Tag: Mile2Marathon

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.

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.