Globetrotting runner and pinball wizard Michael Seliske still has some Pelham roads to conquer
In last week’s Friday Flashback we wondered whatever happened to young Michael Seliske. the Grade 11 Notre Dame student and Pelham Figure Skating Club member who skated his way to a silver medal at the Trillium STARSkate Ontario championship in 2005. Here, in his own words, is Michael’s 20-year update. (Oh, to have just a fraction of those frequent flier miles!)
A lot has happened in 20 years and I feel like the route I have taken over the last two decades is anything but typical so hopefully you enjoy the update. Here is my story starting from just after that high school photo.
The following year (2006), I competed in the same national championship competition in Ottawa and came home with the Gold medal this time. I have been spending the last 19 years using “I was once a figure skating national champion” in the two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker.
After graduating from Notre Dame in 2006, I continued my figure skating career at the University of Waterloo, where I competed on the Waterloo Warriors varsity figure skating team while studying computer engineering in the co-op program. In the final years of my schooling, I also picked up campus recreation hockey and learned how to skate with no toepicks.
After graduating from Waterloo, I moved to Silicon Valley and worked in the tech industry for five years, where I joined a beer league hockey team in San Jose rather than trying to continue my skating career as an adult. In early 2016, I picked up running and by September, had run my first half marathon.
Since then I have run 12 marathons all over the world, including Boston, Chicago, New York, Berlin, Athens, and most recently Tokyo a few weeks ago. I will be finishing up the six world marathon majors in London England in just over three weeks.
During this time I also got really into pinball and joined one of the premier pinball leagues in the US, the San Francisco Pinball Department, where I fell in love with a hobby most people would call odd. I also got pretty good at it!
On my 30th birthday I decided to leave Silicon Valley, put the remainder of the possessions I didn’t sell into a storage locker, and set off on a year-long adventure around the world. With just a 40L backpack and a rough idea of what I would be doing, I boarded a plane to Vietnam with almost no plans. As a preview of how things would develop over the next year, within a few days of landing, I found myself setting off on a 2400 km motorbike ride through Vietnam with a group of three strangers I had met only a day before. By the end of the year, I had visited 36 countries and over 250 craft breweries and had made countless connections with people I still interact with seven years later. Please, please, please, do your best to leave Canada and see another slice of the world at least once in your life.
Please, please, please, do your best to leave Canada and see another slice of the world at least once in your life
Despite taking over a year off from my career, I landed a job at a tech startup in Kitchener in January of 2020 which started the current phase of my life.
I have been living in Kitchener for the past five years, and it’s where I met my fiancée, grew my pinball collection from zero to three machines, and continued playing beer league hockey in the winter. I am an avid homebrewer and have most recently gotten into triathlons. In November of 2024, I finished my first Ironman in Arizona and am already signed up for a second one in California in October.
This year I completed the Dopey Challenge at Run Disney in January, the Tokyo Marathon in March, and will be participating in the London Marathon at the end of April. I got engaged to my future wife, Sam, while in Japan, and we are starting the process of upgrading our living space from a condo to a house (we both have too many hobbies). The summer will be full of biking, running and swimming as I train for a sub-10 hour Ironman attempt.
My parents still live in my childhood home, but the arena has moved from around the corner on Haist Street, up the hill to the MCC. I am happy to see the community investing in recreation but have mixed feelings about the continued growth and potential loss of that small town charm. As an avid craft beer lover, I will also say that I would have never thought that Pelham would ever be home to a delicious craft brewery. Whenever I am back home, I always try to stop in for a pint at Kame and Kettle.
I don’t figure skate anymore, but participation in semi-competitive youth sports at a young age really taught me a lot of lessons that have come in handy over the past 20 years and have helped mould me into the person I am today.
Fun Bonus Fact: I have run 62.82 percent of all streets in Pelham and will be working to run 100 percent over the next few years. The main ones left are in the country or pretty busy.
Thanks for reading.
AloJapan.com