This Blog is For the Dogs

It’s very grey out there today; the weather just hasn’t co operated at all this Christmas break.  I have a million plans for things I want to do, people I want to visit with, and very little motivation to get up and do any of it.  I’m blaming it on the grey day, on the crappy weather, and a sugar low (last night I raided the baggie of chocolates my daughter brought home and I played the “how many chocolates can I shove into my hatch-at once-before guilt overtakes the moment?” game...The answer is 5 and I think I won).  Don’t judge me.  You know you’ve played the same game.



Sorry for the bad photo quality--only had my cell phone



Yesterday, with snow falling and grey skies, we couldn’t go trail running (too much ice and snow now) and could not go snow tubing (not enough snow, though, for the resorts to open the tube runs yet, apparently), could not go snowshoeing (not enough snow and left our snowshoes up at the cottage by mistake) or cross-country skiing.  With only a few vacation days ahead of me, I was itching to GET OUT but there was nothing we could do.  Except go for a hike.  A very slippery hike as the trail was frozen and the falling snow hiding the ice, but a hike nonetheless.  The dogs needed a hike, we figured.  The dogs deserved a long hike now that we were back home again.   (And the rain, followed by snain, followed by wet snow, then dry snow, made for very nice scenery with trees sagging under the weight of the snow and ice)



That is a very happy Chinook



Ironically, despite the fact that I almost always post pictures of us out in nature, on trails, in forest, I actually live in the suburbs right in the heart of the town of Ajax, population 90,000’ish—but I love this town because of its vast trail system, it’s carefully-thought-out green spaces, and of course it’s proximity to Toronto where all the work is.

So now that the year is coming to an end, with no crazy WODs in sight for the next couple of days, I think I should instead spend some time reflecting on what 2011 has been like for me and mine... (And if you're sick of my story, it's ok to skip to the  bottom of this blog, I'll forgive you, only if you instead tell me your story)

...I heard about this paleo/primal thing back in August, and I have to admit, before I stumbled across Mark’s Daily Apple, I’d never heard of it.  It just isn’t big at all yet here in Ontario, as far as I can tell.  So I read MDA and the idea just clicked.  I admit, it DID sound cult-like at first.  There were too many promises being made, too many guarantees.  But I thought, eh, why not for a month?  We’d put a pool into our backyard this year, and I was spending a lot of time in an itsy-bitsy bikini and there was some definite vanity going on (as I drank beer after beer and floated in circles). 

Skip forward one month and both my husband and I had lost some weight, we were talking a lot about this paleo/primal eating thing to anyone who would listen, and BAM!  Appendix burst.  Hospital stay.  Many drugs taken.  Questions asked.  I asked the surgeon what the cause was—and to keep this story clean, we’ll just say chronic constipation.  Hmmm.  Well, the pre-paleo me had a lot of problems with that.  In fact, the pre-paleo me had an ongoing addiction to laxatives that bordered on abuse (often).  But since eliminating grain from my diet (and therefore almost all fibre), it just wasn’t a problem anymore.  “Oh, this took years to happen” the surgeon assured me.  Oh, ok, so it was pre-paleo me that caused this to happen.  And do you know what’s really, really weird about my appendix-free body now (and probably irrelevant, but I‘m sayin’ it anyways)?  I don’t have to pee half as often as I used to.  Yea, I said that.  Ok, I don’t think my swollen appendix was taking up precious bladder space, but is it possible that my intestines were swollen for so many YEARS prior to the final burst that I thought it was totally normal?  No one will ever know for sure.

I went a little stir-crazy post-surgery.  I do not sit still very well.  I have a deeply rooted need to GET OUTSIDE, almost every day, to crazily fill each day with some kind of meaning.  I have never once in my whole life spent an entire day in my pyjamas—except those days spent in the hospital in a hospital gown, but those days were a haze of Demerol, morphine and Oxycontin, so who knows what I did?  

As soon as I got the go-ahead, I got up and started moving again.  This time, with even more passion.  I’ve set goals, as you may have read—I want to run in an adventure race.  I want to be fit, not just skinny, I want to be strong.  I want to surround myself with people who are trying to do the same thing, this paleo/primal thing, I want to make a whole community of like-minded friends.  Is this the “boundless energy” that was promised??  Is near-hyperactivity a side-effect of a lack of sugar in my diet?  Oh, wait, that’s just me.  I’ll shut-up now.

Alright, enough about me.  Maybe vanity and constipation brought me here (how inglorious is that??), but what brought everyone else here?  I love a good success story!  Do tell!  Does anyone else have any plans for the new year, changes they want to make?