Tag: 95 Books

week ten

Books Read:
20. Men Explain Things to Me — Rebecca Solnit
21. Lemon Hound — Sina Queyras

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 34.48
to date — 300.11

I didn’t plan for the one-two punch of you should really read some Virginia Woolf that came with reading Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays followed by Sina Queyras’ poetry collection but I have the two literary black eyes to show for it and I don’t mind. I don’t have any excuses. None come to mind except that I just haven’t bothered to yet. I will probably rectify the situation in the near future. I’m not quite sure how I managed to avoid Woolf so completely throughout my undergraduate degree in English literature. I also didn’t know that Lemon Hound was a book of poems before(?) it was the formidable force in Canadian/feminist poetics that is the (sadly, defunct) blog lemonhound.com though the blog started in 2005 and the book was published in 2006. Defunct isn’t the right word, either, since the site is still alive, though with no new material since May 2015. I recall reading Queyras’ to social media announcing that she was moving on to other endeavors and the wave of ugh that swept through the community. It left a hole that has yet to be filled that I’m aware of at least. Maybe I’m out of touch. It happens.
week ten
I’ve been trying to keep my running interesting by mixing up my routes but it’s not really working all that well since I really only have two routes and they’re approximately the same distance but with dramatically different scenery and my decision to turn left or right is usually decided by the position of the sun in the sky when I leave my building. With Daylight Savings on the near horizon about to push the sun away from its horizon that could change, but for now it’s left for the lit path if the sun sets before I finish, and right if it’s a morning or midday run. They look like this.
Turn Left
This one takes me over the Burrard Bridge the then down (up?) Cypress Street connecting to the Seawall path at the Maritime Museum then around Science World and back to English Bay. It’s a nice, flat run with the exception of the climb to the middle of the bridge, and it’s lit from the bridge all the way back to English Bay (except for that part through Vanier Park). I have a headlamp for the short dark section from the north side of the Burrard Bridge to Bute Street that has garnered me a couple “TOO BRIGHT!” comments. I highbeam people. I’m a jerk.
Turn Right
This is my lit-by-the-sun option. Although I have said headlamp, I prefer to use it sparingly. Not glaringly? [groan…] This route is straight down Barclay and then under West Georgia and onto the Stanley Park Seawall. I like this run, and it’s probably my favourite especially in inclement weather when the Seawall is mostly deserted. The one part that I still find slightly deflating is when rounding Brockton Point under the lighthouse and seeing the Lions Gate Bridge way off in the distance. It looks a lot farther than it is.

week nine

Book Read:
19. The Motorcyclist — George Elliot Clarke

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 28.65
to date — 265.63

So I slowed down on the reading this past week and I cannot quite put my finger onto why that happened but it did and George Elliot Clarke is an extremely accomplished poet and the current Parliamentary Poet Laureate and this is his first novel and you’d expect it to be beautifully written and it is. Unlike that sentence. I like it when poets write novels. Still one of my favourite books is by the American poet Nick Flynn, and it has arguably one of the best titles of a novel ever: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Sometimes I’m a sucker for nostalgia, and reading Clarke’s book brought memories of one of my favourite courses in my undergraduate career — an English lit elective on motorcycles and speed in literature (think Pirsig, Guevara, etc.) peppered with contemporary philosophy via the likes of Donna Haraway and Paul Virilio. This book would have fit in nicely. (So too would have The Flamethrowers for that matter.)
week nine
Part of why I ran so little this week is just because of how the days fell and that I infrequently run two days in a row (since the “incident” in January) and partly because I’m getting sick and I don’t want to get sicker. Anyway, it’s March now and since I don’t have a whole lot to write about running this week I’m looking back on my sober February. I’m generally careful to not make the correlation=causation mistake. But Fitbit has given me some interesting data to consider. I’ve read and heard that one sleeps better sans alcohol. Well, for me at least, if Fitbit is to be trusted, is not the case. I saw no change whatsoever in my sleep patterns, in fact I found it more difficult to fall asleep at night. I did notice a change in the mornings, in that I didn’t wake up feeling like absolute garbage and spending the first few hours in a fog or grossness. But I didn’t feel “great” and “rested” and “alert” and whatever else I was “supposed to” feel. But not feeling like garbage was pretty great. The two biggest changes were in my weight and heart rate. My resting heart rate fell 14 points from the beginning of February to March, and I lost nearly eight pounds. Now I’m left wondering if pull-ups have gotten easier merely because I weigh less.