Victoria Day Weekend

This weekend is a public holiday in Canada - Victoria Day, which is the equivalent of the Australian Queen's Birthday weekend.  Local parlance calls it the "May 2-4 weekend", and there are a few traditions around this time of year that I've been told about.

The name "May 2-4" weekend is given partially because it falls on the 3rd Monday of May, which is usually on or close to May 24th.  The other part is because a "2-4" is Ontario slang for a slab/carton/24-pack of beer, and apparently that's what one should traditionally spend this weekend doing.  It's also the unofficial start of summer, and following on from that, the unofficial start of BBQing season, so it's time to turn on the BBQ and cook up some... I don't know what yet.  I'll let you know when we go to a Canadian BBQ.

Apparently this weekend is also the traditional weekend on which Canadians open their cottages.  From what I've been told, many people own cottages around the nearby lakes, a couple of hours drive away.  These are usually shut up in winter while it's snowing, but in summer, people like to go to their cottages for the weekend and drink beer and BBQ things.  I swear, Canadians are Australians' snowbound cousins - all of these holidays could directly transpose to Australia and no one would blink an eye.

In other news, the tulips are out in High Park:

There are a huge number of tulips around in Toronto and apparently there are even more up in Ottawa.  I had no idea, but apparently there is a significance to this:  during World War II, when the Germans invaded Holland, the Dutch Crown Princess Juliana and her two daughters (one of whom is the current queen) fled to Canada for safety from the Nazis, and lived in Ottawa for the duration of the war.  The Princess became pregnant while in Canada, and they had to declare some rooms in the hospital as belonging to the Netherlands so that the new princess could be born with solely Dutch citizenship.  Finally, at the end of the war, it was Canadian troops that liberated the Netherlands.  For all of these reasons, Holland apparently gifted a huge number of tulips to Canada, and continues to do so every year.

We've been spending our long weekend relaxing, walking in the park, studying and play board games with our Canadian friends.  There has been a distinct lack of 2-4s, but still, it's nice to have a break :)

Goodlife Toronto Marathon

Last weekend, Stephen ran his first marathon - the Goodlife Toronto Marathon.  For those of you who aren't aware, a marathon is a 42.2km run (26.2 miles).  He'd been training fairly well up until we visited Costa Rica, and then fell completely off the training bandwagon, so his longest training run in the lead-up was 26km.  I was pretty concerned for him.

The last few weeks have been pretty atrocious weather here - it rained nearly every day for 3 weeks.  The weather stations were reporting statistics like "until the clouds parted Wednesday afternoon and a merciful sun briefly shone on Torontonians, 4 days had gone by since we saw it last. To make matters worse, of those bleak 96 hours, it rained for 68."  So this was the weather Stephen was running in: 8 degrees and raining.  I don't have any pictures of him actually running, but here's one from the local newspaper to give you an idea of the conditions:

The course started a long way north of the city and ran down Yonge St (the main north-south street in the city), west out along the lakeshore past our house to a turnaround point, and then back along the lakeshore to finish in Queens Park, near the city.

I ran my 5km run earlier in the day as part of my recovery from my stress fractures, and I finished in 29:40 after aiming for a sub-30, with no bone pain or issues, which was good.  After my race finished, I hopped on the subway back home, showered and changed, and then Jax and I hopped back on the subway to get back to the finish line to see Stephen finished.  When we got there at around the 3 hour mark, I saw a guy who'd overdone it - he fell flat on his face 100m away from the finish line, and his legs were so wobbly that he couldn't get up again.  He seemed pretty delirious and he had to be supported to make it over the finish line - this made me more than a little worried about Stephen.  Luckily Stephen was ok, and I caught up with him 2km from the end, jogging along with a smile on his face.

Stephen reported to me after the race that he started getting a sore knee at around the 16km mark, so he dropped back his pace a bit.  It didn't get any better, but he finished the marathon with plenty left in the tank in a time of 3 hours, 37 minutes and 3 seconds - not bad for a first run.  There are some fairly cool statistics for his run available here, including the fact that over the final 12km he passed 44 runners but was passed by 14, and when the winner of the marathon finished, Stephen was at the 30km mark with 12km left to go.

Apparently the marathon organisers took a leaf out of the Vancouver Olympics' books, because this is the medal that he won for finishing.  It seriously weighs a couple of kilos.  It's fairly amusing considering that people were pretty exhausted at the end of the marathon - so they gave them giant heavy weights to carry during their recovery.

All in all, things went well, and he's looking forward to training for the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on October 16th.  His overall goal is to run the Boston Marathon, which has a cut-off time for entry - this year's was 3 hours 10 minutes, next year's is 3 hours 5 minutes.  There will be a lot of training involved to make it to that point I think, but he's pretty tough so I wouldn't rule it out.  Either way, running a marathon is something that nearly everyone could do if they trained, but very few people actually put in the time or the effort to make it happen - so kudos to Stephen for making the distance :)

Cherry Blossoms in High Park!

High Park is full of cherry blossom trees, and in May, they suddenly all bloom at once.  We were keeping an eye on them while we were going for our morning runs, and they were starting to bloom on Thursday, so we organised to go to the park with a friend on Saturday morning to check them out.  

It was really beautiful!   

But the entire place was packed with people - it's 15 degrees and that's the warmest it's been here for quite a while.  We took Jax with us, and he was a hit - people even wanted their photo taken with him.  I'm guessing it's because he's a Japanese breed that's not very common here, and the majority of the crowd was people of Asian descent.  I guess looking at cherry blossoms is a stereotypically Japanese pasttime too :)

People were even making origami cranes and hanging them from the trees :)

Blue sky!

The daffodils are starting to come out as well!  Spring in Toronto!