You never know what you'll find at Costco

Another nice day, perfect for running. One hour's worth up to South Glenmore park and back. Warmed up 15 min, then 8 x 90 seconds of fast turnover, with 2 min easy in between. I wasn't trying to run faster, but that's sort of hard to avoid. I didn't know how fast the turnover should be; I counted a couple times and ended up with 140 and 139 right foot strikes in that 90 seconds. I sure was breathing hard at the end of each. The rest of the time was an easy run home. Stretched after.

Today I was thinking about relaxing my legs, and visualizing them just going round and round, as if I was spinning madly on my bike in a small gear. It seems to have worked; my legs aren't sore afterward. I was trying hard to get that feeling of flow, which is normally the kiss of death. But it came during the last fast interval, and then stayed during the easy run home. I could have run for much longer. Flow is good.

Then we went to Costco for some odds and ends, hoping to beat traffic. It's easy to tell all the geezers are in town for Stampede, traffic was bad, and it's going to get worse for the next 10 days. In Costco I like looking over the enormous variety, the sheer overwhelming quantity of goods for sale, of all levels of quality and usefulness. It never ceases to amaze me that somebody thought of going to the time and trouble of producing these goods, transporting them here, and leaving them in a pile for people to select. A fricking HUGE pile, when you think about it. I like it when the nice lady comes up with the hand scanner and zaps all your stuff so you don't have to take it out of the cart for checkout. How much simpler and faster could it get?

I was moderately surprised to find Clif's bars there, hiding near the candy aisle. I noticed that aisle is just a bit wider than the others, and given some of the people I saw in it, it needed to be. Anyway, MEC sells these bars for $C1.40 each, and Costo sells a box of 18 for $C15.00 or about 83 cents a bar. Hard to go wrong there, even if the box doesn't include my fave flavour. And Lara Bars, sold in large boxes right beside them. My only association with Lara is from Tomb Raider (I'm a guy, imagine that, huh?) so what's the scoop with these? Are they good? Next to that was a very healthy looking bar, with fruit and nuts, and light blue packaging I think, but I can't for the life of me remember what they're called. I guess it speaks a lot about our society that there are nice people frying all sorts of frozen food substitutes for people to try eating, and nobody willing to give people a taste of bars that at least claim to be good for you. Or at least not actively bad for you.

I was choked at how the James Bond movies are packaged. There are only a few good ones (Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, The Spy who Loved me, Casino Royale (Craig's not the 1967 monstrosity)) and so, of course, they package a good one with a bunch of turkeys. Sigh. I simply won't buy them like that.

Here 2009 is barely half over, and they had an enormous selection of calendars. I bought the polar bear one, of course. Yay polar bears! I often think that adding polar bears to the swim portion of triathlon would make it much more exciting for the spectators, and provide motivation for the athletes. Of course, you'd have to time the release of the polar bears carefully. You want to give them a chance at catching someone, after all, or they won't play. I guess we need to hope that the Michael Phelps of polar bears isn't in the mix. Wave starts might be very interesting. I can just picture polar bears waiting on the buoy for the next wave, watching for the athlete that most resembles a seal. I just hope the material that wet suits are made of isn't bad for polar bear digestion.