Happy Halloween

Who Wants Broccoli?

OJ Comes To Toronto!!!

Stolen transport leads police on chase across Ontario

By John Miner, QMI Agency

LONDON, Ont. — Police are pursuing a stolen transport truck that hit a police cruiser earlier Monday morning.

The tractor-trailer was stolen at about 4 a.m. in the Niagara region.

With about a dozen cruisers following, the truck rolled down Hwy. 403 and onto Hwy. 401, passing through the Woodstock area.

The driver then got off the westbound lanes, turned around and headed back eastbound through the Kitchener-Waterloo area and toward Toronto.

At 11:30 a.m., police were still pursing the truck, which had exited 401 and moved onto the QEW.

The truck apparently had a passenger who bailed out earlier.

1:22 p.m. Flatbed has pulled off the road near the Burlington Skyway at 1:22 p.m.

1:27 p.m.  Reports that driver of flatbed is in custody. Trying to confirm those details

Ahh yes.  Life in the Big City.  Never boring

Let's Just Cut The Crap!!!

In a small town outside of Toronto, a radio station sponsered free tickets to see the NFL's Buffalo Bills play in Toronto.  The free tickets were buried in a pile of buffalo dung and the contestents had to dig through to find them.





On the training front, I still don't have a coach and I've gained nine pounds since Muskoka

No Record!

Guinness says no record for 100-year-old marathon runner


Published On Mon Oct 24 2011Email Print (5) Rss Article


A 100-year-old man who completed the Toronto Marathon has not made it into the Guinness World Records book after all.

Guinness spokesman Craig Glenday says his organization won’t accept the evidence provided by Fauja Singh that he is actually 100.

The Turbaned Tornado, as he’s nicknamed, thought he’d become the oldest marathoner ever on Oct. 16, but Glenday tells Toronto radio station AM640 that Singh can’t provide the necessary proof of his age.

Singh, who lives in east London, has a British passport that says he was born in 1911, but holds no birth certificate.

His trainer says officials in the part of India where Singh was born didn’t issue birth certificates, and Glenday says the man’s family might not have registered his birth.

It took Singh more than eight hours to cross the finish line of the gruelling 42.195-kilometre marathon — more than six hours after Kenya’s Kenneth Mungara won the event for the fourth straight year.

The five-foot-eight, 115-pound runner was also the last competitor to complete the course.

“Don’t get me wrong. We would love to credit this guy with his achievement,” Glenday told AM640.

“It’s a no-go for the record, I’m afraid, because if you can’t prove how old you are, you can’t be the world’s oldest anything.”

Guinness would accept marriage certificates, military draft details or records of surgery, but the organization didn’t see any of those types of documents, said Glenday.

He says passports only confirm a person’s nationality, not their date of birth.

And even the telegram sent by the Queen on Singh’s 100th birthday isn’t good enough for Guinness.

“The Queen doesn’t work for us,” said Glenday.
The race was Fauja Singh’s eighth marathon — he ran his first at the age of 89.

Singh began running roughly 20 years ago after losing his wife and child.

We'll Eat You For Lunch!

This was handed out to the protesters on Wall Street.  To be honest, I have no idea what they are protesting about.

We are Wall Street.  Its our job to make money.  Whether its a commodity, stock, bond or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter.  We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable.  I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and every one's 401k doubled every 3 years.  Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose.  I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, and even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joe's are still looking for a scapegoat.  God knows there has to be one for everything.  Well here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves.  What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore?  Guess what:  We're going to take yours. We get up 5 am work till 10 pm or later.  We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position.  We don't take an hour or more for lunch break.  We don't demand a union.  We don't retire at 50 with a pension.  We eat what we kill and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled.  We were too busy working to notice.  Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping?  We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America.  Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half.  I'll be hitting grounders to the high school $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.  So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right?  Guess what:  we're going to stop buying the new $80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore.  No more free rides on our backs.  We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways.  Our money was your money.  You spent it.  When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it.  The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but its really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs.  We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive.  The question is, now that Obama his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? and will they?

Toronto 5150 Approved

Published On Tue Oct 25 2011

Council approves closure of DVP, Gardiner for July triathlon

Paul MoloneyUrban Affairs Reporter

The Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway will close for a triathlon July 22, city council has decided.

The expressways are needed to stage the 40-kilometre bike ride of the Ironman event, which also includes a 10-kilometre off-road run and 1.5-kilometre Lake Ontario swim.

About 1,000 athletes are expected to participate.

Council was told that 11,000 motorists will be affected because that’s the normal traffic level during the 10-hour period on Sunday, July 22.

Council voted 29-9 to accommodate the event.

Joey Quits

Clearly I have no training to blog about.......

A Sad Story

Kale Garner had everything going for him when he died running a half-marathon

The runners were streaming past, seemingly by the hundreds now, in a rampaging kaleidoscope of colours. Kelly Bowden’s focus flitted from one to another to another as she tried desperately to pick out her friend in the teal T-shirt.

She’d worn a bright florescent yellow jacket to make it easier for Kale Garner to find her, too, there among the throng of spectators near the finish line of Sunday’s Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. But they never connected.

Bowden was crestfallen. Her “very close” friend had been there for her when she completed her first marathon five years ago, and now she wanted to help Garner celebrate his first half-marathon finish.

Before departing, she met another acquaintance from the race, who said someone, a young-looking man, had collapsed about 300 metres from the finish line in the 21-kilometre event.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ ” she recalls. “Then, when I was in the car on the way home, I instantly put on (news station AM) 680 because I wanted to hear what happened. That’s when I heard it was a 27-year-old male that had passed away.

“In the back of my head, I was thinking, 27-years-old . . . No, it couldn’t be Kale. There’s no way. When I got home, I looked online and searched his bib number and I saw he didn’t finish the race. My heart sank.

“I had tried to call him on the car ride home.”

Garner, fit and with no known underlying health problems, had already been pronounced dead at St. Michael’s hospital.

If living a life can be seen as analogous to any kind of race, then Kale Garner was constantly at full sprint.

“He loved life and lived life every second, every moment,” says David (Tobe) Day, a former housemate in Bradford before Garner moved into downtown Toronto recently to pursue his goal of becoming a financial planner.

“Just a fun, big-hearted, life-of-the-party guy, able to cheer up any room with a joke,” says Mike Marshall, who shared that house with his two pals.

The type of guy who, when given the chance to sing karaoke, might belt out Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” because he thought it would be funny.

Or who, when working at an event for older women at the Cardinal Golf Club in Newmarket — where he was part of the hospitality department for more than a decade — would take off his a shirt and wear just a red tie, to get a rise out of them.

He was, according to his pals, a handsome charmer, “a lady’s man” who never lacked for female accompaniment. A guy who effortlessly excelled at any sport while still managing to be a ridiculously good student.

“He was the type of guy who would take the shrink wrap off his text book the night before an exam and still get 100 per cent,” says Jordan Mann, a friend since Grade 1. “He was just one of those naturally smart, genius people.”

Every life, of course, includes the stuff of record. Raised in Holland Landing, a political science major at Brock University followed by acing George Brown’s post-graduate financial planning program. There was the long-time employment at the Cardinal Golf Club followed by what the women there call his “big-boy” job as an assistant at Assante Wealth Management in Toronto’s west end. Not to mention all those games of hockey and golf, two of his greatest passions.

But it’s not the resume that his friends remember. Not when asked to recall the life of someone who should still be living it. To them, Garner was much more than an unidentified 27-year-old runner who died in a half-marathon.

But he was indeed a runner.

“When we’d visit him downtown, you’d go into his apartment and there’d be clothes soaked in the bathroom,” says Day. “He’d say, ‘I just ran 16 k or 12 k.’ He was really excited to do different marathons and training for them.

“He was so active. That’s why it was so mind-boggling that he collapsed like that. It really doesn’t make much sense.’

Young athletes have died suddenly and unexpectedly before. Highly-touted NHL prospect Alexei Cherepanov died during a game in Russia when he was just 18. Joe Kennedy, who had last pitched for the Blue Jays, was 28 when he died at his parents’ home. Marathoner Ryan Shay was also 28 when he died during Olympic trials. Denver Broncos running back Damien Nash was only 24 when he died after a charity basketball game.

In each of the recent marathons in Chicago and Montreal, a man in his 30s died. The percentage of deaths, however, is miniscule. There were, for example, about 22,000 runners in the various distances of the Toronto event.

Usually, those types of deaths are linked with a cardiac issue.

Dr. Andy Wielgosz, a spokesman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, says catastrophic heart problems leading to death among young athletes is actually quite rare and that makes it difficult to generalize about causes.

As possible causes he cites undetected conditions, such as cardiomyopathy or problems with the electrical system in the heart or cardiomyopathy.

Wielgosz notes that only two or three marathoners die during races every year amid the hundreds of thousands who participate. “There’s a lower risk among runners because they are fit and lead healthier lifestyles then general public at large.”

The evening before his race, Garner excitedly exchanged text messages with Angela Shryane, his office manager at Assante, where he’d been working for six months — and had taken up running seriously with his co-workers. He and Shryane were going to run together on Sunday. This would be Shryane’s eighth half-marathon, and she would help pace him during the race.

“We were running 10 and ones, which means we’d run for 10 minutes and walk for one,” recounts a distraught Shryane.

They thought they’d come in at around two hours and 15 minutes, a respectable but not really competitive time.

“He was running very, very strong . . . I was looking forward to his excitement about crossing the finish line. I couldn’t wait for that. He was healthy, he was fit.”

Shryane recalls Garner telling her at about the 10- or 12-kilometre mark about he felt “pretty good.” And nothing hinted at a deviation from that.

“There was no, ‘I’m going to push through this.’ Or ‘I’m feeling a pain in my chest.’ Nothing like that . . . There was nothing abnormal at all about our running that day.”

As the two runners turned north on Bay St. towards the finish line at King St., more than 20 kilometres into the race, Garner was just behind Shryane.

As they neared Wellington St., Shryane spotted her boyfriend in the crowd and turned back slightly to wave to him. That’s when she saw Garner on the ground.

Shryane said a race official came to the downed runner’s aid immediately. A doctor also quickly emerged from the spectators and began performing CPR. She recalls another two race officials appearing on the scene quickly, one wearing a red medic jacket, along with two police officers. Police say they received an emergency call at 11:15 from a cellphone saying a runner had collapsed.

“They pulled me away,” she recalls. “They said, ‘There’s a doctor with him right now.’ He came from the spectators.

“I went into shock. There were wonderful people, strangers from behind the barriers and they were hugging me. I was obviously very, very distressed. I kept saying, ‘Is he okay? Is he okay? Is he okay?’ ”

A paramedic team arrived, Shryane says, “very quickly.” According to race officials, Garner had no vital signs when he was taken from the course.

“They worked on him and then they took him away,” says Shryane, who with no choice because of how the runners are funneled, moved towards the finish line.

“I finished. I had to go and get my bag. I walked across the finish line.”

It’s still not clear what caused Garner’s death. When his family and friends gathered for a funeral on Friday, they were still waiting for a coroner’s report.

“We don’t know any answers, to be honest,” says Kale’s 29-year-old sister, Jill. “Just unknown causes. It’s still under investigation. He was a healthy guy who had been training. It’s just a shock.”

Garner spent Thanksgiving weekend with his two sisters and father — his mother passed away in car accident 10 years ago — at the family cottage near Minden, Ont. There was talk about future plans and, of course, the usual raucous game of Risk, a family tradition.

“(Kale) was in such a good place in his life,” says Jill. “He was so happy. He was really, really looking forward to running this race. He was excited for the experience.

“He was always giving himself challenges and goals and then striving to achieve those goals.”

The Red Hat Society women, the ones who enjoyed Garner’s shirtless, red-tie appearance a year and a half ago, are getting ready for the Red Hats Holiday Festival in early November. The ladies, all 50-plus and many divorced, widowed or single, had made a special request that the handsome young man return for the festivities.

So organizer Liz Carlisle had something special planned. She wasn’t going to let on that Garner, always willing to help out at the club, was there. Then, at the appropriate moment, he was going to bound out of a large gift box, ready to charm as he always did.

“It wasn’t a phony charm,” Carlisle says through tears. “He was just an all-around nice guy. He reminded them of their sons or grandchildren.

“I don’t think I’ll tell anyone he was going to be coming. It would be too upsetting.”

With A Friend Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

Dying man said friend doused him with gasoline, lit flame


Published On Tue Oct 18 2011Email Print Rss Article

Peter Small

Courts Bureau

A man dying of burns to 80 per cent of his body told a police officer that an acquaintance poured gas over him and lit him on fire without explanation, a court has heard.

“I didn’t want to die like this,” Robert George Brown told the constable as an ambulance rushed them to Sunnybrook hospital.

Const. Carlos Pareja testified Tuesday that the 44-year-old victim said he was sitting in the backyard of his west Toronto townhouse having drinks with Michael Hall.

“I was a little depressed. . . . My wife is dying of cancer,” Brown told the officer.

“Buddy said, ‘Do you want to die?’ ” the burn victim continued.

“I went to have a shower. He poured gasoline on me. He lit me up with his lighter.”

Pareja asked Brown if he and Hall had been fighting.

“No, not at all,” was Brown’s reply.

The questions seemed to distract Brown from his agony, the officer recalled. He was screaming in pain between answers, Pareja told prosecutor Michael Townsend.

As the officer testified, Brown’s common-law wife, Linda Hedge, sat weeping in court.

Hall, 35, has pleaded not guilty in Ontario Superior Court to second-degree murder in the May 20, 2009, burning death on Jasper Ave. near Weston Rd. and Black Creek Dr.

Pareja recalled that when he arrived at the house Brown was sitting on the front steps, staring, as if in shock.

“I couldn’t even tell what race he was. His skin was multi-coloured . . . greenish, yellowish and greyish,” Pareja said.

“His hair was burnt. He had skin hanging off of him.”

Const. Serena Marchis testified that when she arrived, she saw Brown at the front of the house. He told her, “The man who did this is still in the backyard,” she said.

Marchis went to the back, where she helped officers handcuff Hall.

She said she found a red cigarette lighter in his pocket.

His hands were very sooty and blackened, she told prosecutor Anna Trbovich.

There was a large burnt patch in the backyard, she recalled.

Hall didn’t seem intoxicated, though she could smell alcohol, she said.

“In my notes I had him slurring, but I don’t recall that.”

Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Tom Dungey, Marchis agreed she wrote in her notebook that he was “very hbd” — police code for “has been drinking.”

The trial continues.

Amazing!

The Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon was yesterday

100 year old Fauja Singh (UK) ran it in in 8:11:05




Not to be outdone, 80 year old Ed Whitlock (Ont) ran it in 3:15:50, which is 29 minutes faster than my time for the Toronto Goodlife Marathon this spring.





I, on the other hand, gained two pounds by grazing all weekend.  The only good thing was that I did a 90 minute trainer ride on Saturday and a 90 minute run Sunday morning and I still gained.  Mooooooooooo

Tip Of The Day!

Fall Riding

This weekend's weather was totally awesome.  While I was exchanging emails with a buddy, Rommel, he asked me if I wanted to join them on a bike ride this Saturday.  They were meeting at 8:30 am at Angus Glen CC (where I swim) on Saturday so it was an easy 15 minute ride over.  The weather was a little chilly in the morning but I knew it would be hot later in the morning.  Rommel promised it would be an "easy" ride with no hammering it.  The race season was over and it was a short 80 km ride straight up Warden Ave just shy of the southern tip of Lake Simcoe.  I've done this route several times and am familiar with the road as Warden is flat as a pancake for the first 30 km and then goes into some small rollers.  No problem.   There were five other guys and Lisa.  This was the biggest group ride I've ever been part of.  Usually I ride solo or with one other rider.  One of the riders was Roger Hospedales who writes for Ironman.com, Running Free and Multisports Canada.  I've read several of his articles but didn't realize who he was until after he turned back partway through the ride.  He had to get home to report on Kona. 

The pace started out slow but quickly moved up.  Only later did I realize we had a pretty good tail wind.  I checked my heart rate and I was around 150 bps.  I knew I would be able to keep this up but I didn't want to get dropped this early in the ride!  Basically at every interesection, the lead rider would hold up and wait until the last rider reached.  We kept fairly tight together.  Lisa was keeping up pretty good.  We reached the turn around point and pulled off to the side to rest and refuel.  I had three gels but was feeling tired.  This was only the third ride since Muskoka.  Rommel mentioned that several guys knew Coach and we chatted about him for a couple of minutes.  The conversation confirms what I've been thinking about him the last two months.


We started to head back home and directly into a headwind.  This was going to be trouble!  Within a couple of minutes, the line spread out pretty quick and I was struggling to keep up.  When we met up at the next interesection, I told the other guys not to wait up as I would stay back with Lisa.  Needless to say, it was a long ride back home.  By the time we got back to Angus Glen, the other guys had taken off, not that I expected them to wait.  I checked my power tap and saw that I burned about 2,300 calories but only had about 600 for breakfast and 300 in gels during the ride.  Talk about running out of gas.  Rommel suggested we ride with them next spring and summer as many of them are doing Ironman.  Not a bad idea as riding with faster people will make me faster and my bike needs work.  Lots of it.

Sunday I ran for about 90 minutes and it was a disaster.  I think I was still tired from Saturday's ride.  I was using a wooden roller for the bottom of my foot/heel and it killed.  I'm still mulling over running the Angus Glen Half marathon next month.

Holiday Monday (Thanksgiving) was another awesome day but I had a meeting at 9:00 am.  It ran a longer than I thought it would.  I wanted to get another ride in so I bugged my brother Don to go riding.  He made every excuse in the book but I basically told him that the riding season was almost over and there aren't going to be too many days where its sunny and 25 degrees.  He agreed and so I rode down to his place in Ajax and then we tooled around south Ajax for about 45 minutes.  Tammy wasn't too happy about me working on Thanksgiving and then go riding so I agreed we'd all go to Whittamores Farm after she picked me up at Don's house.  It was total chaos but expected for a beautiful holiday Monday. 

Vanessa with a friend

I was tired from the ride but didn't dare complain to Tammy.  It was another beautiful day but sadly days like these are coming to an end.

Toronto 5150

It looks like there is a proposal for the WTC to host a 5150 race in Toronto ala Ironman New York City.  The plan would be to swim would be in Lake Ontario (yuck, I don't know about that), the bike would be on the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway.  This is laughable as they are two of three major highways in Toronto and they are going to shut them down for 1,000-2,000 athletes?  And the run somewhere in the Beaches.  Oddly enough, Toronto city council denied their request.

Last year, soon to be mayor Rob Ford criticized shutting down major streets in Toronto for the Toronto Marathon and the Scotiabank Marathon, although he did have a point as to why there were two major marathons that were only three weeks apart.  Rob Ford said if he were mayor, the marathons would be delegated to the parks.  Yes that's how the New York and Chicago marathons have their courses set up.  Running in circles in a park.  All 40,000 runners.

Speaking of which, it seems that there is a new war breaking out on running races in Toronto.  The Toronto marathon moved from the fall to the spring this year.  The organizers of the Scotiabank Marathon want to set up a new 10 km race in the spring however the Sporting Life 10 km race which has been around for years and attracts over 10,000 runners is also in the spring.  So, they want three races all within one month, running down Yonge Street (a major, major road in Toronto).  That should make Mayor Ford very happy (he's quite overweight).

Going back to the WTC and they're new 5150 series, it seems that they have replaced the Muksoka Long Course (2 km swim, 55 km bike and 13 km run) as the new Muskoka 5150 is on the same weekend as the Long Course is usually scheduled.

On the training front, not much.  This week I started swimming with the Masters swim club and targeting the Angus Glen Half Marathon in November.  I'm eating like a pig and my weight shot up to 178 pounds but drifting back down.

Oink oink or should I say gobble, gobble

Summer Is Over!

As September comes to an end, so does summer.  I ran this morning for 93 minutes and the weather was pretty crappy.  The temperature had dropped to 7 degrees and it was windy (44 km\hr).  I wore long sleeve shirt and pants and used running gloves.   I was just thankful I didn't have to ride in this crap and tomorrow the temperature drops down to 4 degrees.  Doh!

Training has dropped off as I'm only running three times a week.  I'm only riding once a week (outside) but the weather is getting much colder.  I haven't swam since Muskoka 70.3 but did think about going to Stoufville to swim on Friday morning.  Instead I just surfed the net in the morning.  I'm not sure if Masters has started up but I'm debating on joining them now or swim at Centennial on my own for a couple of months (its much cheaper).

I'm targeting the Angus Glen Half Marathon in early November but still worried about my stress fracture in my shin.  So far, so good.  I'm not really shooting for time as I don't want to do any hill training or intervals.  This race is more about something to train for as I can't sit around and do nothing.

Nothing going on with the coaching front.  I'll start interviewing a couple of coaches next month.  The thought of building my own training plan has crossed my mind.

Other than that, there is nothing going on, other than drinking lots of beer and gaining weight.  Oink oink

Oh yea, I played ice hockey this afternoon for the first time since March.  I had my ass handed to me as I was badly out of shape (might have had something to do with running 17 km this morning).  I'll start playing regularly this Tuesday until Christmas and depending on what my new coach says, that could be the end of winter hockey.  This IM training is getting to be a real PITA