Tag: 95 Books

week thirty eight

Books Read:
51. XEclogue — Lisa Robertson

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 58.77
to date — 1,467.82

I haven’t finished In the Garden of Evil or whatever it is called but I’m just putting it on hiatus for a bit and I’m determined to get back to it and finish it but I just wanted to read something else for a bit. I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to bring it with me to Scandinavia. I went to Word today, formerly known as Word on the Street, formerly known as a thriving literary festival. Sad. Anyway, it wasn’t all a bust because I got to say hello to Rolf Maurer at the New Star table and catch Jen Sookfong Lee talk a bit about her craft and hear Elee Kraljii Gardiner read poems about figure skating and sex in hay bales and get Stephen Collis to sign my copy of his new book Once in Blockadia that I just picked up over at the Talonbooks table where I got to congratulate Kevin Williams for winning B.C. Publisher of the Year and run into the ineffable Jordan Abel and I wish that I would have brought my copy of Martin John along so that I could get Anakana Schofield to sign it and I’m sure that I left someone out but that’s more than enough name dropping for one run-on sentence so I went home and read the copy of XEclogue that I picked up for the steal of just $4 (thanks Rolf!).
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But before I read poetry I ran over the Lions Gate bridge for the first time after thinking about how I’d wanted to do that for a few months and it was a really nice run with the change of scenery and the long hills up and down that were pretty great. I did have a bit of a freak out as I passed the lion statues at the foot of the bridge on the Stanley Park side and the ground dropped off on my right and my acrophobia kicked in rather strongly. Or was it gephyrophobia. I wonder if you can have gephyrophobia without acrophobia. It seems like they would go hand-in-hand. I run over the Burrard Bridge pretty regularly but I’ve never really noticed the traffic exhaust but going through the Stanley Park causeway and over the bridge I really noticed the vehicle exhaust. By the time I crossed the bridge and back again it was really starting to bother me or so I let myself believe, and I had a bit of a sore throat that may be merely coincidence.

week thirty seven

Books Read:
50. In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson (oh my gawd still in progress)

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 33.93
to date — 1,409.05

Yes I’m still reading about Nazis. It’s a dense book. Well, not dense in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sort of dense, but dense. Anyway, I’m just hoping that I finish it before I fly off to Stockholm. In three weeks. I swear, if I haven’t finish this book by then I’ll give up. Out of spite. I remember one of my English lit professors telling me about how she read War and Peace and she was about 50 pages from finishing and quit reading the book “out of spite”. Clearly, that story resonated with me. She’s an administrator now.
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Yesterday was the Eastside 10k, also known as the fifth race I’ve ever ran. I took it easy this week and felt pretty good when I left my house yesterday morning in the pouring rain. I’ve written a few times about how I prefer running in inclement weather, though that is usually more to do with the dearth or other people on the Seawall and the Eastside 10k had sold out as of Thursday. Anyway, I left with what I thought was plenty of time then to find that the line up for bag check was a block long meaning that I stood in line for about 20 minutes then made my way to the start corral with only a few minutes before the gun, which meant that I did not have nearly enough time to stand around and slip into some crowd-induced anxiety attack. I hoped to break 45 minutes in this race, a rather ambitious goal. I was feeling fine crossing the start line but I just didn’t feel like I was going to break any personal records and at the 2 km marker when the 45 minute pacer passed me I just settled in for a decent time. And it went all good. The rain was great and the route was great. A few times it felt a little slippery but it was all great and around half way I thought of quickening my pace and then at six a little more and then at seven and the whole time I was in my head comparing the route and its rolling hills to the rolling hills along Dallas Drive in Victoria and I kept trying to figure out if I was was running Stanley Park where would I be right now and then I can around a corner the there was the 45 minute pacer a couple hundred metres ahead and I thought maybe I could catch him and not die and just past 9 km near the bottom of the Dunsmuir Viaduct I passed him I crossed the finish line and clicked off my Fitbit Surge and of course it recorded that I’d only ran 9.98 km and then passed that same lie on to Strava so neither recorded my new personal record of 44:56 chip time for a 10 km run. I think that the Eastside 10k is my favourite race and I really cannot wait for my Chronos to arrive.