Books Read:
29. The Trouble with Brunch — Shawn Micallef
30. M Train — Patti Smith
Kilometres Ran:
this week — 42.81
to date — 558.44
Hey here’s an idea let’s go spend the majority of Sunday’s midday standing in line outside of some kitsch-decored otherwise hole-in-the-wall restaurant so we can pay $15 for $1.50 worth of poached eggs and fried potatoes. I guess the other $12 goes toward the shitty service? Nope, you have to tip for that. Anyway, I never ever liked going out for brunch. I don’t worship at the cult of bacon. And I pretty much agree with everything else that Micallef writes in this book. But especially his hatred of brunch. That’s okay because I know a lot of people that hate even the idea of running. I really liked Just Kids and so I thought that I would really like M Train but I did not. I found it dreadfully boring, and for some reason the Patti Smith voice in my head the whole time I was reading this was this whiny, dramatic, annoying voice that seemed perpetually on the verge of catastrophe, even if that catastrophe was something as mundane as someone sitting at “her” table at the coffee shop she frequents. I feel her pain; I used to love to spend my Saturday mornings in Kamloops having a coffee and reading on a street bench in the middle of the 200-block of Victoria Street in Kamloops and I’d be pretty disappointed to get there and see that it was already occupied. But not quite Patti-Smith-disappointed. I read that people disliked the overly romanticized (revisionist?) historicity of Just Kids but I didn’t mind. Plus, at the risk of alienating any photographer friends that might be reading this, I kind of like Robert Mapplethorpe. He’s a tragic story to say the least, and yet somehow I didn’t get that from the invariably tragic Patti Smith. But who am I kidding? Nobody is reading this, much less any artist acquaintance. Anyway, since no one’s reading this anyway, all aboard the M Train to Yawnville.
So it happened that on Sunday, May 1, I dragged my ass out of bed at 5 a.m. not to stand in line for brunch but rather to go to Queen Elizabeth Park and stand in a corral with a couple thousand other geniuses waiting for a 7 a.m. gun to tell us it was time to spend the next couple hours running 21.1 kilometres. But to each their own, I suppose. The BMO Half Marathon was my first official half marathon and it was really great. I’d been looking forward to this race ever since I registered back in November, immediately after purchasing the XBoxOne/Fallout4 bundle. I figured I needed to strike a balance. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d won a Platinum race package from Air France and all that I will say about it is if I had actually paid the extra $100 it cost (as 199 other people did) I probably would have asked for my money back. Not worth it. At all. Otherwise, the race was really great. I learned that I might need to add a few more hills to my running repertoire, and reconfirmed that I need a sippy-cup if I want to stay hydrated and not attempt some unerotic-asphyxiation. I bought one of those dorky looking fuel belts. I’ve yet to use it. When I signed up for this race back in November, I estimated my time to be 1:59. At that time, I’d never run more than 15 kilometres, so I was really guessing. I read that the average time for my age is 2:02 so I thought I’d set a goal of under two hours. A couple months ago I reassessed and set a goal of 1:49. My official time ended up being 1:46:00 and I am very happy with that. My knees cooperated the whole race, which was really great. Everything was great, right up until the last two or three kilometres when I felt like a pylon as runner after runner passed me. I need to work on my end game. Hills-hydration-finish. I have a few weeks until the Scotiabank Half Marathon at the end of June.
