Category: Read Run Write

2019 week twenty eight

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week twenty eight – 54.6

2019 to date: 1,352 KM

I didn’t actually read nothing but I didn’t finish reading anything either, which is almost entirely to do with the fact that I finally broke down and bought a copy of Fallout 76 for XBox and I’ve been postapocalypticking pretty much constantly since. I thoroughly enjoy playing immersive video games, unapologetically, to the detriment of my reading. I’m not great at video games. I mean, I’m not going to the video game Olympics or anything, but I’m okay. It might seem like a useless waste of time, but….

Last Sunday I went for a run over-and-back on Burrard Bridge and then over-and-back on Lions Gate Bridge and then on Monday just before noon I sat down in front of my laptop and pre-logged into Eventbright and PayPal and Strava and double checked all my details and then as the clock in the top right corner clicked over to 12:00:00 I hit Command+R on the Take the Bridge ticket page and secured myself an entry to the inaugural Vancouver run coming up on Thursday, July 18. Ten minutes later I check on the site out of morbid curiosity and found as I suspected that it was already sold out. I found out later that it sold out in two minutes, and some deep conspiracy theorist out there believe it sold out in seconds. Whatever the case may be, all this time I thought I was preparing for the impending nuclear Armageddon what with the nonsense happening south of the boarder and you know exactly with I’m talking about. But nope; turns out it was all so that I could click my way into Take the Bridge. So next time someone says video games are a waste of time, tell them I say bullshit. What is Take the Bridge, you ask? I’d never heard of it before seeing on Instagram Briana Hungerford (Mile2Marathon crew) winning it in New York last September. There there was this article in Runner’s World (see I do still read some stuff) and anyway I’m pretty excited in spite of having little clue as to what exactly I’ve gotten myself into, and possibly being resented by more than a few in the running community for getting in at all. But if you need to find me between now and then you can try Appalachia under the handle VonDoppelganger. Mind you I’m pretty solitary on there too.

2019 week twenty seven

Book Read
26. The Incomplete Book of Running – Peter Sagal

Kilometres Ran
week twenty seven – 51.5

2019 to date: 1,297 KM

Stephanie introduced me to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me… on NPR and I’ve been a fan since. Then heard Wait Wait host Peter Sagal’s story about running the Boston Marathon in 2013, which if you know your running history is a pretty significant year for not running reasons. Anyway, she tried to find a copy of this book for Christmas but it was another one of those cases of published in America and then a few months later published in other markets. So she got me a gift certificate to Pulp Fiction Books on Main Street, which I used to order the book once Simon & Schuster got around to publishing it in Canada. I feigned aghastment that PFB had never heard of Sagal in spite of the fact a couple years ago I hadn’t either. Anyway, the book arrived and I promptly read it and rather enjoyed it. The book coincides (neither correlating nor causing) Sagal’s running with the end of his marriage, which was interesting to me since I started taking running seriously as therapy to deal with my own longterm relationship demise. He writes about the time that he bandited a race and the backlash that drew after he wrote about it for Runner’s World, and his subsequent attempts at penance. You can read it here. I haven’t read it there because I read it in his book instead. I agree with the general consensus that bandits are douchebags, but I think (and I don’t know if he has or not) Sagal deserves much more vehemence for something else he talks about in his book. Pooping. (Though he cannot bring himself to type the word, so uses “egress.” Maybe it was his editor. Who knows.) Running can be an extremely effective laxative. Runners already know this. Non-runners or just-starting-out runners, now you know. Sagal writes, “I know where every public restroom is and what gyrations need to be accomplished to get to it” and yet he seems rather fine with going “behind the nearest bush” and that’s just not very neighbourly, especially if you “know where every public restroom is.” I too know where every public restroom is, and as a public service I made a map of every public restroom along or nearby my favourite running routes. And I have never had to go “behind the nearest bush.” Gross, Peter.

I expect that this map might come in useful for tourists, too. When I travel I always take my running shoes (and hope that I happen to come across a public restroom if one is needed). I’ve had to cut a run short, but I have never used a bush. Seriously, Peter, gross. Some cities are better than others, and to be honest Vancouver seems to be one of the better free-restroom-stocked cities I’ve run in.

2019 week twenty six

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week twenty six – 44.6

2019 to date: 1,245 KM

Even with a long weekend in hand I come ill prepared to write something here. I’ve been thinking a lot about reading and writing about it and sometimes I think that maybe it would be interesting to write about some of the interesting stuff that I read each week that is not in a book, and maybe not be so fixated on reading a book a week so that I will have a book to write about every week. I actually do have a book that I just finished that I have a few things that I want to write about just not today. But maybe I’m just lazy.

With my laziness in mind and today being Canada Day I decided to House to Grouse which I totally thought was a thing except I didn’t see a single person I follow on Strava do it today so I began thinking that maybe I thought it up and somehow managed to forget that I thought it up. Then I went to a Canada Day BBQ this afternoon and someone there had also done House to Grouse today (and I “did it wrong” apparently) and I mean I really should have known because “House to Grouse” is kind of a bit too clever for me to have thought up even accidentally. All that to say that this morning I woke up and biked (aka “did it wrong”) up to Grouse Mountain and then did the Grouse Grind and then biked back home. And it was fun. I mean, there was a section climbing up Nancy Greene Way when I thought, “this was a stupid idea.” But I was wrong because right now it feels sort of gratifying to have done it.

I’ve written I don’t know how many times on here about my terrible luck with race photos and wouldn’t you know it lightning struck again when I got my Marathon Photos from last Sunday’s Scotiabank Half Marathon. I flipped through the deck and as usual most are terrible and the others are just meh. Then I got an email from the race organizers Canada Running Series saying one of my photos was free! I figure that I would see what I could do with the least terrible one. However, I don’t get to choose my least terrible photo. Instead, Marathon Photos chose the free one for me. Have a look at the selection below and see if you can guess which one is my free photo.

As you can tell from the watermarks, I didn’t even bother downloading the free photo. Then I was on social media somewhere and found Dave Mallari who is a local photographer and he’d set himself up at around the 20KM point on the course and posted an album to his website. I had a look for anyone who I might know, not expecting to find me because I’ve already beaten the dead horse named Todd’s Photo Luck (it’s a weird name) and then I found this photo and I like it a lot and it’s so much better than any one from Marathon Photos so I gave Mallari my money instead.