2026 to date: books read: nine kilometres ran: a bunch kilometres rode: a bunch more
It’s been over a month since I finished the Boston Marathon. It’s long past due time for a postmortem, so here it is. The short answer is, it didn’t go well, but I finished. The longer explanation, now with the benefit of a few dozen days of hindsight, still seems legit, actually. I had a really great training block with nearly 1,200 kilometres of total running, which is right within the vicinity of two of my previous best builds. The difference this time around was the Zwift Ride in my living room that added 1,700 km of cycling to the block. Heading into the taper I felt great. I conservatively pegged my fitness at around 3:12; with my goal to run 3:19 I was riding confidence high. But then about ten days out I got sick. At first I thought it was springtime allergies, but it soon developed into something much worse, and no amount of rest and home remedies could shake it. Just when I thought I was starting to feel better, the Friday travel day to Boston completely sucked the life out of me. So I went to the start line on that Monday morning hoping for a miracle but just wanting to finish with some pride intact. Some plagiarized notes from my Instagram post in the aftermath here. I adjusted my race plan: Go easy for 10 miles then pick it up if I felt okay. But I never felt okay. My breathing was short and shallow as I fought my cough. My heart rate was ten points higher than my normal. I got to 10 miles, lapped my watch and just held on. I look back at my splits through the first 28 km of the race and in spite of the rolling hills I paced like a metronome. One positive. There are full sections that I simply don’t recall at all.
I was a zombie in a singlet. I frequently have a come-to-god moment in the marathon at around 25 km, but somehow this time I even missed that. I remember waking up seeing the 30K marker and wondering how that was possible, and how I was going to make it another 12. But I did. It wasn’t the finish I have envisioned in my mind for weeks, months and years. I crossed the finish with a whimper, collected my medal, found Stephanie, and shuffled back to the hotel. Earlier on here I posted about multiple Boston finishers and how I think that they should get out of the way for first timers. Now I have some cognitive dissonance buzzing in my ear. Because I think I earned a mulligan. I am extremely proud to have earned my spot on that start line. It has been a long, humbling experience to get there, but I earned it. I don’t think I deserve another shot, but I demand one anyway. So I’m going to try again.
My face says it all.
April was (is) Poetry Month so I took the gift certificate that had been burning a hole in my pocket since Christmas and went up Main Street to Pulp Fiction, and came away with Mercedes Eng’s Cop City Swagger and Playlist by Michael Turner. Eng’s work is a poetic companion to Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing with the Vancouver Police Department and swagger mayor Ken Sim as case study. Turner’s subtitle “a profligacy of your least-expected poems” is apt. Poems are introduced with autobiographical context and left me wishing the book included an equally contextual YouTubeMusic (because I don’t Spotify, though I’m not convinced one is more moral than the other) playlist. But one of the more interesting things I read during Poetry Month was a Forbes article entitled, How Poetry Is Diabolically Being Used In Everyday Prompts To Get AI To Do Things It Isn’t Supposed To Do. I quickly scanned for any reference to Roger Farr — that’s so inside baseball that only Roger and I might get it.
2026 to date: books read: six kilometres ran: 1,072.1 kilometres rode: 1,827.4
I dropped the ball and I am unhappy with a baseball metaphor (I assume it’s a baseball metaphor) for reading and running (and cycling). So, what then is the appropriate metaphor? I bonked? Perhaps that works better. I bonked my blog and this will be some catch up, so forgive me. My favourite comedian has a book club and I did not expect that but it makes sense since a lot of his comedy hinges on misdirection. This month the club is reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, so I read it.
The novel is semi-autobiographical and transitions between first and third-person, and back again. The story is a young couple, have a child, have an affair, attempt to and manage to reconcile, sort of. It’s not a happy novel, but I think it’s quite good. Certainly leans into the experimental realm that I tend to prefer when I have the energy for it. I was surprised that I had the energy for it.
I surpassed 1,000 kilometres ran, year-to-date, on April 4 — the earliest that I ever have (so far?). This capped off a four-week block with an average 95 km ran per week. The only blip in this training cycle came a few weeks ago on Family Day when I put my back out being an old man and then (learning from past mistakes) didn’t panic, but rather took it easy and let it resolve, finishing the week with just 42.5 km total, with one longer workout coming on the Sunday.
I feel good about this build now that I am in the thick of the taper and, save for a time machine, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. The hay is in the barn, as they say. I checked on my past marathon builds and this one falls within the above average in terms of total volume. All except for that anomaly in the spring of 2019 when I somehow managed to run my (still) third fastest marathon off of a fifteen week build with just 726.2 km of total volume. (For comparison, my first and second fastest saw volume of 1,186 km and 1,163 km respectively.)
This fifteen weeks, in spite of the blip week following Family Day, I’ve accumulated 1,120 km. I feel like I am in a good place. My only concern is these past few days I have been ravaged by allergies like no other springtime in memory, such that I wonder if I might be suffering a cold or on the verge of one. I really need to stay healthy to give myself a chance to beat spring 2019 anomal-me.
And so for the catch up, while I haven’t published anything it’s not as if I haven’t written any notes, a jog through the past few weeks….
three weeks until hopkinton
2026 to date: books read: five kilometres ran: 941.2 kilometres rode: 1,668.3
It feels wrong to write this this way since I had ambitions to do this a bit proper justice but then it didn’t quite happen the way that I had planned. Mostly procrastination on my part. My fifth book read this year is The Savage Noble Death of BabsDionne by Ron Currie and on March 22 I read the following passage (bear with me):
Survey one hundred junkies and ask the first thing they’d do upon deciding for the umpteenth time to kick dope. Five, given health insurance and other resources (e.g., people who still actually gave a shit about them) might go to a proper rehab. Another ten or fifteen would wind up in an emergency room, to be shuttled to an underfunded detox ward on the fifth floor of an underfunded public hospital, where in the company of schizophrenics, drunks, and well-meaning but callous staff they would drool and cry and tremble for a week, after which they’d be given the address of a methadone clinic and wished all good luck. The remaining eighty would sweat their way through five or six hours of sobriety, until the real Horsemen of Withdrawal galloped onto the scene, at which point those eighty would to a person be willing to mug their own mothers for a fix, and get back on the merry-go-round of addict anguish posthaste. None of those surveyed, it almost goes without saying, would kick off their sobriety with a good, long run.
On March 22, I passed 3,000 days since I finished alcohol. I have thought about that a lot over the past eight years and 80-ish days with a couple Leap Years in there somewhere, mostly while out on a good, long run.
I wrote on here eight-or-so years ago after I had just quit drinking and had given myself a bit of time to ensure that it had stuck. Back then, it quickly became my most read piece on here before eventually getting surpassed by my crash and aftermath. Back then, I talked and wrote about quitting drinking and why I chose to but in the time since it’s really become apparent that I didn’t quit; I finished. I think everyone who drinks has a finish line. Some people cross theirs more quickly than others. I don’t think the race course is the same distance for everyone.
Before I understood mindfulness I read a book that forced mindfulness onto me. Someone in my socials linked to the book and I saved a PDF copy for when I was ready and then one day (January 2, 2018) I was and I read the book and before I was finished my drinking time was. The book is called This Naked Mind and it effectively helped me rewire my brain because I was open to the idea and ready for it to happen. I finished drinking. I have no interest whatsoever of starting up that race again. I’ve shared the book a handful of times, and I know a few people who discovered that they were nearly or across their finish line too. There’s a really important part at the beginning of the book, where the writer emphasises that it is vital to read the whole book, resist the temptation to skip to the end. Metaphors for running and life galore.
four weeks till hopkinton
2026 to date: books read: four kilometres ran: 840.8 kilometres rode: 1,566.4
The fourth book I read this year was Murderland. I tend to spend the final few waking minutes before sleep reading and I quickly discovered that this was not the book I wanted to do that with, but I am also stubborn so I neither changed my routine nor shelved the book. Part true-crime, part creative(?) autobiography, part eco-non-fiction, Murderland explores road violence, industrial poisoning and serial killers, mixed with the author’s upbringing within intimate proximity to all three in both location and timeline. Memories emerged of my growing up across the Thompson River from the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill in Kamloops, the smell that permeated my neighbourhood and clung to my father when he came home from work each day. A lifetime removed I often wonder which poison had the greater effect on me, the fundamentalist Christianity or the industrial pollution that might still haunt my internals. I didn’t turn out a serial killer, though.
The book includes a disturbing level of detail that often left me wondering how the author could possibly know that while at the same time nauseated that the author would cause me to wonder in the first place. I spent the latter half of 2025 reading Norwegian noir so it’s not as if I am squeamish; I think it was the non-fiction aspect that left me disturbed. I did find the environmental factor that correlates with the dramatic rise in violent crime an interesting angle worth exploring. Maybe not as a bedtime story.
With four weeks to go I had my first 100 km week of the build — well, 99 km to be exact — and my body has been proving rather resilient. I have all the fancy recovery tools, foam roller, spiky balls, massage sticks, elastic bands, hot packs, cold packs, percussion gun, TENS machines and yoga mats, but the best recovery tool seems to be Zwift. I’ve been maintaining a little over 100 km weeks on the bike to nowhere since it arrived in my living room back in December. I know that gentle movement is one of the best forms of recovery but this is the first time that I have put it into practice, even accidentally. I just like riding bikes…and playing video games. Suddenly, instead of sedentary XBoxing after a hard activity I’m spinning away to nowhere chasing imaginary bicycling upgrades and aesthetically tolerable cycling kits for my skinny, grey-haired avatar. I think I am onto something.
Since getting hit on the head reading has been a struggle and at first I thought that it was just down to a lack of interest. It was late 2020 and the global pandemic was in full swing, on the verge of its Wave Two resurgence. What struck me at the time, besides a load of lumber, was the thought that I expected the end of the world to be a lot less boring. What I learned working with an occupational therapist was that reading struggles and head injuries can go hand-in-hand. My physiotherapists marveled at the pace with which I returned to running and cycling. Reading turned out to be banally ordinary. So I didn’t read for a while, except for what I had to.
I don’t tend to make resolutions but I do like to set goals so as 2022 turned into 2023 I set a goal and made an effort to force myself to read again. I started with a goal to read 10 books, and with deep sardonicism launched into Steve Magnes’ Do Hard Things. Around the same time I archived this site I abandoned Goodreads without bothering to find a replacement reading tracker cum minor author circlejerk (don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean). I don’t actually remember how many books I read that year. The next year I tried again and I remain relatively foggy on the goal and its success. Then last year I tried for a dozen and this time, like a genius, I wrote down what I read, and I reached 13 — if you count the 700+ page UESCA run coach certification manual (jury’s out).
Reading struggles and head injuries are well documented with studies linking the two here and here and here and I didn’t read any of them because I don’t need to read them to know that it’s true but also because I don’t need that kind of confirmation bias telling me I am broken. I have a swath of IME reports commissioned by my lawyer’s office and ICBC that all say pretty much the same thing (save for one and let me tell you that guy was a real piece of work). But a strange thing happened immediately following mediated settlement without having to go to trial: a weight lifted like suddenly I was allowed to be well. It’s a feeling that I will never forget, which is really something because I now forget stuff all the time.
So for 2026, I’ve set a lofty goal to read 20 books and I am off to an okay start. I started the year with A Sincere Warning About the Entity in Your Home by Jason Arnopp. The book is written as a long letter on the subject implied by the title. It was ok. I don’t read a lot of horror and I don’t remember (get used to hearing that a lot) how this title landed in my to read pile. The concept behind the haunting seems unique but not altogether compelling. It’s a quick read.
Following Sincere Warning came UnWorld by Jayson Greene — an unsettling glimpse into our AI future and implants, which sounds altogether too close to the sort of thing I dabble with anyway as every single morning I check in with my Garmin watch and Oura ring so they can tell me how poorly I slept and if I am alive and how much. They seldom agree; I am reminded of waking up on the day before the Chicago Marathon last October to Garmin telling me I am “peaking” and Oura counter with its symptom advisor reading “strain” and that I should probably take it easy. In UnWorld, Greene explores moral and ethical conundrums with AI and sentience, as well as themes of death and grief, and I read it at the same time I was trudging through a self-directed New Year’s resolution (goal?) to at least glean a cursory understanding of a dozen or so publicly available AI tools. Death and grief indeed.
I am not racing the Vancouver First Half this weekend so please enjoy this photograph from the 2023 edition instead.
As I type it is 75 days until the Boston Marathon. I’m currently averaging about 70 km on my feet and about twice that distance on a bicycle (mostly to nowhere). Expect better balance between reading, running (and cycling) in the next writing. I’m still finding my rhythm.
