Today was the day. The tires joined the training team again after a six month sojourn in the house’s crawl space. It’s a bit funny that today was the day. It’s wasn’t the day because I’d marked it on my training plan. (Actually, I’m still waiting for the exact right moment to write my training plan and until that moment, I’m plugging diligently away at my Mountain Athlete Big Mountain training program). It wasn’t the day because I thought-“This is the day to start pulling a tire up Signal Hill.” It wasn’t the day because everyone had been asking me lately when that day would be.

It was the day because two Thursdays ago I came home to the sound of a waterfall in our gear room. I had to run around, diagnose the issue, turn off the water to the house, and hold a vacuum nozzle to the ceiling to catch the coal laden deluge from above. Once the flow of water was stemmed, we had to empty one side of the gear room to start drying things out. Equipment for four seasons of 15 different activities left the tight confines of the gear room and migrated into the living and laundry rooms. And stayed there. Long past when things and the room were dry. Because life is a tad bit busy. They might have stayed there for another nice while except…

Marian came up from the laundry room this morning and said, “I hear hissing.” I knew immediately what the sound likely was and went to confirm my suspicions. Yup…it was…just days after speaking of the possibility, just days after cleaning up one flood, we had the makings for another. The hot water boiler/heater was leaking. Once again, I turned off the water to the house and began to extract the opening to the boiler. Of course, it meant that we had to move things out of the laundry room but to where? To the living room, of course! Except that it was already full… We first had to put everything back into the gear room so to make room for the laundry room things that had to move…you get the picture…instead of feeling frustrated that my day’s training plan of a big day hike was thwarted, I felt very grateful that we’d been home/just arriving home within minutes of two potentially house destroying water emergencies. Imagine the damage if hot water had poured for hours from the ceiling a few weeks back. Imagine if the hot water boiler gave out while we were away for the weekend…

So, instead of hiking, we did “beauty and order” until lunch. After lunch, I realized it was a perfect occasion to break out the tires. As it was my first pull in six months, I stuck to a single tire and 50 pounds in my backpack. I did four ascents from the Geo Centre and travelled about 7 km with my old friend. (Cue the Simon and Garfunkel…”Hello Tire my old friend, I’ve come to hike with you again.”

The good news is that it felt pretty easy to do so I’ll soon be adding a second tire to the line and perhaps another five pounds to my pack. It was good to go slow and spend some meditative uphill time thinking about the next 7 weeks and what I wanted to accomplish in training/preparation. I’ll likely write that training plan next…I think it might be time for that as well…but if not, I’ll keep going with one of my main mantras for Everest 3.0: Trust Yourself. “Trust yourself” is something I say to myself every day. Whenever I question if how I am preparing is right or if I should be doing it like Climber X or Climber Y, I stop and remind myself that I am experienced, knowledgable, and that I can trust myself to make it up as I go forward…and so the motto for today, when life gives you waterfalls, make tire-aide…or at least get tire-d.

PS…Anyone out there have nay experience with on-demand electric hot water heaters and can drop me a line about them?