Pulled myself out of the tail spin...

First thing this morning I got a call from my Dad to tell me that Mrs. Simkin passed away yesterday afternoon. Fan is the wife of Abe Simkin, one of our business partners. She was a beautiful person and I'm sure things must be very tough on Abe and the family right now.

Abe and Fan had to have been married at least 60 years and it's tough to imagine Abe without Fan. They were truly a team, anyone who met them could see right away the love and respect they had for for each other. They epitomized what marriage should be.

When I got to work, the first thing I did was book a flight back to Winnipeg to attend her funeral tomorrow. The flight was leaving today at 6 pm and I needed to get a run in and leave by 4 pm to catch the flight. It was 39 C and all sun when I did my run. I felt like I was running in quick sand. It was a plodding tempo run from the heat and all I was doing was sweating, every piece of clothing on my body was drenched. I couldn't wait to finish so I could cool off. Aside from the heat, the two other things that were bothering me was my left knee and my Garmin.

Periodically throughout the run, my left knee would get a dull pain and then it would go away. I've always been lucky and have never gotten knee pain and I hope this is a one time occurrence. Yesterday I updated the Garmin software and in the beginning of the run was still having problems with the heart rate readings. It seemed to settle down after about 10 minutes, but I'm going to try one other thing and change the battery. If that doesn't work I'm going to exchange it for a new one.

Everything worked out perfectly. I finished the run, had a shower, packed and got to the airport on time. I was actually feeling really good. Last night I had a great sleep and was able to reset physically and mentally. I fully recovered from how I felt yesterday. As I was waiting for my flight it started to rain and then came the thunder and lightening. By this point, no planes at the airport were moving. They were all parked at the gates and no planes were landing. When I looked at the flight schedule, they had delayed my flight by an hour.

I was walking through the airport and heard an announcement that the planes can't depart until the lightening stops or is at least 5 miles away. I looked at the sky, which was black at only 6:30 pm and figured this was going to be a long night. This is the Toronto airport, it is one of the busiest airports in the world. I imagined that once the lightening stopped, which I figured would take at least a couple hours, it would still be a long wait on the tarmac to get through the backlog of departures.

It was a moment of truth. Do I stick it out and wait? Or do I go home and fly out first thing in the morning? I choose the later. I just remember that last week they shut the airport down because of lightening and people had to sleep on floors. At the worst case I didn't want to be one of those people and at the best case I didn't want to get into Winnipeg at 1 am in the morning, a regular sleep schedule is important to me. Plus I'd rather have a guaranteed seat on tomorrow mornings flight rather than fly standby if everything gets backed up.

I think I made the right call because at the time of writing this blog the flight still hadn't departed. There's nothing worse than sitting and waiting in an airport for hours on end.

Tempo Run - 51:09 / 6.25 miles / 8:10 pace / 147 bpm