Monthly Archives: January 2026

99 Days

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Although I’m retiring at the end of the school year I really haven’t been tracking or counting down (yet). But I do have a colleague that is also retiring and he shared with me that yesterday marked 100 work days until we are done. So I’m heading into work today with just 99 work days left. That seems a bit surreal to me.

I know someone who started their retirement countdown with over 2 years left. It worked for him, but my mind doesn’t operate that way. I have always struggled with being excited through anticipation. I used to fake it for my kids, but they are grown up now. I get a tiny bit excited for a trip the night before, but only after my bag is packed. Even if I’m packing a bathing suit to go sit on a beach, the excitement level isn’t that high for me.

Sometimes I feel like I’m missing out by not getting excited in advance. I see excited anticipation in others and wonder what gene I’m missing that I don’t get the same feeling. I know that comparison is the thief of joy, but there is something ironic about joy being the thing you are lacking in your comparison.

99 days. Down to double digits. It seems short. There is still so much to do. And yet, I’m ready. Maybe not excitedly ready, but I’m ready.

Cardio time

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Last year I wanted to do one Max VO2 training session a week, but I really did it only every 2-3 weeks. This year I’m committed. My activity of choice right now is 8 one-minute sprint intervals. My interval timer is actually set to 1:15 high intensity followed by 1:10 low intensity. The reason for the additional time is that it takes about 13 seconds to get the treadmill from my low intensity walk, at a 3.4 pace, to my high intensity pace starting at 8.6 and progressing to 9.4 on the final one (I skip 8.7 for those that are math inclined).

I thought I’d share the stats from my watch for the last 3 runs, and then I can see how I compare closer to the end of the year.

January 11, 2025

January 14, 2025

January 20, 2025

I’m actually not trending well, with my average and overall heart rate going up, but fluctuations are to be expected and that’s why I decided to share the last 3. There are two big challenges ahead. The one I have control over is dedicating to doing this at least once a week. The one I have less control over is seeing how quickly I can get my heart rate to recover and if I can decrease my overall peak heart rate doing the same activity… this challenge should be achieved just from the commitment to do this weekly.

Time will tell, and the data doesn’t lie.

Maintaining balance

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I’ve written about finding balance many times before, and I think that in our busy lives finding balance of time is one of the most challenging things to figure out. Between work, family, leisure, and health, there is never enough time in the day. Today, I’m thinking about a different kind of balance, physical balance.

A few weeks ago on one of my Coquitlam Crunch walks I slipped on a small icy section. It was careless because it was my second trip past this area, and I had noticed the ice the first time, then walked right through that section blissfully unaware the second time. I took most of the fall on my hand, my wrist was a bit swollen and very sore for a couple days, and only recently I haven’t noticed it at all. I was lucky not to have broken my wrist.

As we get older, falls become one of the biggest threats to our wellbeing. I have to wonder if I was 15 years younger, would that ice have caused me to fall, or would I have been able to regain my balance? Also, would my situational awareness have been sharper, since I should have already been aware that section was slippery?

Either way, I fell, and had the potential to do a lot more damage than I did. A few months ago I was regularly working on my balance. One thing I was doing was balancing on one leg with my eyes closed. I was getting better at it and then asked both my daughters to try and they had no issues doing it longer than I could. This is something that definitely decreases with age, and I want to add improving my balance back to my stretching routine.

My dad passed away at 79. At that time he was already shuffling around, unable to go up or down stairs without holding the rail and going one step at a time. My in-laws are in their 90’s and were far more mobile than my dad was at 79, but I can also see their struggles with balance now.

Physical balance is so critical to a healthy lifespan, and it’s something that is easy to take for granted until you no longer have it. And falls can be a quick way to hinder how well you can balance in the future, or at the very least they can disrupt your healthy routines with an injury. Yes, strength trading helps a lot, as does cardio training… but I think exercising specifically to maintain balance is something I need to pay a bit more attention to.

Archiving memories

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There is a quote I often hear about the fact that nobody will know your name in 3 generations. This makes me think of my grandparents, and the stories they used to tell. I was fortunate enough to get some video recordings of both of my grandmothers (Granny T & Granny B), but not of my grandfathers. Today I dug up the 10 pages story that my grandfather, Motel Truss, had recorded a few months before he died. I don’t have the recording itself, but I have the document that my mom transcribed from the recording for him. He wrote it as a request from the Barbados Jewish Community. Later, a book was written, ‘Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados‘ and my grandparents were all mentioned in it as well.

I think towards the end of the year I am going to try to document images and stories of each of my grandparents. Nothing extravagant, but something that my kids, and maybe their grandkids could look at to learn a bit about their distant ancestors. It was a very different time, with completely different hardships and challenges, and I think their stories are worth documenting and sharing.

I wasn’t quite prepared

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Today I learned a good lesson. I’m in pretty good shape, but almost all of my cardio training has been under an hour. The only exception has been training to Everest The Crunch, (climb a local power line hike 37 times in two days this coming August, to exceed the height of Mt Everest). Two weeks ago we did 4 times up and ended with one trip down the crunch.

This week we did one more trip up for a total of 5 up then one down.

It was a gorgeous day. We got started by organizing cars and help driving at the top, then headed down to the base and started walking up around 7:45am. At that time the sun wasn’t out yet and I was dressed warmly, but not appropriately. This was my first mistake. I was wearing heavy, fluffy long underwear under water resistant track pants, and a cotton shirt under a hoody and a rain shell.

By the end of the second trip up the hill I was a hot mess. My long johns and cotton shirt were soaking wet. I felt either too warm or chilled from the sweat, there was no happy medium.

My second mistake, and the bigger of the two, was that I didn’t eat enough. I brought no snacks, and only had a protein shake about 45 minutes before starting. There is a stairs section of the crunch that always gets my heart rate up pretty high, and on both the fourth and fifth trip up the hill my heart rate didn’t really go down after the stairs. Basically, I was running on empty.

My buddy, Dave, who is doing this adventure with me (it was actually his idea), appropriately lectured me. And, I’ll be wearing quick dry layers and bringing more sustenance than half a water bottle of flavoured water the next time we are doing 3 (and more) hours of exercise. Lessons learned.

The good news is that 5 trips up still felt completely doable, and I’ll be prepared to get to the next level in a few weeks when we go for 8 trips up. We are still a long way from being ready for 37 trips up in 48 hours, but I’m confident Dave and I will be ready when the time comes… especially since I’ll be a bit more prepared.

Parent influence

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In my early years of teaching I had a student, Caitlyn, who seemed to have everything ‘together’ which is not something you usually say about a Grade 8 kid. (I think it’s ok to use her real name, she would be around 40 years old now.) She was bright, a good student, polite, kind, and helpful, with a good sense of humour and just the right dose of confidence.

Caitlyn came to me one day to tell me she didn’t have her homework because she did it the night before at her dad’s house, forgot it there, and then slept at her mom’s last night. Up to that point, I didn’t even know her parents were divorced. A while later we had student led conferences and both parents came. The way they interacted with Caitlyn and each other, I would never have guessed they were divorced. I remember thinking that there is no way Caitlyn could have been so ‘together’ if her parents were angry and bickering and making a battle out of the divorce.

Kids are incredibly influenced by their parents. I’ve seen this time and again. A parent is quick to blame others for something their kid did, so is the kid. But it’s not just kids mirroring their parents. A parent puts up hard, unrealistic expectations, a student rebels and refuses to play along. The point being, parents have incredible power to influence their kids and that influence cannot be understated.

How do we as parents treat others? Respond to stress? How do we value community, physical fitness, diet, diversity? It’s not a perfect match, but I’ve seen over and over again just how much parents influence their kids.

I was reminded of this again when I met another Caitlyn-like kid. It was an interview situation for our school and in the interview I watched the way her mom supported her, encouraged her, and gave her space to be her own person. The kid was an absolute gem, and I could tell this was fostered and nurtured at home.

It’s not a perfect correlation, and I even know families where you’d swear the siblings had different parents because their personalities and dispositions were so different. But time and again, I’ve seen the difference good parents make. Kids can be awesome despite their parents, but good parenting goes a long way to fostering great kids.

Reconnecting and remembering

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I had lunch with a former student yesterday. It was great to connect and hear how things are going, not just for him, but for his brother and a few other former students he still connects with. It grounds me when I have these opportunities. It reminds me that school is just a short stop on the journey of life. It puts school into perspective.

And yet, despite saying that, the experience we give to students is so important. I read a post on LinkedIn yesterday by an educator I admire and respect. He has a wonderful, high needs kid with challenges that make her school experience difficult. In the post he shared how inflexible the system, or more specifically some people in the system, have been with her… and how hard it has been for her to cope with this in addition to the challenges she faces.

Going back to my visit, this student went to our school when I was overwhelmed, running 3 schools and also dealing with chronic fatigue. He remembers how I struggled. He reminded me of my own challenges I had. But that wasn’t the focus of our conversation, and it wasn’t the only thing we reminisced about.

Still, this provides a little insight into a couple things. First of all, we all deal with things that affect how we cope with daily life, and we can’t really see how we are affected by circumstances or even be aware of how circumstances are affecting others. Secondly, as short as the school journey is, it makes a huge difference in peoples lives.

Our interactions, our attention, our considerations, our disposition, and our actions make differences in the experiences of students. We don’t know the full impact we will have. We don’t know the things people will remember about us when they move on… the best we can do is to remember that all of our interactions matter, and that we have an impact whether we realize it or not, so let’s work to make that impact the best it can be.

Toe, not tow, the line

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I was yesterday years old when I learned something new. While writing my Daily-Ink post I used the idiom, ‘toe the line’… but I spelled it ‘tow the line’, and my phone autocorrected it to ‘toe’.

What? How did I not know this?

I was 100% sure that it was ‘tow’. I thought that to ‘tow the party line’ meant ‘to follow’, as in ‘to be towed along with’ what was expected of you… But it’s ‘toe’!?!

I now needed to look it up:

“The most likely origin of the term goes back to the wooden decked ships of the Royal Navy during the late 17th or early 18th century. Barefooted seamen had to stand at attention for inspection and had to line up on deck along the seams of the wooden planks, hence to “toe the line”. ~ Wikipedia

Please tell me I’m not the only one who got this wrong!

Appreciate the autonomy

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One of the elements of being part of a large system is that is that sometimes you lose autonomy for operational efficiency. It’s hard for an organization to allow everyone to do things differently and still both display some consistency and provide meaningful support.

In our district all of our schools are getting an update to their websites. The new sites are a lot more user-friendly and do provide a bit more choice. However when our tiny school, Inquiry Hub Secondary was built, our cofounding principal, now an Assistant Superintendent, decided that the school needed a different look online and we chose to build an Edublogs site, based off of WordPress. Our website looks nothing like any of the other schools in our district. And, we use it quite differently than most school do.

Two examples of how we use our website differently are that we emphasize the kind of projects students do on our website and we provide our PAC – Parent Advisory Committee with a very flexible WordPress blog as their ‘Parent Portal’.

Yesterday I got a call from our district principal in charge of the website transition for our schools and it was a great conversation where we discussed if our school was going to make the transition. It wasn’t a directive, it was a conversation. It was an opportunity for our school to participate or to keep autonomy.

I can’t express how much this is appreciated. It is challenging for large organizations to allow this kind of freedom, and often small, unique programs need to ‘toe the line’ and follow along so that operationally things go smoothly. For example, we are a Microsoft Office school district and if one school wanted to be something different, it could be a nightmare for tech support to provide trained support. However, all of our high schools already use Edublogs, so our website choice isn’t adding anything new with respect to support.

So, we were given a choice. It might seem like a small choice, but I understand the challenges to complexity it creates and I truly value being in an organization that provides such choice when it can.

You’re already doing enough.

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The following is an excerpt from ‘The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: Chris Williamson: If You Don’t Fix This Now, 2026 Is Already Over!, Dec 28, 2025’

Chris Williamson shared this question, which Steven Bartlett offered back to him, “If this was a movie and the audience were screaming at you, what would they be screaming?”

Here was Chris’ response:

“You’re already doing enough. You’re already doing enough. Stop whipping yourself into submission, thinking that your happiness sits on the other side of the next set of goals that you’re going to achieve.
You’ve already achieved goals that you said would make you happy. So if you haven’t made it now, if this isn’t when life is going to begin, then when are you going to start? There’s this wonderful idea of the deferred life hypothesis.
Deferred life hypothesis is basically the sort of common belief that our life hasn’t yet begun, that what’s happening now is a sort of prelude, it’s an intro to our life truly beginning. And upon reflection, what a lot of people realize is that this prelude that they run through was a mirage that sort of faded as they approached and they were actually just running toward the end of their life. Like they’re permanently putting things off.”

Wow! This is powerful.

“You’ve already achieved goals that you said would make you happy.”

How much do we defer for after we reach the next goal, the next stage, the next level or achievement? We neglect to celebrate our successes while in pursuit of the next… and the next… and the next… success.

I’m left thinking of my #OneWord for this school year: PAUSE.

“There is a lot I’m going to miss when I leave this job, what I don’t want to do is miss things while I still have time to enjoy them. I’m going to seek out opportunities to take pause in my day and truly experience the things I cherish.”

I want to leave my two schools in a way that they will thrive when I’m gone. The thing is that I can’t get lost in this goal and not take the time to appreciate all that I’ve already done. I’m not going to postpone happiness now so that I can feel slightly better about retiring and moving on. Joy doesn’t get put on hold ‘until I retire’.

This concept has really hit me. I am already doing enough… Appreciating this over the next 6 months will make this journey far more enjoyable. I will have spent 14 years with Coquitlam Open Leaning and 13 since Inquiry Hub was founded. I’ve spent those years hitting targets and goals, and working with my teams to make the schools better. I have done enough. That doesn’t mean that I don’t keep pushing, and I plan to leave everything as good as I can… but I don’t need to put blinders on and defer anything to finish off the last few months. Happiness, moments of pause, a sense of accomplishment… these are things that don’t need to wait.