Tag: Scotiabank Half Marathon

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.

2019 week twenty six

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week twenty six – 44.6

2019 to date: 1,245 KM

Even with a long weekend in hand I come ill prepared to write something here. I’ve been thinking a lot about reading and writing about it and sometimes I think that maybe it would be interesting to write about some of the interesting stuff that I read each week that is not in a book, and maybe not be so fixated on reading a book a week so that I will have a book to write about every week. I actually do have a book that I just finished that I have a few things that I want to write about just not today. But maybe I’m just lazy.

With my laziness in mind and today being Canada Day I decided to House to Grouse which I totally thought was a thing except I didn’t see a single person I follow on Strava do it today so I began thinking that maybe I thought it up and somehow managed to forget that I thought it up. Then I went to a Canada Day BBQ this afternoon and someone there had also done House to Grouse today (and I “did it wrong” apparently) and I mean I really should have known because “House to Grouse” is kind of a bit too clever for me to have thought up even accidentally. All that to say that this morning I woke up and biked (aka “did it wrong”) up to Grouse Mountain and then did the Grouse Grind and then biked back home. And it was fun. I mean, there was a section climbing up Nancy Greene Way when I thought, “this was a stupid idea.” But I was wrong because right now it feels sort of gratifying to have done it.

I’ve written I don’t know how many times on here about my terrible luck with race photos and wouldn’t you know it lightning struck again when I got my Marathon Photos from last Sunday’s Scotiabank Half Marathon. I flipped through the deck and as usual most are terrible and the others are just meh. Then I got an email from the race organizers Canada Running Series saying one of my photos was free! I figure that I would see what I could do with the least terrible one. However, I don’t get to choose my least terrible photo. Instead, Marathon Photos chose the free one for me. Have a look at the selection below and see if you can guess which one is my free photo.

As you can tell from the watermarks, I didn’t even bother downloading the free photo. Then I was on social media somewhere and found Dave Mallari who is a local photographer and he’d set himself up at around the 20KM point on the course and posted an album to his website. I had a look for anyone who I might know, not expecting to find me because I’ve already beaten the dead horse named Todd’s Photo Luck (it’s a weird name) and then I found this photo and I like it a lot and it’s so much better than any one from Marathon Photos so I gave Mallari my money instead.