On February 3rd 2014 I retired after 35 years working for the Canadian National Railway.

I worked at a couple of postions..as a clerk (I was actually called a telegrapher when I began) and then as a dispatcher/rail traffic controller in a variety of locations around Alberta, the west coast, Kamloops, and yeah, Edmonton was my final stop.

Appently I’ve been told that I retired wrong, because I just went back to work at the Running Room, and have kept busy….

The hardest thing about being retired is coming to grip with not having to be doing something all the time…

I find that with running….I keep forgetting, I don’t have to be anywhere for an expended period time…I could run for hours with no reason to stop…but every run, every bike ride…every swim, I keep getting nervous, thinking I have to be somewhere….I don’t!

The odd thing is, when I was working full time, I trained forever….every weekend, evenings, I just did it…but once I retired, I kept finding reasons not to…..

Then there are days like today, when I don’t really want to do anything……don’t feel like doing anything…

Yeah, I wandered around the yard, dug up and weeded the garden, cut the lawn, and some run clinic run club things…planned out the week to come…and yes the smoke from forest and grass fires fill the air around me has me worried a bit…..okay, a lot……

Actually the smoke has me really worried, because the word is, this could be our summer…lots of fires, lots of smoke where things arn’t burning..

I didn’t think it would bother me…I biked and run in this stuff before, maybe it’s an age thing….but this is awful….I’m looking outside right now and it’s like a dark fog..and the smell in the air says fire……like on the wrong side of a huge camp fire…