Tag: Half Marathon

2019 week nineteen

Book Read
21. Dear Current Occupant – Chelene Knight

Kilometres Ran
week nineteen – 26.4

2019 to date: 931 KM

Dear Current Occupant is an award-winning creative non-fiction memoir that I had in my poetry pile to read during National Poetry Month and then found that it’s not actually poetry, but it has some poems sprinkled here and there. Knight traces her childhood growing in Vancouver by retracing the places she lived and writing to people currently living there. I don’t know if she ever actually gave any of the writing to the current occupant. It doesn’t matter. I liked this book. It’s a bit weird to me that such a Vancouver-centric book has a Toronto publisher. It does make me wonder if it was turned down by any local publishers. And then it goes on to win the 2018 City of Vancouver Book Award. I liked this book very much. If you follow the link above you can see a video of Knight reading from it. And then you can roam around the Book*hug website because don’t let Toronto fool you, they’re pretty great.

BMO Vancouver Marathon 2019, at about 37.5 KM just before Lumberman’s Arch. Other than the salty shoulders I look way better than I felt. Photo by Taylor Maxwell

A week ago was the BMO Vancouver Marathon and I’ve spent most of the week riding a rather high runner’s high expecting a crash that still hasn’t come. One reason for the continued high is the number of people that sent photos from the race. The BMO Vancouver Marathon uses the running photography cartel Marathon-Photo but I often get suckered. There’s usually one or two that are just okay but on the whole the photos are terrible. I don’t know how they manage to be so terrible so often. So I am so extremely grateful to the people who saw and recognized me on the course and snapped a photo and then sent them to me or posted them online. I’ve reposted a bunch on my Instagram but included my three most vanity stroking selections above and below.

In the finish area, post-race-drunk-talking to Debra Kato and Walter Downey. When I first saw these photos I couldn’t remember this moment at all. Bits are coming back now. Photos by Debra Kato.

I didn’t run much this week but I managed to put around 115 KM on my bicycle. I ran Wednesday and today (Sunday) and both days the legs were lead but the runs were really enjoyable, especially considering the last time I ran a marathon I could barely walk afterwards, and couldn’t run for nearly a month. In three days I’m getting on a jet plane and flying to Paris and then getting on a train ride to Basel, Switzerland where in seven days I’m running the Dreiländerlauf half marathon, which starts and ends in Basel and passes through France and Germany. How cool does that sound? It doesn’t look like a very big race but that suits me just fine. It does look pretty flat, though it’s a couple hundred metres above sea level. Maybe those factors will even out? Maybe there’s a new HM PB? Maybe I’ll just go have fun? Definitely I’ll let you know how it went next week.

2019 week fourteen

Book Read
14. There There – Tommy Orange

Kilometres Ran
week fourteen – 51.1

2019 to date: 651 KM

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel among a host of other accolades and appearing on just about every best-of-2018 list that I came across I figured that I should probably read it because Hail to the Thief is my favourite / the best Radiohead album (don’t @ me) and then I read a bit and learned that the title is actually a reference to Gertrude Stein but by then I was already invested in the novel so I kept going. (A character does listen to the Radiohead song along the way as well, so, good taste.) There There starts out as a series of separate but interconnected short stories that come together over the course of the novel and culminate in the planned robbery of a powwow. This book doesn’t need me to heap any more praise onto it. It takes a bit to get going but it’s worth sticking around through the end. I look forward to the author’s next work.

Coming down the finish chute. Video frame from Stephanie ♥

Today was test day four weeks out from the BMO Marathon and the test I chose was the 42nd (fitting…) running of the Sunshine Coast April Fool’s Day half marathon from Gibsons to Davis Bay just south of Sechelt. I’d not run this race before, but saw a few people I follow on Strava post their results last year and I thought I’d give it a go. The course is a net downhill but they really make you work for it. This is the hilliest course I’ve run and a couple of the downhill sections were just as hard as some of the uphills. The race started at 9:17 a.m. with a bit of a hill off the bat then into a long downhill. I got off to a great start and got into a rhythm that felt really comfortable, rolling with the hills up and down, consciously trying to keep my heart rate steady. I hit halfway at 45:39 and was one second ahead of my goal pace of 4:20/km. The field had thinned out too; after some back-and-forth passing with a couple guys throughout the first half I checked my shoulder on a meandering corner at around 13.5 KM and there was no one in sight. The real challenge started at about 14 KM with the last big long hill that kept rolling up until about 17.5 KM, then it was all downhill to the finish. I got passed by an EVRC guy a bit before the peak, then almost caught him but couldn’t quite hang onto his pace. I finished 1:33:30 for a 4:25/km pace. It wasn’t the finish that I wanted, but I had a pretty strong finish, ending up with my third fastest half marathon time, on undoubtedly the toughest course I’ve run. I ended up 33rd overall for top 9% of the field, and 8th in my age group. It’s hard to not feel a wee bit disappointed with my result, but it’s a pretty great result for me, and as far as tests go I feel pretty good about where I’m at going into the marathon in May.