(and a catch up)
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 Babs Dionne 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.
