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.