Tag: Strava

week thirty seven

Books Read:
50. In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson (oh my gawd still in progress)

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 33.93
to date — 1,409.05

Yes I’m still reading about Nazis. It’s a dense book. Well, not dense in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sort of dense, but dense. Anyway, I’m just hoping that I finish it before I fly off to Stockholm. In three weeks. I swear, if I haven’t finish this book by then I’ll give up. Out of spite. I remember one of my English lit professors telling me about how she read War and Peace and she was about 50 pages from finishing and quit reading the book “out of spite”. Clearly, that story resonated with me. She’s an administrator now.
week-thirty-seven
Yesterday was the Eastside 10k, also known as the fifth race I’ve ever ran. I took it easy this week and felt pretty good when I left my house yesterday morning in the pouring rain. I’ve written a few times about how I prefer running in inclement weather, though that is usually more to do with the dearth or other people on the Seawall and the Eastside 10k had sold out as of Thursday. Anyway, I left with what I thought was plenty of time then to find that the line up for bag check was a block long meaning that I stood in line for about 20 minutes then made my way to the start corral with only a few minutes before the gun, which meant that I did not have nearly enough time to stand around and slip into some crowd-induced anxiety attack. I hoped to break 45 minutes in this race, a rather ambitious goal. I was feeling fine crossing the start line but I just didn’t feel like I was going to break any personal records and at the 2 km marker when the 45 minute pacer passed me I just settled in for a decent time. And it went all good. The rain was great and the route was great. A few times it felt a little slippery but it was all great and around half way I thought of quickening my pace and then at six a little more and then at seven and the whole time I was in my head comparing the route and its rolling hills to the rolling hills along Dallas Drive in Victoria and I kept trying to figure out if I was was running Stanley Park where would I be right now and then I can around a corner the there was the 45 minute pacer a couple hundred metres ahead and I thought maybe I could catch him and not die and just past 9 km near the bottom of the Dunsmuir Viaduct I passed him I crossed the finish line and clicked off my Fitbit Surge and of course it recorded that I’d only ran 9.98 km and then passed that same lie on to Strava so neither recorded my new personal record of 44:56 chip time for a 10 km run. I think that the Eastside 10k is my favourite race and I really cannot wait for my Chronos to arrive.

week thirty two + thirty three

Books Read:
47. Installations – Nicole Brossard
48. Hysteric – Nelly Arcan

Kilometres Ran:
these weeks — 73.4
to date — 1,222.9

I need to break out of this new habit that I’ve formed of coupling multiple weeks into single posts and get back into a habit of posting once per week. Though that depends as well on me reading enough to have something to write about reading. Running doesn’t seem to be a problem, although having something interesting to say about running on a weekly basis is getting a bit trying. Anyway, two weeks, and two books with nothing in common except that they are both excellent reads, by women, originally written in french, from Quebec, and in translation. And I swear I didn’t do it on purpose. I took the Brossard along for some fill between the shouting matches I was dutifully stenographing at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation offices, as is one of the things that I now do in order to purchase food and wine and housing and books. I don’t know why I chose to pick up the Arcan afterwards. It’s not a happy book, as none of them are, but her writing is so great. It’s a beautiful train wreck. I have two of her books left to get to and through. I just don’t think I can do them in a row.
week thirty two three
Week thirty three was really rather thin on the running side of things, partly because I’ve been really focusing on swimming and minutely because I went to Kelowna for the weekend for my sister’s wedding and didn’t run at all. A really terrible excuse. Anyway, for all the complaints that I have about the accuracy of Fitbit and Strava they do both seem to be relatively consistently inaccurate, which is interesting when I look at Strava especially, because Strava likes to do this subtle shaming thing (in my case) where it looks at similar runs/routes and shows an overall trend. And my overall trend in Strava is that I piqued sometime back in February and my pace has slowly but steadily declined ever since. It has made me wonder if this is a product of age or because I don’t actually train or because I’m wearing myself out by running 40 to 50 kilometres per week without really giving myself a break. So I’m giving myself a bit of a break and I’m going to see what happens. Take a few days off (I can’t remember when I last took more than two days off in a row) and then go out and just see what happens and how I feel and then try to interpret that result. I’m curious, though regardless of what happens I’m sure I’ll find a way to overthink what it means. I’m good at that.