Hello October!

Wow…it is really hard to believe that October is here.  Where is the year going?  October in Calgary generally means that the snow will start flying, and luckily this year I left town just before the first snow fall of the year.  This weekend I flew off to Kelowna, BC for the Okanagan Fall Wine Festival! 

The first order of business on Saturday morning was knocking off a couple of workouts.  I had 8 x 2:00 intervals on tap.  I took off to one of my favourite places to run in Kelowna, the Mission Creek Greenway.  The greenway is nice and flat, and it is so quiet and beautiful out there.  Immediately when I started running I knew this was going to be a great run.  Maybe the change in elevation from 3900 feet to 1100 feet had something to do with it?  The intervals were great.  I was pushing but they still felt really good.  It was drizzling out and it just felt really nice and fresh.  A great 6 mile interval run, done!

Once the run was up it was time to get on to the next order of business…a swim!  I still wanted to get in Thursday’s swim workout so I decided to check out the new H2O Adventure Centre.  While the facility is a part of the YMCA it is one of the few ones where you can’t use a membership from another facility to gain entry.  I paid my drop in fee though since I was keen to check this place out.  The pool is huge!  It is a 50 m pool that has moving bulkheads so they can section the pool off for different activities.  Plus there are water slides, a hot tub and all kinds of play areas for the kids.  The middle of the pool was sectioned off for 25 m lane swim.  I knocked out the workout which included a lot of drills and that was about it.  The swim was neither great nor bad, but the pool was definitely worth checking out.  I would have liked to get a trip down the water slide in, but I was running late so I had to hurry up and get out of there!

After that is was down south to Oliver for a the Tinhorn Creek Crush Club wine pick up party……then a wee bit of tasting at a few other wineries and a winemaker’s dinner at Sumac Ridge.Sunday was the See Ya Later Ranch pig roast…which was amazing!  (My apologies to my vegetarian friends…)

In the evening we went to an event at Cabana Grille called Gourmet and Grapes.  It was a pretty neat event where 6 different restaurants had food stations with little tasting bites, plus different wineries were pouring wines to complement the food.  In the mean time there was a bit of an Iron Chef style showdown happening between two chefs as they whipped up a few dishes centered around the secret ingredient, matsutake mushrooms.  Once the competition was over there were a few plates that were passed around so if you were lucky you may get a little taste.

The best part of the evening was probably the food station from El Dorado…the tastiest meatball ever, some lamb, and some seared tuna on risotto with a papaya salsa.

The weekend isn’t quite over yet…time to get out there for a long run.  Hope everyone had a great weekend!