Tag: Fall Classic

week forty four

Books Read:
54. H is for Hawk — Helen Macdonald

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 66.32
to date — 1,702.77

I started reading H is for Hawk and I was not expecting anything. It’s good. It’s very well written and I like the author’s voice but I didn’t read the back of the book and I didn’t know that it is a memoir and a depressing one. I guess true stories of someone’s personal experience dealing with grief are interesting. I guess. Maybe interesting isn’t the correct word. It’s probably not the word I’m looking for. I don’t remember where this book came from. It may have been a gift. Not a wrapped up with a bow gift but more of the hey here’s a stack of books that I was just going to give to goodwill and you like to read do you want to have them I mean I was just going to give them away anyway so you should take them and then if you don’t want them then you can do whatever you want with them kind of gift. You know the kind. If you’ve ever known anyone that reads a lot and if you also read a lot then you know that kind of gift pretty well, I’m willing to wager. I wrote reads a lot there and that’s sort of subjective because I really haven’t been reading a lot. I haven’t been reading much of anything lately. Maybe it’s the weather. But I think that the consensus is that this is actually pretty fine reading weather.
img_2163
This is pretty fine running weather, though. I think anyway. This is the second most distance covered in a week since I started keeping track 44 weeks ago. I was thinking about doing the Fall Classic right up until I saw the course and was turned off by it being two 10 kilometreish laps. I realize that I have basically two routes that I mentally flip a coin between and I do have a couple subtle variations but it has been years since I’ve run laps. When I first started running I would run laps at China Creek Park and did not like it at all, which is probably why early attempts at being a runner were a unmitigated failure. But I’ve also contemplated running laps of Stanley Park. So maybe I’ll regret skipping the Fall Classic. But I signed up for the Vancouver First Half in February, so there’s that.

week nineteen

Books Read:
31. Ticknor — Sheila Heti
32. Pound @ Guantanamo — Clint Burnham

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 48.72
to date — 607.16

I read Ticknor in one round-trip transit ride to-and-from work. It’s pretty short. But short is good sometimes too. You’ve noticed the amount of poetry in these posts, yes? Ticknor was not what I was expecting. It’s nothing like How Should a Person Be?. There were times when I was reading Ticknor and it felt like I was reading Kafka. My edition has an introduction by Ben Lerner and I didn’t bother reading it and then I finished Ticknor and I was around Nanaimo Station and still had another four stops on the Skytrain to go so I decided to take a look at what Benny had to say about the book and he writes that Ticknor reminds him of Kafka’s “The Next Village”. I don’t recall reading “The Next Village” and there’s a good chance that I have not. Yet, anyway. Maybe I should. I mentioned a couple weeks/posts ago the Talonbooks launch. Clint Burnham reading “No Poems on Stolen Land” from his collection Pount @ Guantanamo was far and away the best part of the evening. And most of the evening was pretty good. I like this collection. There’s a rather odd little shout-out to Poetry is Dead in the acknowledgements that I’m a bit confused by. There’s maybe a story there. Or maybe not. I really like Clint; I miss @prof_clinty in my Twitter feed.
week nineteen
Until lately I’ve been grossly ignorant about all the races, and I was lamenting the other day that it would be nice if there was a list somewhere. Well, there are a few, and I was just grossly ignorant when it came to my Googling. Be that as it may, I learned from a Skytrain Station ad that apparently if I sign up for and complete the Granville Island Turkey Trot 8 km race over Thanksgiving and the Fall Classic at UBC in mid November (probably the half marathon) then, along with the BMO ten days ago, I’ll have the RUNVAN Hat Trick. I think I might give it a shot. Registration closes on May 31 so I’ve a bit of time to decide, but I think I should just sign up before I convince myself to back out. The word “trot” though. I really dislike that word. I broke 600 kilometres somewhere around the lighthouse under the Lions Gate Bridge today, so that’s exciting. I’m 30 per cent away from my goal of 2,000 kilometres this year and 36.5 per cent through the year. I’m pretty happy with those numbers.