Here’s a scientific term I wish I didn’t understand: heat dome. Europe has been suffering under one, bringing with it two record-breaking heat waves and more than 1300 excess deaths in the past month. And North America will be on the receiving end of one this week. Ontario and the US midwest and east coast are preparing for temperatures to top 100F/37C this weekend.
There’s a lot to say and feel about climate change. We here at Fit is a Feminist Issue worry and write about it a lot, including most recently Sam’s post here. It’s changed our daily lives in so many ways, including exercise and work and wake-up schedules, travel habits, buying plans– this is just the tip of the (melting) ice berg.
But we can’t and shouldn’t spend all waking moments confronting future and present fears and woes. In order to keep ourselves ready for the long-haul of adjustment and advocacy and innovation and conservation, we need occasional pauses. We need to be refreshed.
And, for my money, there’s no better and more refreshing pause than making and drinking a cold or icy fruity beverage. I’m serious. Who can be sad in the presence of fresh watermelon, a spritz of juicy lime, the cold rush from an ice-cold glass? Not me. And I bet not you. I mean, doesn’t this look like a (momentary) solution to all our problems?
watermelon agua fresca, with a sugared rim, spring of mint and lime squeeze at the ready. Go here for the easy-peasy recipe.
This drink is part of my regular summer drink rotation. Consider adding it to yours.
A new addition that I’m trying this weekend with friends is limonada, or Brazilian lemonade. It’s not really lemonade in a classic sense, as it contains sweetened condensed milk as an ingredient (WHAT?! don’t knock until tried). Also, you pulse (not pulverize) cut up limes in the blender, which adds to its limeyness. Here’s a recipe. I dare you to try it, and I double-dog-dare you to comment on the results. Are you reading, Sarah Pie?
The creamy simplicity of the Brazilian lemonade, or limonata.
I wrote in more detail last summer about fun summer cold beverages; check it out if you are looking for more ideas for cooling off in a hot summer.
Milestones, and what progress really means. Mina marked turning 60 with Flying & Falling into a New Decade — a fall on a birthday run, a wrenched shoulder three days before the Rockies, and a hard-won sense of arrival. Elan’s What Progress Means As We Age reframed a rained-out Guelph-to-Goderich attempt (now affectionately the “G2B”) as success measured by joy rather than finish lines. Nat tested the viral get-up-from-a-chair-hands-free benchmark and tied it back to real-world independence.
Grief, and where love goes. Two of our bloggers wrote through loss this month. Nat’s Nat Finds Comfort in Nature, written around her grandmother Joyce’s graveside service, gave us the line that stayed with many readers: grief is love with no place to go. Nicole’s It’s Just a Feeling. Don’t Take the Shortcut marked a year since her mother’s death, weaving running mantras through grief, vertigo, and gratitude.
Recovery and listening to the body. Diane’s cardiac-rehab arc continued in Listening to My Body — the “bad patient” cheerfully swapping prescribed walks for ballet, swimming, and short rides. Nat returned to the weights in Nat Is Back at Strength Training (heavy metal as working-class opera). And Catherine made the feminist case for in-person care in Virtual Physical Therapy: Not an Oxymoron Anymore, sceptical of apps that quietly replace qualified hands.
A note on climate and cycling. Sam’s It Feels Strange and Awful, But It’s Where We Are sat with ultra-cyclist Lael Wilcox’s heat-driven withdrawal from her round-the-world record, and the unsettling new reality of planning summer rides around the heat. We also marked World Bicycle Day with a romp through the archives.
If it has been a while, then please take this post as a sign to pat yourself on the back, congratulate yourself, and claim your gold star.
And if you congratulated yourself earlier today?
Well, pat yourself on the back, congratulate yourself again, and claim your gold star.
If you’re like me, there will be times when you are really challenging yourself and times when you are just kind of treading water.
Both are good.
In fact, the whole range of ways to show up are all good.
And I’d like you to celebrate every one of them.
I am proud of you for showing up when it’s fun and I’m proud of you for showing up when it’s annoying to be there.
And I hope that, overall, you get more fun than annoyance but here’s your gold star for your efforts either way.
Go Team Us!
I’ve been trying out gold star cards with encouraging text and I like how this one turned out. Image description: a black card with a small painting of a gold star on the left side. On the right side is a piece of white card with rounded corners that says, in black text, “ this gold star celebrates your hard work, the effort you put into showing up every time. Congratulations! I’m so proud of you.” The white card is framed in black with a gold frame outside of the black one. There is a thick gold line a little ways under the star that also extends downward underneath the white card.
Thanks everyone who sponsored the Tour de Guelph Gryphons and helped us reach our $1000 team fundraising goal.
We were a small but mighty crew in the end, with Sarah and Amy both having to drop out, but Graham, Abby and I had a fun day on our 50 km rides. It was Abby’s 50 km. Go Abby! She rode the multi-surface route with her sister and a friend. Graham and I rode the 50 km road route.
I was nervous about the hills since the route took us downhill, past the 401, on Watson and back up into Guelph on Victoria. Graham gets points for patiently waiting at the top and not asking, “What’s wrong?” and I get points for not walking my bike up any of the hills.
There were lots of people riding, more than 800 across all the different distances.
Want to donate to support our team and to help the Guelph General Hospital? There’s still time. Click here.
We have big plans for next year–training rides, Gryphon jerseys, more people and more fun. Hope you can join us!
I just finished reading an advance copy of What We Found Instead, by Heidi Reimer, and it embodied everything I ever want in a summer read: compelling plot, emotional depth, and the kind of writing that makes me go “oof,” because I’ve been hit with a massive truth in a few simple words.
I’m not really a “beach read” kind of person — I don’t spend a lot of time sitting still during the summer. My best summer reads fall into three categories: diverting audio books read by people with clear voices that I can listen to while I’m riding my bike; books with good writing but simple enough structure that I don’t lose track of what’s happening when I read them in chunks on trains or eating solo travel meals; and books that I can wallow into in a hammock. What We Found Instead fits all of those categories.
Set mostly in Ontario, mostly in the north, it’s the story of two women who find themselves in an unlikely orbit when they discover they are both in a relationship with the same man (not a spoiler, this happens in the first chapter). There is plenty of plot, but really, it’s about two women who want more than they have been allowing themselves, and who have to learn to trust themselves and each other to get it. It’s funny and hard and deft and compelling. If you advance order it, and connect with Heidi via her subtack, you’ll also get a delightful prequel sent to your email.
I did get an advance reading copy because I know Heidi, but I’d rave about this book in any case — it takes a lot to penetrate my ADHD/ over busy hummingbird mind these days long enough to care about imaginary people.
My hired bike last year on my solo trip through Normandy.
Since I moved to Nova Scotia, I’ve been trying to spend more focused time reading — and I’m also compiling a list of audio books for hours on the bike, overdue training for a solo cycling trip at the end of August in northern France and Belgium. My current stack includes two beachy froths from Emma Straub and Carley Fortune, Emma Donahue’s The Paris Express, The Midnight Train by Matt Haig which Sam left for me when she and Sarah hung out in my new place before I even moved here, and Black. Single. Mother. by Jamila Lemieux.
What’s on your list? And add Heidi’s book to it :-).
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who is still trying to create order out of chaos in her new little red house by the sea.
What about the 30-30-30 thing? You know 30 minutes of movement and 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. I should have realized that wouldn’t work so well for me. I take medication that I need to have on an empty stomach, and then I can’t eat for an hour after. There goes the 30-minute bit. I am pretty good at getting 30 g of protein when I do eat breakfast, and I usually walk the dog, bike to work, or go to the gym most mornings, so there’s the movement covered.
How about the after-dinner digestive walk? Don’t worry. Cheddar is on it.
Since 2017 I’ve been a member of the 2XX workouts in 20XX Facebook group. I’ve always made it– most years screaming in on the last day of the year, sometimes doing two or more workouts to squeak through. But hey, a win’s a win.
Until 2025. I was chugging along until the beginning of fall. Then, for no particular reason, I trailed off. Stopped posting. I felt like I should resume, but I didn’t.
Then in 2026, I restarted, only to stop again after recording 6 or 7 workouts. Hmmm.
I’ve never had an easy relationship with challenges– they bring out my inner belligerent teenager, ready to flip off anyone (including my non-teenaged self) who’s trying to put me on a schedule of (Heaven forbid) self-improvement. But my non-teenaged self knows it’s not really self-improvement I’m aiming at; rather, it’s self-care. Huh.
I’ve been a close-to-daily meditator since the pandemic. Before 2020, I meditated off and on for decades. But the combination of extreme necessity and a handy app (I’ve boosted the Happier app a lot here, but there are loads of them to try) has helped me set up and maintain a practice that works for me. As they say, the numbers don’t lie…
I’ve meditated 308 weeks in a row. Yes, missing a few days here and there, but I’m pretty proud of this.
The co-most important lesson I’ve learned from 308 weeks of close-to-daily meditation (along with “just breathe”) is that the streak that matters is the streak of one. Being and doing at the time is the thing. Not for what it will yield down the road, but for what it does now, in that moment.
Yes, that sounds cheesy. But a) something can be both cheesy and true at the same time; and b) I’m trying to be sincere here, so don’t pick on me… 🙂
Back to the 226 workouts in 2026: It’s June 28, so we’re almost at the six-month mark. I’m restarting a focus on doing and recording workouts as of yesterday. My plan is 113 workouts by the end of the year. I started last night with yoga before bed. That’s one. I can continue with streaks of one at a time.
Time to do some more yoga now.
Dear readers, how do you feel about streaks? Interrupting them, restarting them? I’m not asking for advice here, but it would be cool to hear how these experiences feel for you. I’ll report back in a while on mine.
Feeling open for business. Open to what’s ahead. By Clemens Van Lay for Unsplash.
I swore I wouldn’t repeat the pattern of a quick ramp up to the MS Bike Tour in 2026.
I retired May 1 and I was CERTAIN I would be riding all the time.
That didn’t happen for a bunch of reasons. As June winds down and July approaches my longest ride this year has been 30 km.
I really enjoy riding. It takes me a hour to warm up and then, then it feels like flying. But my speed needs to improve or I’ll be on the road way too long in the hot sun.
Yikes!
The plan today, get out early for 40 km and see how that feels. Then ride Monday, Wednesday, Friday next week. I’m thinking 10-20 km on rides during the week and go for 50 km July 5.
The next week do back to back rides to normalize riding on tired legs.
The MS Bike Tour is July 25 & 26. It’s roughly 85 km each day. I’m totally kicking myself for my procrastinating on riding.
My fundraising goal is $2,000. If you would like to help me reach that you can Donate here
Michel and I look happy and sweaty after a bicycle ride.
There are many people I know that live with MS. A bunch more have dear friends and family living with MS.
For reasons we do not fully understand, Canada has some of the highest rates of MS in the world. We also have amazing research happening that is helping my friends right now.
While I do have challenges riding as a fat, asthmatic athlete with some typical middle age injuries – my body does respond to training. I’m very lucky that a month is enough time to have a decent MS Bike Tour. Not everyone enjoys that kind of privilege.
So here’s to lots of miles & smiles.
Yes, ideally, I would have had a more gradual ramp up since April. But the second best time to start is now so, pitter-patter, let’s get at’r.
