Tag: BMO Vancouver Marathon

2019 week five

Book Read
5. Motherhood – Sheila Heti

Kilometres Ran
week five – 40.0

2019 To Date: 198 KM

I suppose it shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise that I did not really enjoy reading a couple hundred pages about someone trying to decide whether on not to have a child but while I am no fan of children (in spite of the fact that people seem really excited to point out that I once was one as if that is the best argument that they can come up with) I am a fan of Sheila Heti, going back to her telephone conversation with Thea Bowering that appeared in The Capilano Review Issue 3:22 along with a really great short story called The Girl Who Planted Flowers. There were times reading Motherhood that I enjoyed and other times that I did not and quite a few times when I wondered if I’d misplaced the bookmark because damned if I hadn’t already read this once before. I’m glad that I read it and I’m not surprised that it was shortlisted for the 2018 Giller Prize but I’m forced to wonder if I give this book a pass because I’m a Heti fan. It is probably true that I would not have picked it up if it was written by another author.

Lunchtime at the office.

When I met with my physiotherapist last she said that if stuff was going okay that I am allowed to start increasing distance so I’ve made the dramatic increase from 5 KM last Sunday up to 6.6 KM today. My achilles feels okay but not great but not painful just the comes-and-goes sensation of imagine your achilles feels like dragging a string of wool across sandpaper. Not painful, but rather uncomfortable or annoying. I’ve taken the instruction to run less far, more frequently, and now have a 5-ish kilometres per day streak of 16 days and I next visit my physiotherapist on Friday when I will find out if I’m allowed to run the First Half on Sunday, February 10. I am not confident permission will be granted. But I am really curious to see what will happen if I am allowed to race given that my farthest run of the past three weeks is 8 KM some 18 days ago and it’s been over three weeks since I last ran more than 11 KM. My biggest issue weighing heavily on my mind is that in it now 13 weeks until the BMO Marathon and running less than a marathon per week is definitely not going to get me across the finish line anywhere near my goal time. And as much as I like the Half course I really do not want to have to downgrade to the 21.1 again this year.

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.