Tag: Scotiabank Half Marathon

week twenty two + twenty three + twenty four

Books Read:
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery

Kilometres Ran:
these weeks — 133.27
to date — 825.96

It feels a bit like cheating at solitaire but I’m justifying it because I’ve fallen behind farther than I had ever wanted and this seems like the easiest way to get sort of caught up and move on and hope that this is just another blip along the way. Suffice it to say, I’ve done little reading and even littler writing. I should have just quit or postponed The Elegance of the Hedgehog because I simply did not feel like reading it. And not because the book was bad–on the contrary, it’s quite good–but simply because I was not in the mood to read it. But I stubbornly trudged on, if by stubbornly trudging I mean to say that I took nearly a month to get through it. And by get through it I must admit the latter third involved a lot of skimming towards the finish line. I should have put it aside and moved on to something else. But I didn’t and I do sort of regret it because it’s a good book. It was simply not a book I felt like reading in May and June, for whatever reason. And for that I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will take a miracle to get to 95 books this year. All is not lost. But 95 seems an unattainably long way off.
week twenty four
Running, on the other hand, I’ve not much faltered in the inspiration there. I’ve nearly erased the injury losses I suffered at the beginning of this adventure, and it’s looking like I’m going to be close to 1,000 km by mid-year. I do have two weeks in October whilst prancing through Scandinavia that is going to throw a hiccup into the plan–not a lot of running in prancing. But I’m hoping to front-load some credit into all of that. The other day I set out for a run and noticed that my Surge battery ws nearly dead so I took along my iPhone with WalkTracker Pro installed as a back up. My Surge survived, but the numbers at the end of the run were rather frustrating. Not only were the many of the splits between the two devices way off, by the end of a almost 12 km or over 13 km run (depending on whom your believe) the two were off by nearly 500 metres. And then of course Strava chimes in with its nonsense that barely correlates with either of the other two. So I have no idea what my actual distance is and I don’t know what the solution is. To make it more confusing, I’m to understand that my Fitbit uses my iPhone’s GPS when I connect them. So now I have three different numbers from essentially the same device. At least the overall times are the same across the three. Well, within a few seconds but I chock that up to a lack of button pressing synchronicity. The Scotiabank half marathon is next weekend. I’ve very curious to see what kind of time I can complete.

week eighteen

Books Read:
29. The Trouble with Brunch — Shawn Micallef
30. M Train — Patti Smith

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 42.81
to date — 558.44

Hey here’s an idea let’s go spend the majority of Sunday’s midday standing in line outside of some kitsch-decored otherwise hole-in-the-wall restaurant so we can pay $15 for $1.50 worth of poached eggs and fried potatoes. I guess the other $12 goes toward the shitty service? Nope, you have to tip for that. Anyway, I never ever liked going out for brunch. I don’t worship at the cult of bacon. And I pretty much agree with everything else that Micallef writes in this book. But especially his hatred of brunch. That’s okay because I know a lot of people that hate even the idea of running. I really liked Just Kids and so I thought that I would really like M Train but I did not. I found it dreadfully boring, and for some reason the Patti Smith voice in my head the whole time I was reading this was this whiny, dramatic, annoying voice that seemed perpetually on the verge of catastrophe, even if that catastrophe was something as mundane as someone sitting at “her” table at the coffee shop she frequents. I feel her pain; I used to love to spend my Saturday mornings in Kamloops having a coffee and reading on a street bench in the middle of the 200-block of Victoria Street in Kamloops and I’d be pretty disappointed to get there and see that it was already occupied. But not quite Patti-Smith-disappointed. I read that people disliked the overly romanticized (revisionist?) historicity of Just Kids but I didn’t mind. Plus, at the risk of alienating any photographer friends that might be reading this, I kind of like Robert Mapplethorpe. He’s a tragic story to say the least, and yet somehow I didn’t get that from the invariably tragic Patti Smith. But who am I kidding? Nobody is reading this, much less any artist acquaintance. Anyway, since no one’s reading this anyway, all aboard the M Train to Yawnville.
week eighteen
So it happened that on Sunday, May 1, I dragged my ass out of bed at 5 a.m. not to stand in line for brunch but rather to go to Queen Elizabeth Park and stand in a corral with a couple thousand other geniuses waiting for a 7 a.m. gun to tell us it was time to spend the next couple hours running 21.1 kilometres. But to each their own, I suppose. The BMO Half Marathon was my first official half marathon and it was really great. I’d been looking forward to this race ever since I registered back in November, immediately after purchasing the XBoxOne/Fallout4 bundle. I figured I needed to strike a balance. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d won a Platinum race package from Air France and all that I will say about it is if I had actually paid the extra $100 it cost (as 199 other people did) I probably would have asked for my money back. Not worth it. At all. Otherwise, the race was really great. I learned that I might need to add a few more hills to my running repertoire, and reconfirmed that I need a sippy-cup if I want to stay hydrated and not attempt some unerotic-asphyxiation. I bought one of those dorky looking fuel belts. I’ve yet to use it. When I signed up for this race back in November, I estimated my time to be 1:59. At that time, I’d never run more than 15 kilometres, so I was really guessing. I read that the average time for my age is 2:02 so I thought I’d set a goal of under two hours. A couple months ago I reassessed and set a goal of 1:49. My official time ended up being 1:46:00 and I am very happy with that. My knees cooperated the whole race, which was really great. Everything was great, right up until the last two or three kilometres when I felt like a pylon as runner after runner passed me. I need to work on my end game. Hills-hydration-finish. I have a few weeks until the Scotiabank Half Marathon at the end of June.

week twelve

Books Read:
24. The Shadow of the Wind — Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in progress)

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 36.31
to date — 379.04

I’m going to Barcelona for a week in a couple weeks and I wanted to read about Barcelona so I picked up The Shadow of the Wind and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and, perhaps, made the mistake of starting with the Zafon book. It’s okay, but I’m finding it a slow read. Mind you, it is quite a bit longer than the average book I’ve been reading of late. But I’m not really getting into it so I find that I’m not looking forward to reading it as much as I probably should. By Jonathan Ball’s “rules” in 95 Books I probably should have just given up. The story is interesting but somewhat formulaic and some of the dialogue is patronizing. Maybe it gets better.
week twelve
I ran a half marathon this week not to see if I could but to see if I felt like dying in the hours and day or so afterward and it wasn’t that bad. My time was alright too. When I signed up back in December to run the BMO half I estimated that it would take me about two hours so I entered my time guess as 1:59 and it turns out that was rather conservative. But I’m not really sure what I should be aiming for. I don’t have a goal in mind at this point and I wonder if that’s not a good approach to be taking. I’m thinking that I should aim for something between 1:45 and 1:49 for the BMO and then try to beat whatever time when I do the Scotiabank half near the end of June. Though I’m really going to have to figure out hydration if I want to not die during a summertime half marathon. I’m really bad at the science of running. I liked running because I could just go do it and that was that but now I have to warm up and stretch after and eat and drink “properly” and pay attention to what I eat before I run (usually nothing, which is probably a problem too) and strength training between run days and blah blah blah. It’s more work than I’d anticipated. I didn’t really anticipate anything–just point my shoes and go. I’ve learned the hard way that there’s much more to it than that.