2019 week nineteen

Book Read
21. Dear Current Occupant – Chelene Knight

Kilometres Ran
week nineteen – 26.4

2019 to date: 931 KM

Dear Current Occupant is an award-winning creative non-fiction memoir that I had in my poetry pile to read during National Poetry Month and then found that it’s not actually poetry, but it has some poems sprinkled here and there. Knight traces her childhood growing in Vancouver by retracing the places she lived and writing to people currently living there. I don’t know if she ever actually gave any of the writing to the current occupant. It doesn’t matter. I liked this book. It’s a bit weird to me that such a Vancouver-centric book has a Toronto publisher. It does make me wonder if it was turned down by any local publishers. And then it goes on to win the 2018 City of Vancouver Book Award. I liked this book very much. If you follow the link above you can see a video of Knight reading from it. And then you can roam around the Book*hug website because don’t let Toronto fool you, they’re pretty great.

BMO Vancouver Marathon 2019, at about 37.5 KM just before Lumberman’s Arch. Other than the salty shoulders I look way better than I felt. Photo by Taylor Maxwell

A week ago was the BMO Vancouver Marathon and I’ve spent most of the week riding a rather high runner’s high expecting a crash that still hasn’t come. One reason for the continued high is the number of people that sent photos from the race. The BMO Vancouver Marathon uses the running photography cartel Marathon-Photo but I often get suckered. There’s usually one or two that are just okay but on the whole the photos are terrible. I don’t know how they manage to be so terrible so often. So I am so extremely grateful to the people who saw and recognized me on the course and snapped a photo and then sent them to me or posted them online. I’ve reposted a bunch on my Instagram but included my three most vanity stroking selections above and below.

In the finish area, post-race-drunk-talking to Debra Kato and Walter Downey. When I first saw these photos I couldn’t remember this moment at all. Bits are coming back now. Photos by Debra Kato.

I didn’t run much this week but I managed to put around 115 KM on my bicycle. I ran Wednesday and today (Sunday) and both days the legs were lead but the runs were really enjoyable, especially considering the last time I ran a marathon I could barely walk afterwards, and couldn’t run for nearly a month. In three days I’m getting on a jet plane and flying to Paris and then getting on a train ride to Basel, Switzerland where in seven days I’m running the Dreiländerlauf half marathon, which starts and ends in Basel and passes through France and Germany. How cool does that sound? It doesn’t look like a very big race but that suits me just fine. It does look pretty flat, though it’s a couple hundred metres above sea level. Maybe those factors will even out? Maybe there’s a new HM PB? Maybe I’ll just go have fun? Definitely I’ll let you know how it went next week.

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