Training for the life you moved to Parksville for

Sand does not behave like a sidewalk

When the tide goes out at Rathtrevor, it goes properly out. What it leaves is close to a kilometre of rippled, soft, shifting ground, and walking across that is simply not the same activity as walking the boardwalk at the Community Park, however similar the two look from the parking lot. On sand, your ankle has to hunt for the floor with every stride and your hip has to correct for whatever it finds. Forty minutes of that and your calves will be telling you about it in the morning.

I bring this up because it is the single most useful piece of local knowledge I carry about this town. Soft, uneven footing makes real demands on balance and on the small stabilising work around the ankle and foot. So if the flats feel harder underfoot than they did a few years ago, treat that as information rather than a verdict. It is a trainable thing, and it responds quickly.

The garden is the honest test

People here garden seriously, and gardening is heavier work than it gets credit for. A bag of soil out of the back of the car. Kneeling at a raised bed and getting back up eleven times before lunch. A wheelbarrow of bark mulch across a lawn that is never quite level. Reaching over your head into a plum tree with both arms and a bucket.

Every one of those is a movement pattern with a name: a hinge, a carry, a kneel-to-stand, an overhead reach, a rotation under load. When one of them starts to feel dicey, most people quietly stop doing that part of the garden rather than mention it to anyone. I would rather we trained the pattern than let the garden shrink around it.

Golf, and the bit of the swing nobody trains

Plenty of people I speak to out this way play a lot of golf, and almost all of them assume the answer is more range time. Often the limit sits somewhere else entirely — how far your mid-back will rotate, whether your hips can separate from your shoulders, how much you can decelerate without your lower back taking the job on. I am not going to promise you extra distance. What I will do is build the rotation and the leg strength that let you finish eighteen holes feeling the same at the last tee as you did at the first.

A town people moved to on purpose

Hardly anybody I speak to out this way ended up in Parksville by accident, and almost nobody moved here in order to sit down. They came for the Englishman River, the Top Bridge trail, the Saturday run inland to Coombs, the short hop up to Qualicum Beach for coffee, the boats at French Creek, a garden big enough to be a project. The training that suits this town is the training that keeps you doing all of that, and keeps you doing it at seventy and at eighty without any fuss about it.

What working together looks like from Errington to Craig Bay

Everything runs live over video. Twice a week, an hour, just the two of us, with me watching how you actually move rather than reading a log you filled in afterwards. Most people start with 24 sessions over about twelve weeks and then keep going, because the interesting part is what happens in year two and year five.

Practically, that matters more inland than it does downtown. From Errington or Coombs, any organised class means the drive, and in July it means the drive plus the highway full of visitors. Habits do not survive a commute you resent. Yours does not need one — the mat goes down in the front room and the session starts.

Nutrition sits inside the coaching, not beside it. I am a Certified Holistic Nutritionist as well as a kinesiology graduate with 25 years behind me, 16 of them in my own practice, so food, sleep and energy are fair game in any session you want to spend on them.

First, a fifteen-minute call

The first step is a fifteen-minute call where you do most of the talking. Tell me what you want to still be doing at eighty, and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person to help you get there.