Walking to Work

When I was selling Yellowknife to Brent I pointed out that our life was basically: 

1. get up, 
2. drive to work, 
3. spend 7.5 hours inside, 
4. turn around and drive back home, and
5. spend the remaining five hours inside before going to bed. 

I argued if that is all we do, we might as well do that in a place where we had access to world class recreation centres. When we lived in Grenada we did lots of hiking and walking and when we came back to Ontario we had fallen back into a sedentary lifestyle. I was optimistic that by moving to Yellowknife we would get out of that funk and back into an active lifestyle.

Trying to find housing in Yellowknife (in August for September) is really challenging. So our criteria was close to my work and Aiden’s school which are within a couple of blocks of each other. Luckily (if $2800 for a three bedroom apartment could ever be considered lucky) we found our condo online. Google maps showed us that it was very close to my work and less than 500 meters from Aiden’s school.  My work is the grey building beside the Days Inn and Aiden school is near 44th Street and the bus stop. We were in luck!!

The condo development is really new, so when the Google street view vehicle went through it didn’t exist. We assumed the N on our Street address indicated "North".The name “Summit Condos” should have given us a clue, but we were still very surprised when we got our first look. Summit condos is a series of condo buildings each three stories ranging from A at the bottom of the hill to T at the top. We realized N is not for North but the letter of the condo. 

The condo is set high a top a hill, where I seem to be parallel with about the seventh floor of an apartment building just down the way. Not only are we up high, the condos are built with exterior stairs, no elevators.  This is apparently brilliant because most condos pay to heat hallways and constantly fix elevators, so the condo fees are low, however the hike is high. 

Walking to work is awesome, down hill all the way, with amazing views of Great Slave Lake.

If you had a toboggan in the winter you could be down to Franklin (the main street and when my building is) in a couple of seconds.

The walk home however is an absolute beast. The condo development put a nice little paved path in that cuts out a big chunk of time, but it must be a 60 degree incline and climbs about 150 feet in about 150 feet! Then once you get to the top of that you still have to walk up the hill to our condo.

The other morning Aiden started to go into the stairs at condo “F”. I reminded him we had to get to condo “N”!! And then once you get to “N” you have to climb up to the third story! I do this everyday, twice. Once at lunch and once at 5:00 p.m.

While exhausting, and I am always panting when I get to our door, it is also exhilarating. When I start the climb up to the condo I feel like I rock star. I feel quite a lot less enthused as I climb along, but am keenly aware of my legs burning and heart pumping, which means I am alive and pushing myself. I checked my weight the day we moved in and again today and so far I am down four pounds. Now maybe part of that is not eating out, but part of it is definitely my hill climbing.

When the weather changes we will use the field house for indoor walking while the boys play pickup soccer below.  I plan to continue walking to work regardless of how cold it gets. I may stop going home at lunch, but I am really enjoying leaving work and having time to eat lunch and do some prep work for dinner. I will revisit this when it is -30 and dark, but for right now my workout routine seems to be working.