Tag: Marathon Training

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 eight

Book Read
8. Bad Endings – Carleigh Baker

Kilometres Ran
week eight – 37.1

2019 to Date: 328

Bad Endings is a collection of 15 short stories by (currently) Vancouver-based writer Carleigh Baker. Many of the stories are also set in Vancouver, and one particularly depressing one is set in my hometown of Kamloops. Well, they’re all pretty depressing. The Kamloops one, though, crept up on me like, “this seems familiar, and not just the mood.” Sure, they’re dark and a few really do have bad endings but not badly written, just displeasurable – sort of like the ending of tonight’s Academy Awards that’s just wrapped up vying for my attention in the background. Baker has another piece (that I’m now even more looking forward to reading) in the Vancouver Noir collection that’s currently sitting in the to-read pile.

Ten weeks to go before the BMO Marathon and I’m still spending equal time riding a bicycle to nowhere as I am running. And could spinning a cycle training be any more boring? I thought that pool jogging was bad. Actually, pool jogging is probably worse. At least on a cycle trainer I can zone into something rather than just zoning out. So with a couple elastic bands I strapped my iPad onto the handlebars and cued up Netflix and tried to distract myself from the fact that not only am I not going anywhere, but on a whatever-the-opposite-of-smart-is cycle trainer there is zero coasting. Too bad The Punisher doesn’t have less coasting. I mean it’s okay but pick up the pace, please. Anyway, while BMO is t-minus-ten, WestVanRun is just one week away and just last night I noticed that they’ve changed up the courses for both the 5K and 10K both of which I’m going to race, and they look really fast. My plan was to chase a sub 20 in the 5K and go have a fun run for the 10K but now I’m wondering about chasing a 10K PB too the following day. I have no idea how that will go, but I really want to give both a try. I’m not letting Baker write the finale, though.

2019 week seven

Book Read
7. Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney

Kilometres Ran
week seven – 38.4

2019 to Date: 291 KM

I’m reminded of when Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? started getting armchair reviews from casual readers who hated it because they expected it to be a self-help book and they learned nothing about how to behave. That has nothing to do, per se, with Sally Rooney except to ask, is Rooney the Irish Heti? I find their style very similar, not to mention their telling of contemporary life. Rooney was born in Ireland and lives in Dublin, the primary setting of the book, which follows the narrator Frances and her self-absorbed friend Bobbi. Much like Heti’s breakout book, Rooney’s Conversations With Friends is a rather polarizing novel, with many people hating the pace, events, and characters. And while I too find some of the characters grating – I loathe Bobbi, for instance – I am on the love-it side of the continuum for this novel, and I’m looking forward to reading Rooney’s new novel Normal People after it is released in Canada in April.

Kiboshed plans for a double Stanley Park Seawall loop long run on Sunday. (The white streak in the water in the background is a capsized boat with a half dozen paddlers having a much worse day than I am.)

After racing the First Half Marathon last weekend, this week was pretty relaxed. Not because I wanted it to be but rather because I’m trying to do as I’m told, which is just as difficult as it sounds. After over three weeks straight of running every day, this week I was relegated to three short and one long run. It feels like a set back but I have to trust that I’m in good hands and I realize that all of this sounds rather vague because it is, because that’s all I want to put down about it for now. It’s now eleven weeks until the BMO Marathon and while I’ve been filling my non-running days (and some of my running days, too) with riding my bicycle, it feels like I should be running a lot more than four times, for under 40 KM in a week. Trust has never really been my forté.