Tag: Marathon Training

2019 week thirty three

Books Read
31. The Knockoff Eclipse – Melissa Bull
32. Speedboat – Renata Adler

Kilometres Ran
week thirty three – 53.6

2019 to date: 1,559 KM

I first encountered Melissa Bull a couple years ago when she was in town to read poetry for an Anvil Press event at the Railway Club downtown and then read her translation of Nelly Arcan’s Burqa of Skin and then her poetry collection Rue that maybe contained something from her Railway Club reading but I honestly cannot recall for certain. Anyway I picked up Knockoff at the East Van Publishers Christmas party and finally got around to picking through it. It’s Bull’s first collection of short stories and it’s good in that contemporary style of abrupt vignettes presented as stories, like flipping through weeknight primetime television and pausing on a program for a minute or two before moving on to the next one, back when television wasn’t all on-demand. I’ve written a few times here previously my finding short story collections a bit weird for various reasons and weird isn’t really the correct word. What would happen, for instance, if you took Bull’s collection and just smashed it all together (or is it altogether)? Well, something a lot like Speedboat. Adler’s first novel was the second ever recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award back in 1977. The novel, if you can really call it that, follows journalist Jen Fain in first-person as she navigates contemporary upper-middle class American life. It takes a bit to get used to, but once you find your flow Speedboat is an exceptional novel that I am sure every editor working today would have chopped up into two dozen or more short stories.

In the Seawheeze start corral with Katie Gordon. We considered swapping bibs. I don’t know what Rose is doing either. Photo by Gary Franco.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about easing into fall marathon training and not racing in August and thereby forgoing my goal to race every month in 2019 but justifying it with the fact that I’ve already race 13 times this year and I have registered for seven more (actually eight but who’s counting…) and that I had won the entry lottery for Seawheeze but had declined it and now you’re all caught up. So Friday evening my youngest brother was in town because his partner and her sister and father were running Seawheeze and I said I planned to maybe try to take some photos along the route and then he asked where’s a good spot to watch and oh Gordon’s hurt and cannot run do you want his bib? So about eight hours before gun I decided to run Seawheeze. Fortunately I had earlier decided against shawarma for dinner, but I hadn’t exactly fuelled and rested properly, and if I’d had any inkling that I’d be racing I definitely wouldn’t have hammered my Wednesday workout with the Mile2Marathon crew.

That Burrard Bridge is exhausting…mid yawn midway through the Seawheeze Half Marathon 2019. Photo: Tim Nickel.

I went out fast at the start to get ahead of the crowd but nothing ridiculous. I had zero game plan except to run how I felt and have a good time, and I felt great for the first few kilometres. And then the next few too. At halfway I was still on sub 90 minute pace. But over and back on Burrard Bridge took a lot out of me and my started to slip. By 18 KM I was running on fumes and then faced the little hill at Lumberman’s Arch that took the remainder out of me. I gave one last shove from the top of the slope only to find that instead of turning left to the flat of the Seawall the course veered right and another slope up and over the pedestrian bridge over Stanley Park Drive. The Seawall wind through Coal Harbour was a bit of a death march but I managed to dig out a decent sprint along Harbour Green Park to cross the finish line in 1:31:43 – good enough for an eight second personal best and 122nd overall. So while it wasn’t a great performance (top 100 might have crossed my mind over the first 5K) it was still the fastest half marathon I’ve ever run, and I’m very please with my fitness level at the start of a new marathon build. Plus it was a whole lot of fun. Maybe next year I won’t decline the entry if my name’s drawn again.

2019 week thirty two

Book Read
30. The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead

Kilometres Ran
week thirty two – 48.4

2019 to date: 1,506 KM

I don’t remember why I was listening to Q on CBC Radio 1 the other day and post-creep what’s his name was interviewing Whitehead about this book and I had never heard an interview with him before nor had I read any of his books though The Underground Railroad has been floating on the periphery of my to read list / pile for a while but The Nickel Boys grabbed my attention and not just for the title. I read it in a couple days because (1) it’s more of a novella than a novel and (2) it’s completely captivating. It tells the story of two boys who end up being sentenced to Florida reform school during Jim Crow and the beginning of the rise of the Civil Rights movement. The Nickel Boys is a fictionalize account of the horrific treatment alleged to have actually taken place at the Dozier School for Boys. I recommend this book. I expect it to be on a few best of the year lists.

I have no new photos running this week or last week so please enjoy this photo documentation of why my knees hate me as I cross the finish line at Take the Bridge back in July, as captured by @gconnelie

Marathon build number four officially started this week and what’s become apparent almost instantly is that I’m going to struggle with balancing running and cycling and that is not something that I ever expected to have happen. But I also didn’t expect to be cycle-commuting to and from the office nearly everyday, weather permitting (and weather has permitted a lot this summer). The problem is that after an 80-minute, 34 KM bike ride home from the office each evening I’m not really in the mood to go for a jog around Stanley Park. I’ve come up with a few solutions. Best is that I go back to running a lunch time. The problem is that I can maybe squeeze in 40-45 minutes at the most and should probably be sticking closer to 30 minutes. I did this on Friday. It was okay, but I was pretty tired for the cycle home at the end of the day. Second best solution is to bike in a bit earlier and then run before starting work. I don’t think I could get more than 30 minutes in doing that, but I haven’t tried it yet. The rest are crap for various reasons. I could run the 11.5 KM from Braid Skytrain Station to the office but then I’m stuck riding transit all the way home in the evening (which is awful). I could drive the car, but I really like not driving, or perhaps hate driving, plus the car isn’t insured for to/from work so I could only do that six time per month anyway and frankly I really like how much my commute costs on a bicycle. What it really comes down to is striking a balance between getting the marathon build work done and my utter loathing having to take public transit from Port Coquitlam to the West End Vancouver. It’s awful, and I already dread that it’s my fate from mid-November until late March.

2019 week seventeen

Books Read
17. Trauma Head – Elee Kraljii Gardiner
18. Prison Industrial Complex Explodes – Mercedes Eng
19. Port of Being – Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Kilometres Ran
week seventeen – 49.5

2019 to date: 835 KM

April is National Poetry Month, which was started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets and shortly there after was picked up on by the League of Canadian Poets, and which I cannot recall knowing about until after my departure from The Capilano Review, which is weird to me but probably anyone reading this is thinking are you starting a coven? that’s too many whiches, which is now making me wonder if since it’s witches is it really whiches or is it whichs. I suppose I could look it up but I’m not sure I’ll find what I’m looking for. All that to say that I thought that April would be a good time to pick up a few of the poetry collections that have been languishing in my to-read pile for a while, and all three of these women I first discovered through The Capilano Review. As it turns out, I am one of the lucky few to have a copy of the handmade Trauma Head chapbook and by turns out lucky I mean I didn’t know that there were only 50 made. EKG expanded the work into a full book that explores her near-death experience and recovery from having a stroke. I loved the bits of Kierkegaard sprinkled through it too. Eng’s 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-winning book provides a scathing critique of the prison system and its institutionalized racism. It is deeply personal, pulling from correspondence with her incarcerated father. SHR’s Port of Being is a short collection with plenty of depth and won the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. I enjoyed peering into these pieces and finding little bits of Vancouver inside. I have a few more poetry collections on the go so my poetry month might spill over into May.

Splashy splash

Yesterday I go onto a Mobi bike and rode over to Kitsilano and then ran the last 16 KM of the BMO Vancouver Marathon route from Point Grey Road over the Burrard Bridge and around Stanley Park clockwise ending up at the corner of Pender and Bute and it was a bit of an adventure thanks to winds between 40 and 50 KM/H that were in my face for most of the route. As I rounded the Seawall east of the Lions Gate Bridge park rangers were in the process of closing it down. Suffice it to say all fingers are crossed and all wood knocked for not that sort of weather next weekend. And so begins the constant weather app checking. With a week for meteorologists to finish making up their mind it is currently looking cool and wet with a bit of a breeze. Given the choice between that and the heat of last year, I’ll take the wet though I’d really prefer it to be merely cool and damp. On Wednesday I was back at the Point Grey track with the Mile2Marathon crew and had a good workout and then just as good conversation with Coach Kevin about May 5 and since then and including yesterday I’m feeling pretty good about how things might go down in a week. I’m also inspired by results from last night’s London Marathon and this morning’s marathon in Eugene, OR where a handful of Strava friends and M2M teammates ran excellent races posting results that have me excited for them, as well as feeling the pressure to perform just as well. I’m looking forward to finding out.