five weeks till hopkinton

2026 to date:
books read: three
kilometres ran: 741.5
kilometres rode: 1,449.6

I used to post here weekly and when I decided to resurrect this space I wasn’t sure what my cadence might be, but what I knew was that I wasn’t going to post here weekly. And since then I have posted here weakly.

I finished Perfection and intended to have something written to coincide with 50 days until the Boston Marathon but here we are 35 days away. A colleague once quoted Voltaire at me and I am still not sure they even know who Voltaire is. I replied something along the lines of good enough is rarely synonymous with good.

Perfection is a work in translation that made The New Yorker’s best books of 2025 list, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. But I didn’t know that when I picked up a copy that had climbed my to-read pile I cannot remember how. A couple of expat designers settle into life in Berlin during that heyday (or so it seemed from over here) of Berlin being the cool place to be, and they proceed to experience the same mundane life as they would anywhere else. I remember the early aughts when it seemed like every artist and designer was on their way to Berlin or trying to figure out how to join their friends there. I’d just moved to Vancouver from Kamloops by way of a two-winter purgatory in Winnipeg and everybody was talking about Berlin. While reading Perfection I found a few neurons refire with nostalgia for the little gallery space I helped float on the corner of East Hastings and Princess in those early arrival years. Some of those could have remained burnt out. I have found myself thinking about this book a lot in the time since I finished reading it. I think that its praise is deserved.

There’s a problem with the Boston Marathon and everyone talks about it for a few days or a couple weeks every year right around the end of September when everyone who qualified and applied to run Boston finds out whether or not qualifying is actually enough. Spoiler: it’s often not. I know this intimately. This confuses people who are on the periphery of this stupid little hobby, but to some of us it is serious business. Since not everybody knows how this works here’s my explainer. (If you know then just skip a bit.)

The Boston Marathon is the only race I am aware of that you need to qualify for in order to be allowed to run…other than the Olympics, the Worlds…I guess there are a few but Boston is the only that I shlub like me needs to qualify for. Most races you just give them enough money and they let you run. Some you enter a lottery for the chance to give them money. To be allowed to give the Boston Athletics Association (BAA) money to be allowed to run the Boston Marathon you need to have run a Boston Qualifying time (BQ). Times are adjusted by age and gender. For instance, if you are a 30 year old dude you need to run a marathon in under 2 hours and 55 minutes. Do that, and you have a BQ! Congrats you qualified to run the Boston Marathon! But not so fast (pun intended?) because so did a whole bunch of other weirdos. The BAA takes all the qualifying entries and subtracts time until they get to their number of participants. Every year the number changes because it depends on how fast everybody ran, and how many people applied. For 2026, the cut off time was 4 minutes and 34 seconds, which means the 30 year old dude who ran 2:54:58 actually needed to run faster than 2:50:26.

Screenshot

People keep running faster so every few years the BAA lowers the BQ standard. In 2025 the BQ standard for that 30 year old dude was 3 hours flat, but the cutoff that year was 6 minutes and 21 seconds. I feel that pain because for 2025 I had a BQ “buffer” of 5:59. I missed out going to Boston by 22 seconds. (Which is also why I was certain that I wasn’t going to get in this year either, since my buffer was just 5:05.)

After the 2026 field got released, a shitfluincer (a few did…) went onto Insta and probably TikTok (I don’t TikTok but I do assume) to lament the unfairness of it all since they had run the qualifying time but missed the cutoff and now, the horrors, they wouldn’t be running their fifth Boston Marathon in a row. “I ran the Boston Qualifying time; I should get in! This is so unfair!” But everybody — even you unless you skipped that part — knows that running a BQ doesn’t mean you get into Boston. I do sort of hear their lamentations, and it seems like the BAA does too, because for 2027 they have instituted a time penalty for marathon times earned on a significantly downhill courses. Beginning now, courses with a net-downhill of 1,500 feet or more will incur a “time adjustment” of 5-10 minutes. It’s a start but I don’t think this goes far enough.

My idea will never fly. The BAA loves to shine spotlight on multi-year participants, while I think they should sit out and let some first-timers have a run. My idea is to impose a time adjustment of one minute for every time the applicant has already run Boston. If you’ve already run Boston four times, like our shitfluincer has, that’s a four-minute penalty.

I will run the Boston Marathon in 35 days and then no matter what happens I will get out of the way for someone else. Hopefully they’ll be a first timer too.

a note about reading

Since getting hit on the head reading has been a struggle and at first I thought that it was just down to a lack of interest. It was late 2020 and the global pandemic was in full swing, on the verge of its Wave Two resurgence. What struck me at the time, besides a load of lumber, was the thought that I expected the end of the world to be a lot less boring. What I learned working with an occupational therapist was that reading struggles and head injuries can go hand-in-hand. My physiotherapists marveled at the pace with which I returned to running and cycling. Reading turned out to be banally ordinary. So I didn’t read for a while, except for what I had to.

I don’t tend to make resolutions but I do like to set goals so as 2022 turned into 2023 I set a goal and made an effort to force myself to read again. I started with a goal to read 10 books, and with deep sardonicism launched into Steve Magnes’ Do Hard Things. Around the same time I archived this site I abandoned Goodreads without bothering to find a replacement reading tracker cum minor author circlejerk (don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean). I don’t actually remember how many books I read that year. The next year I tried again and I remain relatively foggy on the goal and its success. Then last year I tried for a dozen and this time, like a genius, I wrote down what I read, and I reached 13 — if you count the 700+ page UESCA run coach certification manual (jury’s out).

Reading struggles and head injuries are well documented with studies linking the two here and here and here and I didn’t read any of them because I don’t need to read them to know that it’s true but also because I don’t need that kind of confirmation bias telling me I am broken. I have a swath of IME reports commissioned by my lawyer’s office and ICBC that all say pretty much the same thing (save for one and let me tell you that guy was a real piece of work). But a strange thing happened immediately following mediated settlement without having to go to trial: a weight lifted like suddenly I was allowed to be well. It’s a feeling that I will never forget, which is really something because I now forget stuff all the time.

So for 2026, I’ve set a lofty goal to read 20 books and I am off to an okay start. I started the year with A Sincere Warning About the Entity in Your Home by Jason Arnopp. The book is written as a long letter on the subject implied by the title. It was ok. I don’t read a lot of horror and I don’t remember (get used to hearing that a lot) how this title landed in my to read pile. The concept behind the haunting seems unique but not altogether compelling. It’s a quick read.

Following Sincere Warning came UnWorld by Jayson Greene — an unsettling glimpse into our AI future and implants, which sounds altogether too close to the sort of thing I dabble with anyway as every single morning I check in with my Garmin watch and Oura ring so they can tell me how poorly I slept and if I am alive and how much. They seldom agree; I am reminded of waking up on the day before the Chicago Marathon last October to Garmin telling me I am “peaking” and Oura counter with its symptom advisor reading “strain” and that I should probably take it easy. In UnWorld, Greene explores moral and ethical conundrums with AI and sentience, as well as themes of death and grief, and I read it at the same time I was trudging through a self-directed New Year’s resolution (goal?) to at least glean a cursory understanding of a dozen or so publicly available AI tools. Death and grief indeed.

I am not racing the Vancouver First Half this weekend so please enjoy this photograph from the 2023 edition instead.

As I type it is 75 days until the Boston Marathon. I’m currently averaging about 70 km on my feet and about twice that distance on a bicycle (mostly to nowhere). Expect better balance between reading, running (and cycling) in the next writing. I’m still finding my rhythm.

resurrection, and a unicorn

I was leaving the track early Tuesday morning in September and received a WhatsApp message from TC that just read, “Fuck yeah” along with a blue and gold heart. A couple days earlier he’d sent a few photos from Eastside 10K and I thought that was a delayed and rather enthusiastic response to my “thanks so much.” A couple hours later I was in my office and saw the Boston 2026 cut off time had been announced. “Oh fuck!” I said. “What!?” chorused my boss and his EA from outside my door. “I just got into Boston.”

Boston 2026 Cut Off Time: 4:34

It’s been five years since I’ve posted anything here. A bit ago I reached a mediated settlement with the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) and by extension Mr. Dumb Fuck in a Truck (DFIAT), which is what ended this exercise in the first place.

Back in January, 2021, upon legal advice I unpublished all of my posts about getting clobbered by a negligent driver on the Sea to Sky highway while attempting my first century ride. “No good will come of this.” A common refrain from my lawyer whenever I would ask after some reporter came asking what’s up. This site went stagnant, ending abruptly with my mid-2020 check in post; eventually the site’s SSL expired and I let it petrify, but the domain and hosting continued to auto-renew.

Last summer, I considered resurrecting Read Run Write to catalogue the build up to the 2025 Chicago Marathon in October. Over the Christmas holiday I got the urge to do something with this again. At least to properly tie it off. So in a lightning storm of misdirected ambition I shocked this back to life, of sorts. I reposted my post-cycling crash near death experience and recovery, such as it (the recovery) and those (posts) are. I haven’t brought myself to revisit any of them and I don’t know if I will.

I am still unsure what this might end up looking like. I am dissatisfied with these current aesthetics. I’m going to return to posting here about what I have read and what I have run with a focus on training towards running the 130th Boston Marathon in April. I’m not sure what sort of frequency this will take on.

It is 85 days until Hopkinton.