2020 week eleven

“Books” Read
7. You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack – Tom Gauld
8-12. Money Shot #1 – #5 – Tim Seeley & Sarah Beattie

Kilometres Ran
week eleven – 88.8

2020 to date: 675 KM

The COVID-19 crisis has become a worldwide pandemic and while many online suggest this is a great time to get some reading done my attention span is on lingering around comic books and video games. So I read some comic books and played a lot of XBox. Tom Gauld graces the cover of many a New Yorker collecting dust on my coffee table, and I picked up this collection from Pulp Fiction Books in the fall. This little book collects from his eight years of weekly comics in the Guardian. Dark, quirky, genius. I’m a fan. I’m also a fan of Sarah Beattie on Twitter and Instagram and (also) back in the fall she started talking about a new project with Tim Seeley. Money Shot takes place in the near future “amid an anti-science presidential administration and public apathy.” A group of five scientists cannot secure research funding and resort to raising money by producing pay-per-view intergalactic porn. Fun, funny, smut. I’m sure I’ll get back to being Mr. Serious soon enough, but for now it’s comics and XBox.

Because everything is cancelled. First, Boston got postponed, which I was a bit relieved because I was expecting it to be cancelled. I expected everyone to get deferred to 2021 and then make it virtually impossible to qualify for Boston #125. But it was postponed, for now. Then the cascade started. Yesterday’s St Pat’s 5K was cancelled, followed by the Vancouver Sun Run. I wasn’t registered in either, but disappointed regardless. Then goal race April Fool’s Run half marathon on the Sunshine Coast was postponed until August and I was really disappointed. And then the BMO Marathon in May was cancelled and I was pretty demoralized. I had registered to run it to try to get a BQ for 2021 but didn’t talk about it except with my partner and coach, and had sworn them to secrecy for various reasons. Now I’m in limbo. I had wanted to run Berlin at the end of September and enjoy it rather than put the weight of BQ onto it. Who knows if it will even happen now. So for now I’m back to running like I did in the weeks following CIM – running for the sake of running and just enjoying it like I did way back before I became hyper-competitive with myself. And that’s okay, but I’m going to miss racing, and it seems my race-each-month goal is not going to happen this year. My next races are Scotiabank Half Marathon on June 28 followed by Summerfast 10K in mid-July. If they go ahead. We’ll see.

2018 week thirty four

Book Read:
No book read

Kilometres Ran:
week thirty four — 61.5

To date: 1,792 KM

A week spend pack and hauling and so many stairs and then cleaning and unpacking and trips to recycling and managing to every now and then squeeze in a run just to maintain my mental health and I was thinking today while out for my run that I wonder if anyone that follows me on Strava is going to notices that I moved three blocks down the street. I did not get much reading done but since I’m on book 42 on here and it is week 34 that I can take a week off but I am very excited about my vastly expanded reading alcove and the gigantic outdoor space I now have. Any outdoor space would beat the nonexistent outdoor space of my last place so this is a plus but it is also really huge and I can’t wait to have a garden but I don’t know what grows in the fall so that will probably have to wait until the spring unless of course I pick up a Vancouver year-round-gardening book if such a book exists. Anyway, my body is wrecked. I ran 15 KM less than I’d wanted to this week and I feel like I ran a century. I’m tired. I could go for a vacation. Even a cruise seems nice right now, and I generally hate the very idea of a cruise. Back to chasing my fall BQ. Then maybe a vacation.

Every time I see a cruise ship I think about that bit Bill Burr does in his stand up about over-population.