Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Emergency Preparedness Week Stories

My new role as the field reporter for The Weather Network's national morning show includes live segments, but it also has me putting together stories as well.

The first week of May was Emergency Preparedness Week and I completed two stories as my contribution to our EPW coverage. The story embedded below is a tale of lightning survival.



The second story is about flood prevention and can be found under the Weekly Videos tab.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

May Update - Throwing CrossFit into the Fray

The Weather Network

April was a busy month for me and May looks like it's going to be even busier.

The middle of April saw the beginning of the new Southern Ontario bureau on The Weather Network's national morning show. The first show saw me reporting from my hometown of Oshawa where I took a walk down the memory lane of my baseball career and I also had a chance to interview the Mayor.

Other cities I visited during the month of April were Woodstock, Port Perry, Orillia, Fergus (where I tried fly fishing for the first time), and Niagara-on-the-Lake.

You can catch me every Monday and Tuesday morning on the national morning show from 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. ET.

My in-studio weekend schedule has also changed slightly (again). After this weekend, you'll be able to see me from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday afternoons across all five of The Weather Network's feeds.

Basically I have four locked-in shifts per week, running from Saturday to Tuesday, with additional shifts sprinkled in Wednesday through Friday.

That is going to be interrupted slightly during the middle of the month because of CrossFit.

CrossFit

Before I started working at The Weather Network (and the Woodstock Sentinel-Review and the KW Review and wrote my book 60'6": Balls, Strikes, and Baseball Mortality, and played semi-pro baseball with the London Majors), I was a certified Level 1 CrossFit instructor.

I also competed in the sport of fitness, taking part in the 2010 Ontario Sectional in an attempt to qualify for the 2010 CrossFit Games (I was unsuccessful).

But I've been asked to do the sideline reporting for the Canada West Regional competition from May 9 to 11 in Richmond, BC. I'll be interviewing athletes before and after events throughout the weekend of competition.

This will be my first trip to the beautiful province of British Columbia, so I'm excited to get a glimpse of Western Canada's mountain ranges firsthand. And I'm grateful for The Weather Network to give me the time off to attend the regional.

For more information on my field reporting for The Weather Network and my sideline reporting for CrossFit, be sure to follow me on Twitter @MikeGArsenault for updates.

Thanks for reading!