Tag: Alex Hutchinson

2019 week ten

Book Read
10. The Hungry Brain – Stephan Guyenet

Kilometres Ran
week ten – 54.4

2019 to Date: 418 KM

I was interested in this book after seeing it on an Alex Hutchinson (Sweat Science) “not a best-of-2018” list, rather the books he liked in 2018. (Sounds familiar….) It’s safe to expect a couple more from his list to appear here in the future. The subject interests me in a cursory way. Guyenet is a respected, though not uncontroversial, obesity and neuroscience researcher who subscribes to the “calories-in-calories-out” model, which has always made the most sense to me anecdotally. I say not uncontroversial because for reasons I don’t know calories in/out is not universally accepted, and as you can imagine when it comes to things like obesity, there’s a lot of yelling from the differing sides. In The Hungry Brain, Guyenet explores the many reasons why the “calories-in” part is so damn hard for a lot of people, and the socio-economic structures that don’t help very much at all. This is a good book but I think it could have been shorter.

I have consistently terrible luck with race photos. I would much rather have a few decent race photos than a(nother) t-shirt or finisher’s medal. Then this year WestVanRun took like 5,000 photos over the two days and I found this one that I don’t appear to have body dysmorphia or I’m stuck behind some dude or dudette, and I kind of like it.

Eight weeks until BMO Vancouver Marathon. I’m not much of a social runner but one of the resolutions I made in 2018 was to be a bit more of a social runner. It went okay. Coach proposed I join the group workouts and after a couple Wednesdays on the alternative (cycle-trainer to nowhere) I relented (self-deprecating revisionist history is fun). As luck would have it, Wednesday ended up being a wet snowstorm. I showed up exhausted mentally and physically, made it through a 3K warm up, then hit the track for 8 x 600 / 200 and to someone who knows what they’re doing that seems pretty simple but I had naddaclue. (In case you’re like me, it’s 600 metres hard (1.5 loops) then 200 metres easy (half loop) eight times.) So I did my first set not with the fastest group but the second fastest and pretty quickly realized that I’m not that fast so I joined the third for two through eight. And it went okay but I was dead by the end and while everyone was friendly and supportive I still found it a rather humbling experience. I’m looking forward to next week. For two reasons, the second being that I signed up for a bit of redemption after the WestVanRun 5K train fiasco. The St. Patrick’s Day 5K goes Saturday morning in Stanley Park and while the course isn’t quite as flat as West Van the only train anywhere nearby is the kids’ one and I’m pretty sure the course doesn’t cross those tracks. Another crack at an official sub 20:00 in a 5K race, no luck required.

2019 week one

Book Read
1. 80/20 Running – Matt Fitzgerald

Kilometres Ran
80.6

Reading and writing goals for 2019

I’ve decided to aim steady and read 52 books again in 2019 and write about them weekly here. I’ve been doing this blog for three years now and I’m pretty happy to have found a rhythm that seems to be working, which is to write on Sundays about my week, or on Mondays on those weeks that have a holiday long weekend. Some weeks had multiple books and a couple weeks had no books. Some weeks I struggled to write about books I really didn’t like. I read a lot of stuff in addition to books, so this year I might write about interesting stuff I read on those weeks I don’t feel like slagging the book I read. But we’ll see how that works out. And perhaps this year I will go back to writing something for publication elsewhere, or as it’s commonly known, [actual] publication.

Running goals for 2019

Last year I set three really ambitious goals for running, and I didn’t achieve any of them. In 2018 I set new personal bests in 5 KM (new), 10 KM (by 1:02), 21.1 KM (by 6:07), and 42.2 KM (by 8:42). This year I want to beat all of those and when I look at by how much I set new bests in 2018, my 2019 goals seem attainable. What were really ambitious goals last year, this year seem they’re somewhere within the realm of possibility:
5 KM in 19:59
10 KM in 39:59
21.1 KM in 1:29:59
42.2 KM in 3:14:59

In order to achieve these times I’m going to need to train smart and stay healthy. In 2018 I read a lot of Alex Hutchinson and he seemed to write a lot about the seemingly counterintuitive importance of running slow in order to build endurance and speed so I picked up an epub of Matt Fitzgerald’s book 80/20 Running and he convinced me to give it a shot so SC picked up a hard copy for me because my iPad pencil is still a Staedtler and not an iPencil or whatever. When it comes to certain things I still prefer analogue.

The past two years I’ve traveled to a race (Copenhagen, 2017) and raced while travelling (Helsinki, 2018). (I don’t count Victoria as travelling to a race because I go there pretty often and it sort of feels like a Vancouver suburb.) I want to travel-to-race or race-while-travelling at least once again this year but I haven’t quite nailed down the one(s). (There’s a very high contender already, though.)

But in order to achieve my time goals I’m going to have to run more than a few races this year. Last year, I was surprised to find, I ran 10 races. This year I want to try to run at least one per month. I have most of them Staedtlered into my Moleskine calendar but I also want to keep my options open. For now, this is what I have on the horizon:
January – Icebreaker 8 KM
February – First Half Half Marathon
March – WestVanRun 5 KM + 10 KM
April – April Fool’s Half Marathon
May – BMO Marathon
June – Scotiabank Half Marathon

Final goal isn’t really a goal…I will run 2,019 KM in 2019. It’s not really a goal because it’s not even a challenge anymore. Unless I quit running or get really seriously injured. The first is pretty unlikely. The second is always possible (especially how Vancouver drivers respect a pedestrian crossing) but I feel pretty confident that I have the tools now to manage any misstep. I don’t want to set a lofty distance goal for a bunch of reasons. First, if I have a hope of chasing my time goals, I am going to have to put in a ton of milage. Second, last fall I started bicycle commuting to the office and I really liked it so I want to do that a lot more this year. I’m pretty fair-weather on my bike, but once it gets consistently nice out it is going to cut into my running (my office commute is 45 KM round trip). Finally, I feel like, from experience, having a lofty annual distance goal in the back of my mind spurs me to go run when my body is saying it needs a break and, in the past, has exacerbated some injuries. So I’m setting a lowball goal. Some people reading this probably think 52 books is a lowball goal. Whatever, let’s get going.

2018 week fifty one

My year in reading

After a few attempts at reading 95 Books, and failing with diminishing returns year upon year, I opted for 2018 to read 52 books, or a book a week so that I’d always have a book to write about. I didn’t always have a book to write about (more on that later) but I did exceed my goal, reading 54 books this year. I like reading best of lists, but I do not like writing them, so I’ve decided to pick a favourite from my three big categories: books about running, fiction & poetry, and non-fiction. These are my three favourites that I read in 2018, two of which actually came out in 2018 and have found their way onto other people’s best/favourite lists.

Favourite running book

Endure Cover Image
Endure – Mind, Body and the Curious Elastic Limits of Human Performance
By Alex Hutchinson
Buy it Here.

I’m a big fan of Hutchinson’s Sweat Science columns in Outside magazine and his sometimes appearances in the Globe and Mail. I loved this book, and it’s responsible for one of my two favourite quotes regarding endurance that I still think about all the time:

Do you notice he’s not dead? What does that tell you? It means he could have run faster.

Also, cyclists are batshit crazy.

PS – my other favourite quote regarding endurance comes from Olympian and Mile2Marathon coach Dylan Wykes, whom sadly the Vancouver running community lost this year…to Ottawa.

Slowing down just means it hurts for longer.

These voices in my head got me over a 5K and 42.2K finish line this year but more about that in 2018 week fifty two, my year in running.

Favourite fiction & poetry book

Split Tooth Cover
Split Tooth
By Tanya Tagaq
Buy it Here

Split Tooth is a mashup of fiction, mythology, and poetry by the Polaris Prize winning, multi-discipline artist Tanya Tagaq. It follows a young woman growing up in the harsh climate of small town Nunavut in the ’70s and takes the reader down the rabbit hole. It is a captivating read.

Favourite non-fiction book

This Naked Mind Cover
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness, & Change Your Life
By Annie Grace
Buy it Here

I had very little confidence in this book and its lofty claims on the cover, but when the time was right I gave it a shot and haven’t looked back since. I don’t know if it’s for everyone but it worked for me, and when I wrote about it on here back in week eleven of this year I did not expect it would go on to be the most read piece on here. By a lot. I’ve been amazed by the reaction. Maybe this is something that you’ve been thinking about. Maybe you have questions. I cannot promise I have answers but I’ll try, and I made a promise that I wouldn’t become a dick about it. So far…so good…. You can DM me via social media Insta: toddnickel Twitter: @toddnickel FB: toddreadrunwrite or leave a comment on here.

The year that was

I read 20 more books than last year, and it felt like a lot less poetry (eight of my 34 books in 2017 were poetry) but it turns out feelings are crap since I read nine poetry books in 2018. I suspect that I will read around the same number in 2019 since there’s plenty of poetry that I want to read that is sitting in my to read pile and on my to buy list. One big difference between this year and past has to do with what I just wrote about above. Not drinking means I have a lot more time and energy for reading. More reading and less nauseous snoozing on public transit.

Goodreads gives a rather pathetic breakdown of my year in reading here. Here’s a rather pathetic breakdown of my own:
Poetry: 9
By women: 25
By *straight white* dudes: 20
About Donald Trump: 2
About running: 6

*I admit that I am making some assumptions with regards to straight and white when I come up with this number and I’m entirely comfortable with that.

All the books I read (and wrote about) in 2018 in the order I wrote about them on here:

  1. The Argonauts
  2. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  3. Nick Cave: Mercy on Me
  4. Fire and Fury
  5. Find You in the Dark
  6. Sapiens
  7. American War
  8. Freshwater
  9. Son of a Trickster
  10. Mad Blood Stirring
  11. This Naked Mind
  12. Full Disclosure
  13. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  14. From Here to Eternity
  15. The Mars Room
  16. Steal it Back
  17. Further Problems with Pleasure
  18. Ariel
  19. My Ariel
  20. Angel of the Underground
  21. Lost in Stockholm
  22. By Night in Chile
  23. The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances
  24. How to Lose a Marathon
  25. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls
  26. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
  27. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
  28. Hunger
  29. Ayiti
  30. What Made Maddy Run
  31. Run Forever
  32. Endure
  33. Blown
  34. Less
  35. Runner: Harry Jerome, World’s Fastest Man
  36. Nightwood
  37. The Book of Repulsive Women
  38. Believe Me
  39. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
  40. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
  41. The Age of Briggs & Stratton
  42. Autonomous
  43. Katerina
  44. Fear: Trump in the White House
  45. The Rule of Stephens
  46. When Running Made History
  47. Split Tooth
  48. R’s Boat
  49. Instructions for a Funeral
  50. The Tiger Flu
  51. French Exit
  52. Milk and Honey
  53. The Sun and Her Flowers
  54. The Italian Teacher

Next week: my year in running.