Our Coach stood at the front of the room at the whiteboard at our introductory class, checkmarking and printing and unleashing a whirling blur of information: power, output, full-body movements, paleo diet.  I'd been listening earnestly till then but then my mind stalled out and refused to absorb: Diet, I thought,  A fad diet and I'm not so sure about the whole Caveman premise. I thought: I'll work out here, I like the premise of full-out, strong, short workouts and this seems right up our adrenaline-fuelled, mildly masochistic sensibilities  -- but I'll keep eating what I'm eating.  I've been seeing good results ... [More]

My brother left home when he was 14, a gangly kid with pin-width legs,an affable smile and a shot-on-goal that could tear a bleeding hole through sheet metal.  He was a talented hockey player, and had been touted as a Future NHL Star from the time he was 6 years old. He was a semi-professional hockey player before he could drive a car. He returned home the following summer for break: suddenly taller than me, with giant arms and a steely resolve, suddenly determined to take over the world.  He needed summer work and I got him a job bussing tables at the pub where I worked as a waitress.  During those long shifts, the door would... [More]

I am in the process of writing part 2 of Corey's story, but it's suprisingly hard.  Usually I sit down at the keyboard and stuff just tumbles out of my brain and on to the page but it's different with this because I want to do his words justice.  I want to relay things precisely, in a way that adequately captures the roller coaster of a journey he's been on, and how that all fits into where he is today.  It's an amazing story and I'm freezing a bit, worried I won't do him justice.  So thank you for bearing with me. Anyway, we've had a few emails from readers interested in learning more about what we're eating. So in the i... [More]

Addiction seeps in slowly, penetrating life's surface, unnoticed at first. It sits like a puddle, pooling, waiting, benign until there's a tear in the surface.  It's then that addiction can infiltrate, fill the veins, poison the yawning void with manufactured, false brightness. *** It was a summer morning when Corey sauntered into a 7-11, intent on a slurpee to quell the thirst triggered by the pulsating music, bouncing lights and illicit substances of the night before. Sweat soaked and wearing the tattered shirt he'd slept in, he turned the slush nozzle and waited for relief.  It was the weekend and University courses and compute... [More]

Corey and I originally plotted to escape Vancouver during the winter Olympics.  We'd rent out his apartment to the highest bidder and go to surf school in Costa Rica.  Or maybe we'd take a break from our work-packed days and just lie, device free, on a pier somewhere, next to crystal green water. But Corey's apartment didn't rent and our cat needed ridiculously expensive surgery and a million other things happened to make escaping impossible.  So,we decided - we'd just have to brave the crazy traffic and swarming crowds and irritating tourist masses and hole up inside our house with our vats of egg whites and multitudes of lea... [More]