggies and some beans into a pot and Voila! Dinner! I love stew because:

1) It’s just one pot to wash.

2) It’s very forgiving about what is actually in the fridge.

3) Stews are nutritious, especially on days when there is some kale or squash hanging around.

4) It requires about all the brain power I usually have late in the day, which is to say Next To None.

5) We can graze off the leftovers for another meal or two. Score!

In a moment of supreme maturity, I chose not to lecture her on the burden of coming up with dinner night after night (I make my family dinner and then, a mere 24 hours later, they want dinner again. Ungrateful wretches!) Instead, I handed her a pencil and some paper and instructed her to make me a list of 7 dinners she would like to see on her plate this week.

Okay, so I had to tone down the multiple appearances of (vegetarian) hot dogs and burgers but she surprised me by putting a couple of old favourites on the list, all too long out of rotation. And since we had one of those crazy, busy weeks where every work/play/club/legal event came at once, we even managed to arrange them so that busy nights had a dinner I could prep a day or two ahead.

This means, when we had 90 minutes to get home from the matinee performance of The Kiddo’s skating extravaganza, eat dinner, and be back at the arena, I was able to get dinner on the table 5 minutes after we walked in the door. This left me time to take a breath and enjoy no longer being in a cement bunker/dressing room with 25 little skaters. And since dinner that night revolved around everyone’s favourite Superhero grain, Quinoa, it went some way to warding off the evil done to the kiddo’s system by the cherry Slurpee I found myself agreeing to at the arena snack bar.

Rediscovered Quinoa Salad

Salad:

1 cup quinoa, uncooked

2 or 3 roasted red peppers (I keep a jar of roasted peppers in the pantry so I can whip this together quickly)

1 cup chopped cucumber

8 or so stalks of blanched asparagus

1/3 cup toasted cashews or almonds (this used to be pinenuts but, at $45/lb., they got the boot)

¼ cup hemp seeds (optional but worth a trip to the store to include them)

Dressing:

2 tbsp. fresh basil, chopped

2 tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped

¼ tsp. salt

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

1 tsp. Dijon mustard

2 tbsp. maple syrup or honey

¼ cup olive oil

Cook the quinoa (throw it into 2 cups of boiling water, slap on a lid and turn the heat way down for 15 minutes.)

Making the dressing by putting all ingredients in a glass jar, slap on a lid and shake. (Gee, this recipes suddenly seems to require a lot of lid slapping)

When the quinoa is done, pour the dressing on it while it’s still warm and stir gently. Combine veggies, nuts and seeds in a bowl with quinoa/dressing mixture. Chill or dive right in.

Makes, oh, about 6 cups of salad.

We appreciate you having your triple bypass performed in our hospital. Here’s a coupon for a free Baconator to thank you for your patronage.

We’re so glad you like your new haircut. One of our stylists will be happy to stick a wad of gum in it for you on your way out.

Your manicure looks great. Tequila Sunrise is definitely your colour! Now, just scour these pots before leaving the salon, okay?

When my gal pal offered me a cheapy trial pass to her swanky gym, I thought I would see how the other half lives. My standard workout spot is a utilitarian community center. I have the cheapest membership, which lets me use the treadmill, elliptical trainer and stationary bike. There are a handful of weight machines and, if you are feeling brave, you can go into the free-weight alcove, which has all the ambience of a prison yard. On Mondays and Fridays, my usual workout partner is a fella in his late 80s. He walks at a restful pace on the machine beside me, reading the financial pages and mouthing the highlights of it to me, over the Black Eyed Peas on my iPod.

So, while I was going to miss hearing about his grandson’s latest hockey game, I was interested to visit a gym that didn’t mend its equipment with duct tape. I arrived at this to-remain-unnamed-temple-of-Zen-fitness armed with the twenty bucks that would get me a week’s sampling of classes. I could have a ride on one of their high-tech vibrating machines that “defeats cellulite”. Now there’s a fight I’d want front row tickets for. I could take a class involving ropes and pulleys that would suspend me from the ceiling. Useful if I were training to be a diamond thief. First up for me was the anti-gravity-slidey-thing that guarantees ‘pre-exhaustion…by loading your muscle groups in varying planes’. Well, I like a gym that recognizes I am probably arriving pre-exhausted. After all, I am a working mother.

Now, while I admire Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s honesty when she said, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me”, let me just sidestep the issue and politely say that, after trying as many classes as my schedule allowed that week, the swanky gym just wasn’t for me. While their restful Zen décor left me with the feeling that I had been to the spa, I didn’t feel like I got a better workout there than I did at my slightly drab community center. And once the trial pass was used up, I’d be paying more per class than I now pay per month. Case closed.

But the swanky gym did offer one perk that my gym doesn’t; free breakfast. After a few rigorous classes, I schedule myself into Restorative Yoga. I arrived at sunrise and basically lay on the floor and breathed. What’s not to love? As a reward for turning up so early, they hand you a muffin as you head out the door. But not just any muffin; the largest, heaviest, sawdustiest muffin I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. It looks fruit-studded in the photo but the visible berries are just window dressing. The body of the muffin was pure stodge. It was vast, at 3.5 inches across. It weighed a heartstopping three quarters of a pound, making it roughly equivalent to three Tim Horton’s muffins in weight. Without a nutritional breakdown, I can only guess but, given its density, I’d put money on there being more than half my day’s calories in it.

So, for all the high-tech equipment and trained staff, they just derailed any benefit I might have received from my workout by handing me the equivalent of a Baconator. That is, of course, assuming I could choke it down.

Tomorrow, I am heading back to the community center to renew my membership. They are my people. No one has ever suggested I work on my abs while dangling midair and there are lots of back issues of Us Weekly. Oh, and there’s the plodding old man who reminds me that, whatever obstacles are in your way, it’s just about consistently doing what you can with the body you’ve been given.

When Joan of Arc was 13 she heard the voices of saints in her father’s garden. The spirit of Schubert dictated music to Schumann. Nothing quite so pastoral or ethereal for me. I was trying to create order of the ungainly list of things I need to do today. In the midst of wondering if the grocery shopping needed to be done this morning or could be put off until this afternoon, clear as a bell, a voice inside my head said “Well, first thing, I really need to go to the gym.” My head swiveled wildly, trying to find the source of this unfamiliar phrase. Turns out it came from me! Who knew?

Now, those of you who live in a 7 Minute World, know that my system is to make small but consistent (aye, there’s the rub) changes to improve my health and my productivity. It’s the consistency that is the bugbear in this situation but, now that the nice people who live in my head are on board, things are looking up.

What if I told you that everyday you had to carry around a bag containing………

A red Swingline stapler

A cast iron crow

A first edition of A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

A teapot

A little terracotta pig

A mason jar of buttons

A stoneware dinner service for 4

An Ikea Ribba frame, in beech

You have to carry this bag everywhere.

Going to the loo? Carry the bag.

Bringing your groceries in from the car? You have to carry this bag for each trip too.

Standing at the sink doing dishes? Yup, that bag had better be slung over your shoulder.

And whether you are sleeping or canoodling, that bag is going to be between the sheets too.

Sure, it sounds ridiculous but that’s what I was doing.

Since joining Weight Watchers last October, I have lost 20 pounds, which puts me well past the halfway marker to my goal weight. There is something both motivating and appalling about this nice round number; twenty, 20, one score, an Andrew Jackson.

Motivating because I’ve made a lot of slow, consistent changes (7 minutes at a time), I’ve stuck to it through the Christmas holidays, some vicious PMS and the vagaries of life. I have more energy than every before, so doing the rest should be a cake walk (or rather, a walk past the cake.)

The appalling element comes from knowing that I was carting all this around 24 hours at day and didn’t even know it. Can you even imagine stuffing all the items on this table into a bag and lugging it about? But one day the universe finally stood beside my bed and hollered in my ear, “Wake the Eff Up!”

I wasn’t awake as I looked in the mirror each day (in fact, our full-length mirror broke and it took me well over a year to replace it. Coincidence? I don’t think so.) I was asleep as I progressively bought larger and larger trousers. I hit the snooze button over and over again about what I was really eating.

Sure, the quality of the food was good but the portions were out of proportion and the “treats” were a mainstay. Here’s a hint from me to you; if you are eating something once or twice a day, day in a day out, it isn’t a treat, it’s a staple. Those daily chocolate bars/cookies/bowls of soy ice cream (ooh! Soy. It must be virtuous!) had elbowed their way into the party and staked out a prime spot at my table. I had to show them the door. Sure, I still invite them over once in a while. They liven up a party and I enjoy having them around. I just don’t set them a place at the table every day.

I weigh in at my Weight Watchers meeting every week. Then I sit down and get to hear some of the smartest, most interesting people I know talk about cookies and bathing suits. No more zoning out about trouser sizes because this weekly check-in keeps me focused and I know if I just make the best choices I can between that moment and the next meeting, I’m heading in the right direction. When I decided to give WW a whirl, despite my concerns of being time warped into the 1970s, I lucked out, wandering into what is considered by many to be Toronto’s best meeting. Ashley, our WW leader, provides a floor show along with a pep talk. This vegan actress/cabaret singer gives us her all at 8:15 on a Saturday morning (often after performing the night before) and we all love her for it.

So now that I’ve hit the big 2-0, my next goal is to lose another 10 pounds or, as we call it around here, a cast iron frying pan and 3 Nancy Drew books.

My buddy Debbie Ohi (She of the Oh, So Many Talents) has a daily poem prompt (http://instapoem.blogspot.com). You set the timer clicking for 5 mere minutes and make meter. The prompt today was Poke, which I must say is not a word that lends itself easily to poetry, in my humble opinion. Still, here is what I managed in 5 minutes (no, I didn’t give my self an extra 2 just because I live in a 7 minute world):

A Facebook Poke just shouldn’t be done.
A poke’s no good in real life,
So why would I like a virtual one?
Now a Facebook hug would cause less strife.
So let’s change pokes to hugs on our computers
Oh, and Deb says a Multiple Like button would suit her.

There is baby’s first steps, baby’s first word and baby’s first day of school. But today we reached that other landmark day…baby’s first Hitchcock. A Snow Day kept the kiddo home from school and so, while I crocheted this dishcloth, we watched Rear Window together. I reused some pink stripey cotton from an outgrown poncho. She’s too big for the poncho but too small for Psycho or The Birds. I might whip up another dishcloth if she wants to try Vertigo or The Trouble with Harry. I’ve still got 1 1/2 pounds of this cotton!

The Mr. awoke us with the happy news that school was canceled and a chorus of Snow Day! Snow Day! echoed around the house. Digging out the car and heading to the gym seemed unappealing but, remembering that consistent exercise is one of the things that makes me happy (though rarely at the exact moment it is being done), I substituted digging out the car, shoveling the walkway and breaking up the snow dam the plows had made at the end of the driveway. Some fresh air, a little sweat and the virtue of having moved my body a little, despite the hurdles.

Then the kiddo and I went for a hike to civilization to get loo rolls. There are some things you just can’t get snowed in without!

I’m taking a new app for a test drive this week to see if it helps me do what out to be done. I like chocolate, I like democracy and I like All About Eve but I love ticking things off a list.

When I became the proud owner of the Mister’s hand-me-down iphone, I polled my pals to see what kind of apps I should install. Angry Birds was well represented but I was looking for something a little more functional in my daily life.

HomeRoutines is a kissing cousin of The Fly Lady (don’t know about the Fly Lady? Check her out here). It lets you create daily and weekly lists of all those little Fly Lady chores that magically combine to make an (almost) continually clean house.

Now, I’ve got a morning and evening list of my daily recurring tasks and if I give them a little tap of completion, a lovely gold star appears. Now, I don’t know about you, but a lovely gold star makes this heart beat a little quicker. They are the George Clooney of stickers.

I can add tasks to each day of the week (for instance, I clean out the fridge each Wednesday in anticipation of Thursday’s big grocery shop) and I use the Zone section to focus on the jobs that come up once a month or so.

I know that doing what ought to be done makes my life sweeter and easier and I have used this kind of system before. While reading The Happiness Project I stopped thinking about housework as simply a chore and started thinking about it as a means to an end. I find it restful and pleasant to live in a clean, orderly house. It contributes greatly to my daily happiness to be able find the scissors. It is pleasant to know I don’t have to call 9-1-1 if my kiddo invokes the three second rule on something she dropped on the kitchen floor. Cleaning the house regularly creates the environment I want to live in. It also prevents the house from looking like the Collyer Brothers’ summer cabin.

Ironically, it was often the task of creating the list each week which derailed the whole system so I am hoping this ever-renewing list in HomeRoutines will keep things on track.