Tag: 2000km

week six

Books Read:
11. Pillage Laud — Erin Moure
12. Open City — Teju Cole

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 39.26
to date — 159.9

From the re-issue copy that I have in my grubby hand by way of BookThug, “Pillage Laud is a lost cult item from the last century. It used MacProse, freeware designed by American poet Charles O. Hartman as a generator of random sentences based on syntax and lexicon internal to the program; it worked on Apple systems prior to OSX and is now in the dustbins of computer history. In 1999, the news was shocking: Moure’s poems are written by a computer. In 2011, now that everyone is a computer, the book can be read anew.” I guess this collection begs questions around authorial intention, among other things, but in spite of (or regardless of) I enjoyed the book. Besides, New Criticism is dead, right? I found Teju Cole’s debut novel on my bookshelf and it still bothers me that I cannot recall how it got there. I don’t remember buying or borrowing it. So if it’s yours, please let me know. I share some sentimentality with the protagonist Julius. He spends a lot of time walking seemingly aimlessly around his city, though he doesn’t seem to feel like it’s his city. He’s better at articulating his states of mind while wandering, whereas I run more than walk, and less aimlessly. But….


I’ve been trying to be more aware of what I think about when I run. The reason I started running initially a couple years ago was as much for mental health as it was for getting my (arguably) fattening self out from in front of the XBox. A lot has changed since then. I run a lot farther than I used to (duh) and I tend to spend more time contemplating my aching body than ruminating on my lying, cheating ex. Though one provided more fuel than the other. Guesses? Anyway, as I’ve shifted my routine from early mornings to middays and afternoons I’ve found the petty annoyances that plague my runs of late are other people. Other runners are cool, for the most part. The other day as I rounded that last corner before Third Beach I passed a guy jogging and juggling, and it took a bit of willpower not to push him into Burrard Inlet. Purely out of jealousy, of course. If I could only juggle, and not just juggle, but juggle and jog at the same time…. But the real annoyance is the strollers. And the strollers pushing strollers. So I’ve come up with a new sea wall rule: if we’re making eye contact for a few metres and you decide that it’s more important to maintain your entire-path-covering parallel stroll with your family/friend(s)/significant other/Tinder date then I’m allowed to elbow you in the face as I try to run by. Only seems fair.

week five

Books Read:
9. A Sport and a Pastime — James Salter
10. Poetryworld — Louis Cabri

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 28.61
to date — 120.64

A sport? I must have missed something. I kind of get the pastime part. Maybe there’s some baseball metaphor at work that I completely missed. Sounds like a job for George Bowering…. Anyway, I thought this book was alright although I found the narrator rather curious. He’s a character in the story, obviously, but he’s rather shady it seems. Not trustworthy to say the least. But strangest is that he seems to be around directly observing an awful lot of the arc of Dean and Anne-Marie’s relationship. Impossibly so. It reminds me of when people claim the Bible stories of Jesus are definitely all totally true because they’re from eye-witness accounts, including events that happen without anyone around to eye-witness them. He sweat blood? Really? You watched him and Satan hang out in the desert? Sure you did. Seriously, the amount of time that narratorwhatshisname spends watching Dean and Anne-Marie have sex…there’s a lot of sex. With an audience. Wait, am I also the audience? So, anyway, Poetryworld, another from the CUE Books archives that I’ve failed until now to read. And I should have gotten to it sooner because I loved Posh Lust and Louis Cabri is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Poetryworld hurts my head, like a long series of tongue-twisters for my brain. I enjoyed this collection a lot. Worth picking up a copy, and I know where you can get one.

week five
My physiotherapist suggested that I try the Strava app to go with my Fitbit so I did a few runs and I’m confused. The thing on my wrist tracks what I’m doing and then it syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and Strava syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and the two take the same data and come up with remarkably different results. The distances are often close, but you’d think they’d be exactly the same, no? The times and splits, close. The calories burned, well, not close at all. And that’s fine because I assume that they’re both just guessing, really. But the information going into both apps is the same information from the same source. The only thing that I can think of is that the Fitbit dashboard is lying to Strava, but that doesn’t make much sense because Strava tends to be a bit more generous on the time tracking. And waaay more generous on the calories burned. I used to pay more attention to that caloric burn, because I would think that if nothing else I’d earned enough metabolical reserve for that post-gin-and-tonic bottle of wine. Doesn’t matter much, what with currently doing–and killing at, I might add–sober February. But if I start doing hot yoga, someone just put me out of my misery.