Tag: 95 Books

week twenty two + twenty three + twenty four

Books Read:
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery

Kilometres Ran:
these weeks — 133.27
to date — 825.96

It feels a bit like cheating at solitaire but I’m justifying it because I’ve fallen behind farther than I had ever wanted and this seems like the easiest way to get sort of caught up and move on and hope that this is just another blip along the way. Suffice it to say, I’ve done little reading and even littler writing. I should have just quit or postponed The Elegance of the Hedgehog because I simply did not feel like reading it. And not because the book was bad–on the contrary, it’s quite good–but simply because I was not in the mood to read it. But I stubbornly trudged on, if by stubbornly trudging I mean to say that I took nearly a month to get through it. And by get through it I must admit the latter third involved a lot of skimming towards the finish line. I should have put it aside and moved on to something else. But I didn’t and I do sort of regret it because it’s a good book. It was simply not a book I felt like reading in May and June, for whatever reason. And for that I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will take a miracle to get to 95 books this year. All is not lost. But 95 seems an unattainably long way off.
week twenty four
Running, on the other hand, I’ve not much faltered in the inspiration there. I’ve nearly erased the injury losses I suffered at the beginning of this adventure, and it’s looking like I’m going to be close to 1,000 km by mid-year. I do have two weeks in October whilst prancing through Scandinavia that is going to throw a hiccup into the plan–not a lot of running in prancing. But I’m hoping to front-load some credit into all of that. The other day I set out for a run and noticed that my Surge battery ws nearly dead so I took along my iPhone with WalkTracker Pro installed as a back up. My Surge survived, but the numbers at the end of the run were rather frustrating. Not only were the many of the splits between the two devices way off, by the end of a almost 12 km or over 13 km run (depending on whom your believe) the two were off by nearly 500 metres. And then of course Strava chimes in with its nonsense that barely correlates with either of the other two. So I have no idea what my actual distance is and I don’t know what the solution is. To make it more confusing, I’m to understand that my Fitbit uses my iPhone’s GPS when I connect them. So now I have three different numbers from essentially the same device. At least the overall times are the same across the three. Well, within a few seconds but I chock that up to a lack of button pressing synchronicity. The Scotiabank half marathon is next weekend. I’ve very curious to see what kind of time I can complete.

week twenty

Books Read:
33. Poverty Creek Journal — Thomas Gardner
34. Serpentine Loop — Elee Kraljii Gardiner
35. Ignite — Kevin Spenst

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 45.97
to date — 653.13

I don’t know anything about figure skating but I do like dance and I played hockey for a decade or so and they’re kind of a combination of the two, but Serpentine Loop has so much more to offer than just a crash course in figure-skating-meets-poetry. I really liked this book. It was launched a few weeks ago along with Kevin Spenst’s Ignite at a mediocre hipster joint in the old Heatley Block building on East Hastings, the best part of which (other than the poetry that eve) is certainly the Ola Volo piece on the wall above the bar. We sat at the bar for a little while then I leaned over to SC and said not too subtly that if the bartender ever decided to ask us hat we’d like to drink that I would have the pilsner on tap and that I was going over to the book sales table for a sec. He heard me. The dirty looks and curiously the service level both increase dramatically.
week twenty
There’s this entry in Thomas Gardner’s running journal where in he comments about how unfriendly the runners are compared to his frequent trails in and around Poverty Creek and I got to thinking that the Seawall isn’t the friendliest place either though I think that’s Vancouver in general and not something particular to the running community here and I use the term community loosely though that’s as much because I prefer the solitude of running and really do not understand those that can run and carry on a conversation amongst each other but every once in a while I’ll pass someone and get a wave or a head nod and once on the Burrard Bridge a high five which was a bit weird. Anyway, I’m part of the problem though I’ve started to at least acknowledge another running if we make and maintain eye contact.