It’s been almost three weeks since Spain claimed the men’s 2026 World Cup title. I had a lot of fun tracking the results of the knock out rounds with a group of international fans online and in person in our favourite pub watching on the big screen eating super fresh fish and chips.
Here I am celebrating the big win:
Martha, wearing a red football jersey from Team Spain, waves her hands with joy after Spain wins the 2026 Men’s World Cup.
I wrote a month ago about the number of women serving as referees in the global competition. I never saw a game where one of the women served as a centre referee, but I did see a game where one of the women was one of three refs in the VAR control room.
Although women officiated in three group stage matches as centre refs, and another four as non-centre refs, to date no woman has ever refereed a men’s final (quarter, semi or gold). However, Tori Penso, the American referee, was stellar as the centre ref for the Women’s World Cup final in 2023, which Spain also won.
I’m really hoping that the 2027 Women’s World Cup and the 2028 Men’s World Cup have more women in the refereeing ranks. At a minimum, perhaps their presence will reduce the number of shenanigans displayed by the male players. One can dream, right?
— MarthaFitat55 has never played soccer, but once scored a goal in her exceedingly short career as a forward in floor hockey.
We talk a lot here about physical fitness and health, and frequently about mental health. This week, though, I have been thinking a lot about financial health. Or at least about having my financial affairs in order.
I’m some ways, my financial things are pretty straightforward. I worked for the federal government for most of my career, so there was only one pension to worry about, and I’m already collecting that. I have a will (it was actually a requirement before my first posting abroad). But there have been other bits and pieces of information that I really should put together someplace where my kids can find it: I have a bit of money in other financial institutions, an RRSP I set up years ago with a out-of-town friend who has long-since retired, account numbers and passwords for everything from the hydro bill to credit cards.
And I need to figure out how to keep it all up to date (lesson learned from my dad, who kept records of everything including the adoption of our family dog in 1969 in his handy binder of key information, but had not updated info on an insurance policy so it took me a over year to track it down to get it paid out).
I have questions too. Do I need to keep some sort of proof of ownership for my cottage and house, or will that require a title search anyway before the kids can take over and sell them? What do I want to happen with my cats?
And my books? I have some that are probably of value because they are rare and out of print, but they are pretty niche. I have promised the kids I would provide the names of a few friends who might be interested in them. I’ll provide a list of those I think would be worth reselling or passing on to a museum. But if they choose to just dump them? I have promised I won’t be offended because I’ll be dead.
The same general principle applies to my craft supplies and the furniture I love because it came from my grandparents, assuming I haven’t yet downsized myself.
Speaking of being dead, I should add funeral plans to my list and make sure the kids know my wishes (and if I arrange a pre-paid thing, ensure they know where to find that information).
It feels overwhelming to deal with all these details, on top of managing Mom’s financial affairs. But each time I get through a little task, the mental burden lifts a bit.
This week’s achievement was moving furniture from Mom’s and my houses to the cottage. I finally have a proper bedroom and place to eat, and both Mom’s basement and the room I use for my fitness studio are significantly less cluttered. It was definitely a workout loading up a van then getting into the cottage from the parking area.
My cottage bedroom, finally with a dresser and a proper bed. One of my grandma’s crocheted throws is at the end, with my cat Pandora sitting on it.
I spent much of the rainy long weekend relaxing on that bed, alternating with making lists of next steps to ensure my financial health.
How about you? Do you have all your financial information and wishes organized and accessible? Or is it something you dread contemplating?
On the Eurostar from London to Paris, I felt my identity transitioning, as if Trail Mina was tucking herself back onto a shelf, as City Mina climbed down to take her place.
Early that morning I’d been out hiking on the fells in the Lake District, my eighth day in a row of reveling on trails through long-grassed sheep meadows, above the shores of Ullswater Lake, up steep scree fields in dense fog and across knife’s edge ridge lines. Before dinner, there was a bracing swim. All of this, my happiest kinds of places. I alternated between two sweatshirts for the post hike afternoons and evenings reading and hanging out with family.
On the train, I was headed to another kind of happy place, a city to lose myself in. From the sweatshirts, countryside and home cooked meals, it was time now for linen shirts and dresses, café culture and hubbub. Even if Paris is relatively empty in August, it is still bustling.
I haven’t been here since 2019, with my ex. We came often and for a month or two at a stretch. Every time I’ve thought about coming back, I’ve worried I would drown in memories. Then, when I was planning this trip, I decided it was time. Ready or not. As soon as I got off the train in Gare du Nord, my whole body was suffused with pleasure. Exchanging the full body goodness of a hiking trail for an equivalent fullness of sparkle in this city.
Here, I will move in my usual city ways. Today I went to a Pilates class around the corner from where I’m staying. I passed the sign on a wander. Tomorrow I will run along the Seine. Another day, I’ll ride a Velib (their social bike system) to the Bois de Boulogne and run in that park.
I also have a specific intention: to treat this time as a writing retreat. Take the mornings for words on pages. The afternoons and evenings for wandering the city. Seeing what I see. Letting myself be moved by whatever the energy invites.
Matcha latte and writing notebook
And all these ideas I have about how I spend my time depend on whether I can keep from drowning, because the memories are indeed with me. I somehow did not realize that I would be staying a one-minute walk away from the first hotel we stayed at in Paris, on a narrow street, one block long. The hotel is still there, more than 30 years later. I stood in front of it and remembered rushing, jet lag groggy, to catch the last minutes of breakfast, which was served in a cozy cave with lumpy stone walls. Such croissants.
I am surprised to find that keeping my head above water is less of an effort than I expected. I can love the time I spent here as part of a couple. I can miss my companion. Yet, the melancholy moves through me right alongside the pleasure.
Here, past and present commingle, flowing between who I was and who I am. Trail Mina. City Mina. Married Mina. Single Mina.
In front of that hotel, I felt Young Mina of 30 years ago step out onto the sidewalk to join me. There’s so much I’d love to tell her.
“Bra doping” is the phrase making the rounds in cycling news this week, and no, it’s not what it sounds like. Nobody has been accused of stashing performance-enhancing drugs in their sports bra. What’s actually being alleged is aerodynamic: some riders may be padding their bras or wearing specially shaped inserts to smooth the airflow around their chests during the individual time trial — a trick cyclists call a “chest fairing.”
To be clear up front: as of this writing, no rider has been found to have cheated. This started as concerns raised by rival teams, reported by the Dutch outlet WielerFlits, and it prompted the UCI to run extra equipment checks before Tuesday’s time trial at this year’s Tour de France Femmes.
Why would this even matter? Because time trials are won and lost in fractions of a second, and aerodynamics researchers say the underlying science is real — a chest fairing can measurably cut drag.
I was struck by two things. First, wow, a competitive sports advantage for large-breasted women! Is this a first? Second, the riders are mostly not very large-breasted women since there is such a competitive advantage in having a lower-weight body in cycling, particularly climbing hills in France. They all look very thin to me.
Here’s where it gets interesting, feminist-issue-wise. This isn’t actually a new problem. Men have been doing versions of this for years, tucking ice packs or water bottles down the front of their jerseys for the same aero effect, and the UCI has already banned that. Dutch rider Jan-Willem van Schip is something of a repeat offender. He was disqualified from the Ronde de l’Oise this past June for racing a time trial with a hydration pack stuffed into the front of his jersey, chasing the same “chest fairing” effect riders are now being accused of getting from padded bras. Same physics, same rule against altering your body’s shape for aero gain — just a very different object doing the altering.
But policing it for men is comparatively simple. After all, a bottle-shaped lump under a jersey is a bottle-shaped lump. Women’s bodies don’t offer that same clean test. Breast size varies naturally, rider to rider and even day to day, which means the UCI’s fix — sending riders through pre-race chest checks — puts officials in the position of eyeballing bodies and making judgment calls about what’s “natural” and what isn’t.
Unsurprisingly, that went about as well as you’d expect. The riders’ association pushed back hard on how the checks were rolled out — thrown together the night before, with little warning — and specifically raised concerns about rider “dignity and privacy” being protected during what amounts to officials inspecting women’s chests before they’re allowed to start. A female commissaire was assigned to do the actual checking, which maybe helps, but doesn’t erase the strangeness of the situation: a sport already prone to scrutinizing women’s bodies in every other respect is now formally empowered to scrutinize them for hidden padding before a race.
So here’s the tension I keep turning over: on one hand, a rule against artificially altering your body shape for aero gain is a completely normal kind of equipment regulation — no different in principle from banning an illegal bike frame. On the other hand, applying that rule to breasts, specifically, in a sport that already treats women’s bodies as endlessly inspectable, is not a neutral act. It’s hard to imagine an equivalent scenario for men that would involve officials in a tent making judgment calls about whether a body part looks “natural.”
What do you think? Does fairness require stricter enforcement? And is there a way to enforce a rule like this that doesn’t put women’s bodies under yet another layer of scrutiny?
Whether you call it kindness or you use a ten-cent-word like altruism, the world needs a lot more of it right now and the Action for Happiness calendar for August is a great place to start.
As always, the calendar is full of small practices that almost anyone could try but if you don’t feel up to the practice of the day, it’s totally cool to be kind in a whole different way. I’m sure you have a huge repertoire of kind actions you can take at any time.
In fact, even though this calendar is about being kind to others, it’s also a swell idea to practice being kinder to ourselves – these Self-Compassion Practices from Dr. Kristin Neff are a good place to start.
And the small actions are the most important part.
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in waiting to do a big project or to solve a big problem but to not actually be able to get started.
Doing a small thing right now is way better than developing a big thing that never actually gets done.
So, as you give these small actions a whirl, please don’t worry that you aren’t doing enough right now. It’s ok to take the small steps now and let them build over time.
Here’s the full calendar for this month and today’s action is pretty straightforward, “Ask someone how they feel and really listen to their reply.”
Good luck out there, folks!
An image of a calendar of tips for Altruistic August 2026 that features small cartoon drawings of altruistic along the bottom edge. (for example, someone is putting coins in a tin, someone else is offering noodles to a friend, someone else is picking up garbage. Each block of the calendar features an action for that day and the background of each block is either dark or light blue or dark or light green.
A video from the Action for Happiness YouTube channel entitled, “Never underestimate the power of small acts of kindness.” The still image features Vanessa King, a middle-aged woman with medium blonde hair cut in a bob with a bang. She is wearing a white top with a series of red bead necklaces looped around her neck. Text to the right of the image reads, “Kindness Matters” in red and “3 tops tips with Vanessa King” in yellow.
One way or another, I’ve been heading into Algonquin for 20 years with a variety of friends, family, lovers and dogs. To say it is a sacred and integral part of my life is to understate what it means. The four years I’ve been away from it have been achy (not just because of the lack of Park, there’s been plenty to ache my heart). Yet, every summer that ended without me spending time in a tent on a lake with a canoe parked under a tree and a loon calling just around the corner, was another piece of grief. So this summer, as I reorganized my life, again, after so many losses, again, I messaged Sam and Sarah to see if they would have me on their trip with them.
In part, my failure to plan trips was due to my increasing trepidation about my body. Pandemic, menopause, auto-immune conditions all conspired to rob me of confidence that I could still endure and do this thing. So going with people who never gave it up, who knew they could adapt themselves, was heartening. I was very surprised at what I found out about my capacity.
First of all, the things that hurt while I’m not on a trip barely hurt while I was on the trip. Other things hurt of course, but I was so happy to feel tiredness in my shoulders and quads, knowing it was because I was moving, rather than the vague ache of. . .pick the poison. . .sedentariness, grief, age, decline, despair. . .it all adds up. In fact, there were ways I was stronger somehow. I have never given up yoga and Pilates and always focused on balance. I have this notion that I am no longer agile and that my core isn’t what it used to be but I was wrong. I think the last number of years I have spent in meditative stillness have conditioned something I never had before that practice became a huge part of my life. There is a core conditioning and balance along with a softness and awareness that means my body knows where it is and what it is doing. It knows what hurts in the way of “discomfort” and what hurts in the way of “don’t do that”. Discomfort is far more prevalent and discomfort I can handle.
I can feel that I’m at another crossroad, I could just stop pushing and drift to a customary decline or I could keep brushing up against my limits and seeing what beauty I can find. The verdant beauty of the earth expressed in Algonquin park is worth pushing for. I was so happy and confident about how this trip went that I booked more vacation and decided to bring friend of the Blog, Kim, on the trip she’s been pestering me for since we met. We will report back on Older Women In The Park, Susan and Kim edition, after Labour Day!
Sam
Like Susan, I love love love canoe camping. There’s something very special about it and no other sort of holiday scractches the same itch.
It’s effort and natural beauty, yes. It’s also no phones and hammock naps. I love swimming after a hard paddle. I love eating food that’s been cooked over the samp stove. I love basking on rocks. And I know it’s a minority view, but I love sleeping in tents.
I go at least once every summer, sometimes more. This summer this was our first trip but we have two more planned.
It’s the vacation that packs the most bang for buck in terms of rest and relaxation and the feeling of really getting away. Three or four days in the woods isn’t that much time, but it feels like a real holiday.
I also love that I’m still learning new things. This trip, for the first time, I carried my pack and my canoe. I learned that in some ways that’s easier. Yes, it’s a lot more weight but it felt better on my shoulders.
It was lovely to get out there again with Susan since that’s really how our friendship began, on a canoe trip in the woods.
She had the uncomfortable middle spot in our canoe but this inspired us to get a third removable seat.
Sarah
Seems like this was a bit of a different trip for everyone this year. Susan returning after a hiatus, and Sam growing in strength and confidence a few years out from knee surgery.
For me, the biggest hiccup this year wasn’t work, and it wasn’t the dramatic car part failure that meant switching cars and shaving a day off our trip. I’m currently dealing with a frozen left shoulder – not usually hugely painful but the restricted range of motion means I can’t reach up to hold the gunwales when the canoe is on my shoulders. This means that for the first time since we’ve been tripping, I would need to rely entirely on my companions to portage the canoe.
Fortunately, Susan and Sam were both more than up for the challenge and were more than capable at carrying and manoeuvring Sam’s unwieldy (when it’s not in the water) 17’ canoe. For someone who’s used to being self-reliant in the backcountry, it was a wonderful experience to be able to literally share the load this trip.
How many posts? More than 30 posts this month, through a run of heat and wildfire smoke that scrambled a lot of our workout plans — proof that showing up looks different every summer.
Who blogged? Sam, Diane, Christine, Nat, Catherine, Mina, Tracy, Martha, Elan, and guest blogger Chloë.
Recovery and what the body actually needs. A strong thread this month was on healing slower — and more honestly — than planned. Diane’s cardiac-rehab arc continued in Recovery is Weird, where her Garmin body battery finally climbed out of the “depleted” zone even as her intensity minutes stayed baffling. Mina’s Deny Pain, Heal Faster; if only … looked back at a shoulder injury that turned out to be several fractures and torn tissue, and wondered whether not knowing the full diagnosis for a month actually helped her heal with less fear and guarding. Nat worked through the final stage of a back injury in Nat, spinal movement and the Jefferson curl, learning to trust movements she’d been avoiding out of old caution. And Tracy’s C25K is taking longer than 9 weeks and that’s okay traced how a running program stalled out after she lost her mother, and how she’s found her way back to it.
Guest voices on bodies and belief. Chloë’s guest post What I thought my body was for was a standout: a lifelong “mind person” who took up jiu-jitsu in her forties and discovered a forty-year-old assumption about her own physical limits was never actually true — just an old, unquestioned story.
Heat, smoke, and summer plans going sideways. Climate kept elbowing its way into the blog’s usual summer rhythms. Sam’s summer movement plans go awry catalogued a cascade of cancelled rides, smoky air quality, a shuttered pool, and a too-hot dog walk, while Nat’s Summer’s in full swing and Nat couldn’t be happier found the bright side of an early-morning, heat-dodging routine of walking, biking, and lane swims. Sam and her crew still managed a four-day canoe camping trip into Algonquin (“Type 1.5 fun,” by consensus), and Catherine spent two weeks travelling and noticing the small sensory pleasures of summer — cold rivers, gravel underfoot, one very memorable watermelon slushie — in Mid-summer: a time for ordinary movement and extraordinary sensory experience.
Charity miles for good causes. Nat rode the MS Bike Tour (Today’s the day!), a weekend that’s become a fixture in her relationship with Michel. Diane paid forward her open-water swimming in Sometimes Good Things Grow, serving as a swim angel at Bring on the Bay for the fourth year running. And Sam wrapped the month gearing up for the Great Cycle Challenge in support of SickKids, after laying out her whole summer and fall of charity riding in Sam’s August Charity Riding.
Feminism, sport, and language in the news. Martha’s Blowing the Whistle on Gender at the World Cup celebrated the six women officiating the men’s tournament this year — a record, even if still a small fraction of FIFA’s roster. Diane’s My FIFA Protest Has Turned into Something Pretty Great turned frustration with lopsided World Cup coverage into a new love of the Northern Super League. And Martha’s Incompetent, blighted, senile took on the quietly damning language medicine uses for women’s bodies — incompetent cervix, senile vagina — and argued for language that doesn’t blame the patient for the problem.
Sam’s dean life meets the blog. In Is Looking at Art Really the New Running?, Sam brought her day job as Dean of Arts at Guelph into conversation with the blog, digging into the research behind claims that gallery visits can be as good for you as a run — and landing on cautious enthusiasm for treating art as part of a whole-life approach to health.
Trackers, streaks, and small daily wins. Elan reflected on five years of wearing an Oura ring in A Fitbit for My Finger, Five Years On, noting how her relationship to the data has quietly simplified over time. Sam kept her Zwift streak alive through the heat in Sam’s Zwift streak abides!, and the team traded reflections on their most valuable personal habits — sleep, meal planning, morning movement — in The bloggers and our best habits.
Checking in as a team. July 2 brought Happy Halfway Day!, the bloggers’ traditional midyear check-in on their words of the year, and Elan closed out the month interviewing Sam about her long-running “3 good things” practice in Positive is Practice, digging into negativity bias and what it means to notice the good on purpose.
Month-in-review posts are assembled by Claude with prompts from Sam and edited by Sam. If you spot any errors, let us know.
I’m a big fan of Danny MacAskill, a Scottish cyclist whose feats on his trials bikes confirm the unlikely hypothesis that bikes can perform on land, sea and air. His videos leave me breathless and dumbfounded, but also admiring of his planning, effort, and honesty about how hard it is to know the magnitude of the obstacles you’re facing, and then face them anyway.
Then in 2024, as the political atmosphere in the US became as scary as the previous pandemic one, I wrote about how Danny shows us how to take what comes: slowly when necessary, using acquired skills, trusting that your body has some knowledge that will help you, and using body english to manage unexpected twists and turns. How to make 2024 less scary, or how to move forward anyway
Now it’s 2026, and aspects of my life feel both scary and appalling, in macro and micro views. The US government is falling apart and taking too many people with it. My mother is falling apart and I’m trying to figure out how to respond. Details of life management have become harder, for macro and micro reasons.
I’m about to go on my first coffee ride in a while with my friend Janet, who’s meeting me in Arlington Center to cycle up the bike path to Lexington. I’ve done this ride dozens of times, and am looking forward to easy chat, easy pedaling, and yummy ice coffee. I remember how to do this, and am managing my anxiety with that knowledge along with the reward at the end– hanging with a friend, drinking coffee.
And I can take comfort in the fact that no part of my ride will go over water and require the skills you see practiced below by Danny MacAskill in his newest video– riding over water! I’ll just let you watch, heart in mouth, hoping against hope he doesn’t end up in the drink… If you want to read an interview with him about this course, check it out here.
First, the MS Bike Tour is not a race. Second, I do not have a lot of recorded data before 2024.
With those 2 things in mind, I was still thrilled to PB 80 km on Day 1 of the tour, beating my previous best by 3 minutes and 43 seconds.
The morning of Day 1. Michel on the left, John in the centre and I’m being silly on the right.
Also, shout out to John who was the first rider to cross the finish Day 1. He was so fast! No, it’s not a race, but it is also fun to go fast.
The conditions were ideal for me. A cool 18C to start. It was calm with only the faintest of breezes. This year’s route was straighter, flatter and on quieter roads. Those things help me do my best.
Michel rode with me. Now that I know more about how my left ear affects my balance I ride with Michel on my right.
I can hear him better and I get less dizzy. We had a marvelous day.
Day 1 completed. I take a selfie with Michel and our new friend Jersey.
Ride from the ride
After we finished the course we rode the 4 km home alongside our new friend Jersey. I was tired but not wrecked when I got home.
Magical Morning
Day 2 was another excellent day for riding conditions. I felt strong and decided to see how it would go without any solid plan.
The first hour I averaged 19.5 km/hr and I could feel my thighs pumping up.
Perpetual Motion
As the morning went on I got faster and faster. It does take me about an hour to be warmed up but this was next level.
We rolled through a little town with a speed monitor that flashed 24 km/hr. That felt good!
The possibility dawned on me
I decided in the last hour or so to see how fast I could go. It’s a descent to the finish and I was feeling it. It occurred to me I might break my personal record again. Maybe?
As we rolled towards the finish Michel told me I was much faster than Day 1. I laughed. SURE BABE, SURE!
He was right, of course. I completed 80 km 6 minutes and 23 seconds faster than the previous day. Thanks to leaving from the house my total distance hit 50 miles, which I PB’d by 9 minutes and 45 seconds.
The last time I felt this strong on the bike was in 2016 on the People With AIDS ride from Toronto to Montreal. I don’t have data from that time but I know I rolled consistently in the 20-22 km/hr range.
New Possibilities
Before last weekend I thought my fastest rides were behind me. Now I’m thinking they may very well be ahead of me and that feels pretty exciting.
Some of our Canada Life Cycles team celebrating an incredible two days of riding.
It’s always a group assignment
While my watch only records my speed, my results are because of a whole bunch of people.
The event organizers and volunteers ensured each stop for water, food and toilets could be done quickly and safely. Thank you!
My physiotherapist had helped me heal from many injuries and empowered me with strategies to be strong and steady on the bike. Thank you Emily for helping me ride injury free!
My teammates provided company and encouragement on both days. I got to ride most of Day 2 with Tracy & Rosie, which was a rare treat. Rosie powered through a mechanical like it wasn’t even happening. Tracy was rocking a new ride. It was great!
And, of course, Michel there by my side for both days. We laughed. He shared snippets of Werner Herzog’s autobiography. He was listening to the audiobook read by Werner himself. There’s something really entertaining about his grim determination when you yourself are feeling determined.
A great weekend
So, long story longer, it was a marvelous weekend of riding and spending time with great people.
Michel and I are now plotting how we can do more rides together very soon.
