πŸŠβ€β™‚οΈπŸš΄πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ The Guelph Lake Olympic Triathlon was great fun, though challenging. Big thanks to my daughter for her expert race crewing.

A map displays the route of the Guelph Lake Olympic Triathlon covering 46.43 km in 2 hours and 44 minutes with 2,581 kcal burned, passing through locations like Armstrong Mills and Speedsid, along with the date Sat, Jun 20.

πŸŠβ€β™‚οΈπŸš΄πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ Packing for the Guelph Lake triathlon. I’m excited to try a new course

A collection of triathlon gear including a helmet, cycling shoes, running shoes, water bottles, nutrition gels, sunglasses, a cycling computer, swim goggles, and a backpack is arranged on a wooden table.

Finished reading: Hostages to Fortune by Peter C Newman really helped me better appreciate the role that the Loyalists had in shaping Canada. Much more extensive than I recall from my history lessons in school πŸ“š

RBC Amphitheatre. πŸ“

🎢 Bleachers know how to put on a great show

Just Be Normal About S**t by JA Westenberg

Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.

Seems to me like a great approach.

Andrew MacDougall: Lessons from D-Day, 82 years later:

Looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses is usually a waste of time. We’re never going to be the country we were when it served up the β€œGreatest Generation.” But we do need a renewed sense of nationhood. We need to become a place that can once again pull together to do big things when called upon by the world. Different things, surely, but big just the same. What we shouldn’t be in a rush to do, especially in the face of Trumpian disorder, is to further weaken ourselves, whether by continuing our economic and military stagnation, or carving up the country via referendum.

🚴 Glad to get out for my first proper long ride of the season. The nasty headwind on the way up became a glorious tailwind coming back.

A cycling route covering 90.10 km is overlaid on a map of the Toronto area, showing elevation gain of 532 meters and a duration of 3 hours 27 minutes.

Finished reading: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is the harrowing story of survival that inspired Moby Dick. Hard to imagine such an ordeal πŸ“š

Fun to listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco from start to finish for The Hemispheric Cavalcade Bingo Arcade June-boree! 🎡

Watched: Although I enjoyed For All Mankind Season 5, I agree with The NASA Vending Machine that the balance wasn’t quite right 🍿

πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦ Gander is an interesting experiment: a β€œCanada first” social network, built on the AT Protocol. I’m trying out the beta and it works well. As usual, though, the challenge is getting enough people on the network to make it compelling.

πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ My kind of weather

A sunny landscape featuring a river, trees, and a golf course is overlaid with running stats proclaiming Great day for a run.

Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery. πŸ“

Delicious pizza from Willibald

Finished reading: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson is an immersive story with great, imaginative details. Took a few chapters to get into and then was a page turner πŸ“š

Wedges ‘N Woods Golf Academy. πŸ“

Mini golf on a lovely day ⛳️

🚴 Glad to finally get out for my first outdoor ride of the season, though the 5am wake up was rough

Friday before a long weekend and a wave of meetings have been getting cancelled throughout the day. Now there’s just one left at 3pm, taunting me.

The collaborative office puzzle is complete

A completed puzzle depicts a vintage poster of The Canadian train traveling through a scenic landscape with mountains and forests, promoting a route across Canada.

πŸ”— Jonathan English makes a useful distinction in Engineering Problems and Phone Call Problems

There is a distinction that the infrastructure planning world doesn’t tend to make explicitly, but that explains an enormous amount of why large projects cost what they cost. It’s the distinction between engineering problems and what I like to call β€œphone call problems.”

Phone call problems lead to increased costs, schedule delay, and significant uncertainty.

πŸ”— The morning shakeout by Mario Fraioli

As a coach, I use various tools and data to track trends over time and initiate deeper discussions with my athletes about where we’re heading and why. But there’s a big difference between a tool and a crutch. Data should be used to inform your decisions but outsourcing your decisions to a data point is a fool’s errand. I worry that in our rush to optimize every aspect of our training and racing that we’re losing touch with the parts of this pursuit that can’t be measured and why most of us started running in the first place.