Run 957: Beating the heat and bears

Brunette River, pre-run: The promise of heat that is hot, to paraphrase America.

Not literally beating bears, of course.

I had a few goals today:

  • Avoid bears
  • Beat the heat

I achieved both of these things by:

  • Running on the river trail instead of at the lake
  • Starting my run just before 9 a.m., almost two hours earlier than on Friday

Now, I have seen a bear on the river trail, but the trail is wide and open, with excellent sight lines, all of which is the opposite of the loop around the lake, so if you see a bear, it will likely be way up ahead and not when you suddenly confront it coming around a tight, narrow corner. As it turned out, I saw no bears, only one dog (on leash, yay) and a few cyclists, so it was pretty quiet overall.

It was 21C, which is pretty warm for 9 a.m. but not bad overall. Humidity was a sticky 78% and didn’t drop much, so sweating was copious and constant.

That said, the right shin, still a bit tender, is definitely starting to feel better, so I believe it’s officially on the mend. Because I always find a way to complicate things, last night I managed to pull at least one ab muscle, so I got to run with a mild ache on my right side. I don’t think it had much effect, other than just annoying me.

The switch to the river trail seemed to give me a little more pep, as I came in with a fairly zippy pace of 5:39/km, my first under 5:40 in a good while. Something that helped: Most of the trail was in the shade, with only one small section getting direct sunlight. Nice.

In all, a fine start to the week.

Brunette River, post-run: Still with the early morning vibe.

Stats:

Run 957
Average pace: 5:39/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Brunette River Trail
Start: 8:57 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:29
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 21°C
Humidity: 78-76%
Wind: light
BPM: 151
Weight: 165.7
Total distance to date: 6,615 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (210/463/673)

Music: Pop Stuff (playlist)

Apps update: 30 updates, more to come soon™

UPDATE, one day later: Now up to 32 pending updates!

What’s funny is when 27 apps on my iPhone 12 needed to be updated, I did update 7 of them and just days later the number of updates is already past that initial 27, to 30. This is just silly.

Phone updates are silly.

I want to see how long I can go before something stops working.

Jim Patti amuses me

Scheduled to start taking patients in 2026, the new acute care tower they’ve been building next door since 2021 is pretty much complete, at least from the outside. Jim Pattison, a famous-in-BC entrepreneur, donated something like $30 million to the hospital, which is a lot of money even in Canadian dollars. As a result, he gets his name prominently displayed on each long side of the tower, where it reads:

Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower

Except for some reason, the east side of the tower reads:

Jim Patti

And this amuses me because I’m just that kind of guy. I assume the rest of the letters will go up at some point, but in the meantime, I draw comfort from having Jim Patti looking down on my home from nine storeys up.

My one quarter game

Video game arcades emerged in the mid-1970s and flourished through the 1980s. During this same period, I was 10–25 years old, so pretty much the prime age to indulge in arcade gaming as a pastime. A friend and I would sometimes even get in his van and drive from Duncan to Victoria, a roughly 50-minute trek, to check out the latest games at the snazzy arcades in the capitol. This was around 1984, just when the first (and as it turned out, some of the only) laser disc games emerged.

I was never great at arcade games, but also not horribly inept, so I usually felt I got my money’s worth when I exchanged a $10 bill for a roll of 40 quarters. Unless I played anything from Williams (Robotron 2084, Defender, Stargate, Sinistar), because their games were technically brilliant, a blast to play and required a level of hand/eye coordination I never had, even as a nimble youth.

But there was one game that I actually mastered and could play from beginning to end (because it actually had an end) on a single quarter. That game was one of the aforementioned laser disc titles, Space Ace.

I was never that good at its predecessor, Dragon’s Lair, but loved the film-quality animation and being able to “control” the same. I put control in scare quotes because both games were ultimately just variations of Simon–hit the button or push the joystick when a colour flashes onscreen, and the animation continues uninterrupted. Guess wrong or take too long to react (measured in fractions of a second in some cases) and you got to watch Dirk the Daring (in Dragon’s Lair) or Dexter (in Space Ace) die in some horrible way, you’d lose a life, and the game would play through the sequence again, giving you another chance.

Space Ace was a bit more generous in the clues guiding you through the game, and this was apparently enough to get me to keep trying, to where I could get through the entire thing for only 25 cents.

Last night, YouTube served up a video of a complete playthrough of the game. The video is about nine minutes long and is linked below. Watching it, I am kind of amazed I managed to get through the entire game on a quarter, even with 20-year-old reflexes, because there were so many times decisions had to be made so quickly, I couldn’t even suss out which was the right one before two more had already popped up and flown by.

Clearly, I was a maniac in 1984.

I continued to hang out and play in arcades until the early 90s, or until I was around 30 years old. By then home video game consoles were getting good enough to make them credible alternatives to the arcades and today arcades are just a niche for either nostalgia buffs looking to play the cocktail table version of Ms Pac-Man (which was the best way to play), or for indulging in novelty games with weird controls that are two bucks a pop or something.

But I’ll always remember those early years and my only single quarter game, even as it seems totally bananas today that I could pull off those moves back then.

Birding, August 23, 2025: Snow (geese) in August

Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary, Centennial Beach (Delta)
Weather: Sunny, 20-28°C

Reifel Bird Sanctuary

It almost feels like you can see the curve of the Earth.

It was warm today and maybe that made a lot of birds shy about coming out, because sparrows and sparrow-adjacent birds were in relatively short supply. We did see some chickadees, a few blackbirds and a lone cowbird, though.

Mostly it was mallards (being jerks by hogging seed) and wood ducks, with the males still looking snazzy with their proto-mullets, along with the re-emergence of geese in most parts. The air was full of honks.

We even saw some swallows still hanging out in the main pond, though I wasn’t able to tell what kind they were, as they were in full flitting mode.

Others must have known this is the birding lull, because we were able to drive straight into the sanctuary and the number of people around was definitely down for a sunny, pleasant summer Saturday.

Still, it was fine. Can one have too many glamour shots of mallards?

Centennial Beach

Mt. Baker looms over Boundary Bay and the tidal flats.

We had some better luck at Centennial Beach, with multiple types of shorebirds prowling the streams left in the wake of the extremely low tide, including yellowlegs, killdeer, semipalmated sandpipers and a lifer–a long-billed curlew. At least I think it’s a lifer, I don’t remember seeing one before and it has an extremely distinctive (and gigantic) bill that curves down. A couple of them were strolling about farther out. We ventured onto the tidal flats for a bit, but were wary of spooking them.

There were also a ton of grasshoppers basically everywhere. I was tempted to title this post “Day of the Locusts.” I got some decent shots.

The other surprise was three snow geese in amongst a bunch of Canada geese. I did not have snow geese in August on my bingo card.

The raptor trail was raptor-deficient, however.

In all, the shorebirds made the trip worthwhile.

The Shots

Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto.

A few shots:

Blackbird up close and personal at Reifel.
Snow goose in August.

The Birds (and other critters)

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • Anna’s hummingbird
  • Black-capped chickadee
  • Brown-headed cowbird
  • Cliff swallow
  • European starlings
  • House sparrow
  • Red-winged blackbird

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American coot (still not yet)
  • Canada goose
  • Killdeer
  • Great blue heron
  • Greater yellowlegs
  • Long-billed curlew (lifer)
  • Long-billed dowitcher
  • Mallard
  • Northern pintail
  • Northern shoveller
  • Semipalmated sandpiper (lifer, at least per Merlin)
  • Snow goose (new!)
  • Wood duck

Common:

  • American crow
  • Rock pigeon

Raptors:

  • Northern harrier

Non-birds:

  • Copious pollinators
  • A black squirrel
  • One turtle

Run 956: My leg and the bear

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run. Clear, warm. Summer.

I wanted to get out early, before it got high (a forecast of 32C today), but only partly succeeded, as I slept in a little. I still started in the morning, just before 11 a.m., but it was already 24C and my phone told me it felt like 27C, which seemed about right. There was copious sweating.

This was pretty much a repeat of Wednesday’s run, just a little slower and sweatier. The heat/humidity definitely had an effect and I experienced the same second km droop. The right shin was again tender to start, but perhaps less so than it has been, though I feel like I could still feel it later in the run (though it wasn’t hurting at that point. Then again, it could have been all in my head, who knows?) My right ankle in the last km started to twinge for no apparent reason, just to add to the fun. I don’t think it affected my pace.

I was glad when the run ended. Later, I was glad to not be eaten by a bear. As I am still doing 5K runs, this means I walk the second 5K around the lake. As I was nearing the intersection of the South Shore and Avalon trails, as seen below, a couple motioned to me and I muted my music. They said there was a bear and it was big and also it was right around the corner.

Note: Figures not quite to scale.

Fortunately, the bear was heading to the west, toward the Freeway Trail, possibly to hitch a ride, which meant it was heading away from me. I still looked back several times as we got farther apart. The bear occasionally stopped, and once it turned around, as if contemplating coming my way. I jogged a short distance, then stopped, thinking that would make me look like I was fleeing. Which I was.

Click to see a slightly less blobby version of the bear.

Farther up the trail, nearer to the 10K marker, I met a guy with binoculars who said he thought for a moment that the bear was chasing me. He said there have been many bear sightings around the lake this summer, more than he’s seen in 37 (!) years. He also runs, though I don’t recall seeing him. He even recounted a story from this summer when the spitfire encountered a bear. She apparently stood to the side of the trail to make room and the bear just ran past her to…somewhere.

Also, the guy said on the other side of the dam, a woman had reported seeing another bear getting out of the river. This was at the same time we were there, so multiple bears. Bears everywhere. All the bears. I did not see the dam bear, though.

In any case, it seems the lake is the #1 tourist destination for black bears this summer. Why, I can’t say. I just hope they stick to eating berries and fish, you know.

Hopefully the running next week will be bear-free, and my right leg will be at least somewhat normal.

View from the rickety bridge over Deer Lake Brook, looking south, post-run but pre-bear.

Stats:

Run 956
Average pace: 5:51/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 10:58 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 29:25
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 24°C
Humidity: 63-61%
Wind: light
BPM: 150
Weight: 165.1
Total distance to date: 6,610 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (205/459/664)

Music: Pop Stuff (playlist)

Still Creek, August 20, 2025

This is often one of the shots I post in my running updates. I didn’t yesterday, but I like the scene so much I am compelled to give it its own post. I love the green of the vegetation, the perfect blue of the sky, the puffy clouds, the perfectly reflecting water. And it’s all shot on a phone so old it makes Tim Cook sad.

Run 955: Moody, with sun

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: A perfectly fine summer day.

An appointment of Jeff’s got bungled in the morning due to bureaucracy, and then things got a bit chippy after that. I would be running late as a result, and debated what to do. A shorter run? No run? Carry on as normal?

I opted for the latter and did a regular 5K, going clockwise around the lake. While I stretched beforehand, I opted to not wear sunblock because it was already late, risking potential sunburn. So far, my skin does not resemble a cooked lobster.

The same issue persisted as the previous run, except this time my right shin felt even more tender during the first km. I briefly contemplated calling the run, but gingerly pressed on and after the first few km, it once again settled. It doesn’t feel sore now, nor did it on the walk back (which is 9 km), so hopefully it’s just a weird thing and not a terrible thing.

I had another second km droop, but mostly recovered to get a perfectly cromulent pace of 5:48/km. The best part was my BPM at only 147.

It was warmer than Monday, but a nice breeze actually helped, so it didn’t feel as muggy.

Overall, not bad, considering how little motivation I had heading out.

Still Creek, post run, looking to the east.

Stats:

Run 955
Average pace: 5:48/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Start: 12:23 p.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 29:11
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 21°C
Humidity: 67-64%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 147
Weight: 165.0
Total distance to date: 6,605 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (200/446/646)

Music: Pop Stuff (playlist)

Run 954: Yay for clouds, yay for clouds without the rain

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run.

I headed out a bit later than normal today, mostly because I was feeling less motivated than Friday, which is weird, because Friday it was pouring rain and today it was merely cloudy, which is good for a run!

Here is the run in handy list form:

The Good:

  • Cloudy, which is better for running
  • No rain, which is even better than cloudy
  • Cloudy meant no sunblock needed, which is a nice bonus
  • Cloudy also meant that, despite high humidity, I didn’t sweat as much
  • Relatively quiet on the trail
  • I actually passed another jogger–Hangdog!
  • My pace was better than expected, despite another 2nd km sag

The Bad:

  • My right shin was tender again to start, but felt better (again) after a short time

The Indifferent:

  • The Baker’s cyst didn’t seem to affect my run and doesn’t feel any worse, post-run

Overall, I’m pleased with the outcome, especially since I really wasn’t feeling it this morning.

Still Creek, looking west. After the rain on Friday, everything is even more lush than before.

Stats:

Run 954
Average pace: 5:44/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 11:18 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:48
Weather: Cloudy, with a wee bit of sun
Temp: 18-19°C
Humidity: 76-71%
Wind: light
BPM: 150
Weight: 165.7
Total distance to date: 6,600 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (195/433/628)

Music: Private Eyes, Hall and Oates

Birding, August 16, 2025: Bees, not birds

Where: Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam)
Weather: Sun and clouds, 19-22°C

Piper Spit

View from the turtle nesting area. Not seen: turtles, as always.

Although several naughty humans were feeding seed to the birds, which has been banned all summer (and reinforced my many signs all over the place), there were still relatively few around. We did not see geese, blackbirds or any fall migrants. It is also true it is not fall yet. Perhaps the migrants know this, too.

But we did see a scruffy little young song sparrow and an even more adorable baby cedar waxwing, which still had a lot of down, but already sported a proto face mask. It was kind of hiding in the bushes, which is probably a wise thing for its age.

The waterfowl largely consisted of mallards and wood ducks, and they mostly stayed well away from the pier. If it hadn’t been for one very splashy duck, I might have taken more shots of butterflies and bees.

But the trip was worth it for the babby waxwing.

Tlahutum Regional Park

Coquitlam River, fuller than last week thanks to heavy rain the day before.

There were even fewer birds at Tlahutum, though we did see some kind of raptor flying way overhead, and a lone female northern shoveller in the main pond. I shot a lot of flowers here, which have the bonus of not flitting around, unless it’s really windy.

And that was about it! Our outing was shortened by foul (not fowl) weather in the morning and by an event Nic was attending in the early evening, yet I somehow still managed over 25,000 steps as I type this.

I think there is a decent chance we’ll see at least one fall migrant the next time we are out. Coots are imminent.

The Shots

Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto.

A few shots:

Northern shoveller in the main pond at Tlahutum Regional Park.
One of many pollinators seen in the community garden.

The Birds (and other critters)

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • Black-capped chickadee
  • Cedar waxwing (babby)
  • Eastern kingbird
  • Song sparrow (babby)
  • Spotted towhee
  • White-crowned sparrow (heard)

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American coot (not yet!)
  • Long-billed dowitcher
  • Mallard
  • Northern shoveller
  • Wood duck

Common:

  • American crow
  • Rock pigeon

Raptors:

  • Some kind of raptor, yes

Non-birds:

  • Copious pollinators