Book Read:
38. Believe Me — Eddie Izzard
Kilometres Ran:
week thirty — 54.3
To date: 1,514 KM
This book took me too long to read and that’s probably because, as to be expected from an autobiography, there’s this whole bunch of stuff at the beginning about being a child and I don’t really like kids. I should have skipped it. It’s not as if there were any vital plot points that missing would leave me bewildered later in the book. But I trudged on through. I’ve been a fan of Izzard since a Dress to Kill DVD make the rounds of my friends sometime around the century change over. It’s funny(?) to think that in a small backwater town we didn’t even bat an eye at the notion of a transgender comedian. Izzard was very likely my first encounter and it all seemed utterly normal to me at the time, which has carried through to now to the point that I do not understand what the fuss is about. Reading this book reminded me of how many things Izzard has touched that I really like, many that he doesn’t mention in the book at all. Shadow of the Vampire is one of my favourite films and the NBC series Hannibal I will argue is one of the best TV series in ever and I generally hate network television. Maybe not generally. So anyway, it’s a good book.
Eight weeks out from the 2017 BMO Marathon I decided, yeah, I’m going to do that. As of today I’m ten weeks out from running my second. In July 2009, Eddie Izzard, decided to run around the UK. He writes, “Of course, I had no business running marathons–I wasn’t trained, I wasn’t particularly fit, and I had absolutely no experience in running anything that long, let alone running multiple marathons.” What I mean by run around the UK, I mean a marathon a day, six days a week, resting on Sundays. So with six weeks(!) until start, he decided he should maybe do some training. And he did it, running 43 marathons in 51 days and raised a few million dollars for charity. Then in February 2016 he ran 27 marathons in 27 days (including two marathons on the 27th day because he missed a day near the beginning, the loser…), all in balmy South Africa. And all I want to do is BQ at the Victoria Marathon in ten weeks. It seems so pedantic in comparison.