Busy week......

Lots to talk about this week.......let's see.....I attended a church with my coach James and Cindy Klassen and I had an amazing experience. First of all, the church was huge and was state of the art with video, 3 huge screens, and acoustically sound. There was a band to open the sermon and they were rockin the Words of Christ......ballads and rock and people were singing along as the words were on the screens, people clapping, people raising there hands to the heavens.........just a joyous time.....and this was a Sunday evening mass.......then an inter-active sermon was given but it was more like a teaching of one passage of the Bible......to help people better understand the Word.

I was truly impressed by how many young people were in attendance and how full the church was and how casual everyone was............all there for the same reason........to have the Lord in their hearts. It was definately an experience for me coming from a Greek Orthodox church.........interesting.

Chinook, its back this week......some may think this is a type of salmon....true, but in Calgary, it is an unusual warm weather system that comes with a drop in barometric pressure (see cloud formation pics).........which is good, and bad.

Bad cause it causes nail pounding headaches........good cause it makes skating faster, as the air is thinner, and I get to enjoy 20 degree weather at the end of October. I took advantage of this weather to hammer out a few hundred push ups and sit ups outside and read a few books too (see pics).

The Dinos hockey played a couple of games this weekend too and we won one and lost one.....first loss of the season as we are now 5-1.....we deserved the loss as we didn't play well at all.

As for my races this weekend......this was an official sanctionned race, the Invitational, and on Friday I raced the 500m which I PBd once again but only by 1/100th of a sec so it doesn't really count and the 1,500m which I wanted so badly to PB again but I ended up getting almost the exact same time as my PB last week but 3/100ths off but I do take solace in the fact that I felt I was very sloppy, skiddy, not very low....and here's the kicker, I had to break stride and stand on the last backstretch , just before the final turn, to let the other guy from the outer lane into my lane on the switch cause outer lane has right of way and I was only a stride or two in front of him so too tight for me to cut in cause I could have gotten DQd....needeless to say....no more speed so taking all that in consideration.......I know I should have PBd by a good margin.....oh well....thems are the breaks and that's the nature of sport.....you never know what will happen!!

On Saturday I raced the 1,000m which I still needed to PB this season and, well, I finally did and in crushing fashion.....almost three full seconds.....good thing cause I was disappointed after week 5 when I raced it......

And finally, today, Sunday, I raced my first 5,000m of the season and it went....okay......I PBd but did not get the time I really wanted but as they say....a PB is a PB..

Looking forward to spending some time back home this week with my girls.....a welcomed break with some familiarity.....when I get back to Calgary, phase 2 of my training will kick in right up until Christmas.......should be interesting!!

Peace for now.