Greetings blog fans. I´m out of the country, so that means blog updates. Good times.

Lissy and I are currently in Costa Rica, at the foot of the Arenal volcano in La Fortuna. We arrived in San Jose on Saturday where we spent the night. Early sunday morning we took the local bus ($4!) for four hours to La Fortuna which is a little town at the foot of a volcano that has been erupting continuously since 1968. Apparently if it´s clear you can see the lava flows from the town... but there´s no chance it will be clear during our visit.

Today was the first non-travel day of the trip. We really packed it in: we spent a few hours this morning doing some canyoneering. This involves making your way down a narrow canyon, rappelling down waterfalls. Two of the falls were 150 and 220 feet, so it was no joke. Usually these kinds of tours are a bit week, but this was quite good. Then we had a two hour break, and started another tour which involved a variety of activities. We drove to the other side of the volcano to see the lava (we didn´t see any, too cloudy). Then we hiked through the jungle to a really nice waterfall where we went for a swim. Finally we drove down the road to some hot springs.

Usually hot springs on these kinds of tours are pretty terrible: big swimming pools filled with flabby tourists in tepid water. These were different. We stopped on the side of the road, just after a bridge and the guide said to get out. We walked down under a concrete underpass, where about 3 inches of hot water was flowing over a concrete slab and guide told us to slide off the edge of the slab into the darkness (it was pitch black). Turns out there was a nice pool there, and you could hardly tell it was next to the highway. Then we spent some time sliding on our backs under the underpass in three inches of water, and finally headed up stream a little to a spot where a hot stream met a cold one. Pretty good.

Tomorrow is whitewater rafting. Wednesday we head to the coast.

Andrew and I made it safely home from Egypt. Over the last few days we hung around the resort in Dahab, flew back to Cairo for one last day there, then headed home on Sunday. The Egyptian Museum was a bit weird. One one hand it was just packed with really impressive, ancient artifacts. On the other it didn't really feel like the Egyptians put much effort into it. It wasn't very well organized, the write-ups had typos and there were random objects scattered around the museums (fans unplugged left in the middle of aisle, random dog skeletons in display cases with no explanation). It felt a little like being in someone's basement with their unorganized collection of priceless Egyptian artifacts.

In other news: on Oct. 4 I'll once again be doing the MS Bike tour around New York city and though New Jersey to rais money for Multiple Sclerosis. This year I'll be doing the 66 mile ride, and will be joined by Lissy and two of her sisters for the first 30 miles. Peggy, one of Lissy's sisters, has MS, so this hits close to home.

If you'd like to donate you can do so here.

Hey blog fans.

Andrew and I are in the resort town of Dahab, on the Gulf of Aqaba, on the Red Sea. Since the last update we did some more sight seeing in Luxor, rented a Felucca (sail boat) on the Nile for a few hours, and then flew to the Sinai. We are staying in a fancy-ish resort, but we made friends with a British guy that runs the dive shop at the resort. He took us to a Bedouin village last night. We drove for about 20 minutes, then rode camels for a little over an hour to the village.

The village was on the beach, right next to a coral reef. We chilled out for a bit with a few beers (and had a few on the camel ride too) ate some local cuisine including some tasty kebabs and then went for a night snorkel. We slept on the beach and woke up to the sunrise over Saudia Arabia, which was about 20 km away.

We relaxed on the beach for most of the morning, when snorkeling some more, and made it back to the resort by 2. Good day.

One more day at the resort, then one more in Cairo, then home. Good trip.

Andrew and I are in Cairo. We arrived yesterday afternoon, spent the afternoon/evening wandering around yesterday, did the pyramids this morning and are going to do some more sights this afternoon.

I'm sure that if I gave it a bit more of a chance I would find things I like about Cairo, I usually do about most cities, but right now it seems like a bit of a dump. It's incredibly dusty and polluted, which is not really unexpected. The people are really the disappointment. It feels like every transaction is a scam. We got the old short change scam when coming back from the airport. When going to the pyramids the driver took us to the 'Pyramiso' hotel, and then demanded more when we wanted to go the real Pyramids (we didn't pay). The pyramids were full of people claiming to be official who obviously weren't. I've been to lots of places with touts and so forth, and often they have something of a sense of humour about the whole thing. Here it seems a little more mean spirited.

Anyway, we are headed to Luxor tomorrow and then the Sinai Tuesday night, pick up some more commandments.

Hey blog fans. I thought I'd mention a few up coming events. I'm going to Egypt next Friday with Andrew, so I'll be updating my blog while I'm away. We go for 9 days, leaving Friday night. Right now we don't have much of an itinerary, other than we think we want to do Cairo/Giza, then Luxor and then either a Nile river cruise, or fly to the Sinai. But nothing is booked, other than our flight to Cairo.

Also, I'm going to be doing another triathlon on Sept. 27. Since I don't use the blog for anything else, I thought I'd update between now and then with updates on training.

The triathlon is Olympic length, meaning that it's: 1500m swim, 40km bike, 10km run. I did another Olympic length tri in June, which went not to badly, but I was battling an ankle injury from January till the tri in June, and I think it really affected my training/race. I had the same injury for most of the summer, but I just bought a new pair of shoes, which seems to have helped my ankle a great deal. I think if I wasn't going to Egypt I would be in pretty good shape for the tri. Leaving for 9 days 3 weeks before the race is not very good for training: that's the time you should be working the hardest.

One last thing: I've added a recipe section to the website. These are recipes I have either created, or just like a lot and wanted access to when I wasn't home. Hopefully some of you will enjoy them too. I may add photos to them at some point, but that will probably have to wait for a cold winter day when I have nothing better to do.

Here are a few videos from recent trips. In June Lissy and I drove up the California/Oregon coast, and went ATVing on the Oregon Dunes. This past weekend we went to my dad's cottage and did some waterskiing.

Once again I'm participating in an MS charity/sports event. On Mar. 1 I'll be climbing the stairs in Rockefeller center to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis research. Rockefeller Center is 66 floors up, which, for those of you familiar with Toronto, is almost as high as the observation deck of the CN tower (I think it's 72 flights up).

Lissy's sister and aunt have MS, so MS hits a little close to home. If would like to donate, even something small, it would be most appreciated. Follow the link below:

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR/Climb/NYNGeneralEvents?px=4228041&pg=personal&fr_id=11081

Yesterday morning I competed in the triathlon. It went quite well. My goal was to finish in under two hours. I managed to complete it in 1:58:11.

I did the swim in the same pace it swam in the pool, which really surprised me because it was quite wavy. From trough to crest the waves were about 4 feet high. I think the wet suit and the salt water made me a little more buoyant, so maybe that helped me. My goggles fogged up, and I got way off track at one point. Given this I think my pace was really good in the swim portion.

The bike was ok. I averaged 16.4 MPH, which is about what I was doing in training. I was riding my hybrid and I think going much faster than about 17 MPH requires a lot of energy. This was my worst leg compared to the competition, but they all had road bikes.

The run felt terrible, but I ran an 8 minute 17 second mile, which is not bad for me when I'm fresh, and I think was great after an hour and a half of exercise.

I finished 92 of 260 men. I think that's not too bad for the first attempt. I think I'm going to try another one in the spring.

I have been swimming twice a week now. This morning I swam 1600 yards in about 35 minutes. Half of that was breast stroke, half was front crawl*. My problem right now is I don't know if I should be focusing on breast stroke or crawl.

I can breast stroke forever, but it's probably only about 2/3 as fast as my crawl over a short distance. But by doing the front crawl I think I'm tiring myself out. 1600 yards in 35 minutes is a slower pace than when I was swimming a greater proportion of breast stroke.

I think it's a technique problem, and I think that if I make my front crawl more efficient I can get a speed boost and not burn out at the end of the swim. I'm going to continue working on the crawl for the next few weeks and see how it goes, then I'll have to make a decision on which to focus on for the race.

Does anybody have any advice on how to swim front crawl for a long distance?

* I called the 'freestyle' stroke to one of my American friends 'front crawl' and he didn't know what I was talking about. Is that a Canadian thing? Or do other people call it front crawl?

In October I'm going to be participating in a triathlon. Specifically, I'll be doing the Cedar Beach Triathlon. This race is a 0.75 mile swim, 17 mile bike and a 3.1 mile run. I thought I would use the blog to document my training progress, because lord knows I don't use it for much else any more.

I did a bit of googling about how to train for a triathlon. Most people agree that you should train for each leg separately, which maximizes your output and minimizes the risk of injury. So, for the past few weeks I have been training six days a week, running, swimming and biking twice a week.

Right now I'm swimming the full 0.75 miles in about 27 minutes, running 3.1 miles in about 27 minutes, and biking 17 miles in somewhere between 60 and 65 minutes. Each of these times is pretty decent, but I think my big problem is that I'm working pretty hard to achieve them, and I think once I start putting the legs together it's going to hurt.

I have done two sessions now where I have done two legs back to back. I swam and ran for 18 minutes each on Saturday, and biked for 30 minutes and ran for 20 today. Both times it really took a lot out of me. Transitioning from one leg to another is tough, the body doesn't like it. But I guess that's why I'm training. I'm going to try to do one pair of legs a week.

We'll see how it goes...