Tag: WalkTracker Pro

2018 week twelve

Book Read:
12. Full Disclosure — Beverley McLachlin

Kilometres Ran:
week twelve — 69.3

To date: 443 KM

This is Beverley McLachlin’s first novel. She turns 75 this year. I assume she was distracted by being the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. So if you’re worried that your first novel isn’t coming along quite as quickly as you had imagined, don’t fret. There’s still time. There’s probably still time. You should worry instead about becoming a household name so that someone will publish whatever it is you decide to write just because. Or you could write a decent novel and hope that there is still a publisher out there publishing decent novels. This novel, as it turns out, is decent. I found it to be an engaging read overall, with enough drama and suspense to keep me interested in spite of a bit of a slow start. It follows Jilly Truitt, an up-and-coming criminal defense lawyer, relatively fresh with her own law firm, as she takes on the biggest case of her career so far. I expected a simple narrative and was pleasantly surprised by the nuanced story arc and character development. There’s a plot twist that is alluded to early and often that becomes somewhat predictable. My only real complaint is that the end is a bit of a sprint to tie up all the loose ends. I liked the many Vancouver references, and I feel like Truitt has enough going for her, and unresolved, that could make for a sequel or serial, assuming McLachlin has another in her. The novel is released on May 1. Thanks for Simon & Schuster for the advanced review copy.

Camera adds 10 pounds. Knee brace adds 15 minutes.

I capped off week 12 with my first long run since the First Half back at the beginning of February after realizing that I’m quickly running out of opportunities to get a 21+ into March since I’m heading to Victoria for the long weekend, and other excuses that don’t make much sense if you pause and think about it for a sec or two. I was apprehensive about taking my on-the-recovery knee out for a Sunday LSD but I really wanted to give it a test. So I decided to run a long route with no opportunity to tap out — over Burrard and up West 4th/Chancellor then back along Marine Drive. And it turned out okay. I’m pretty sure that it is my slowest 21+ run. It is my slowest since I started tracking with Strava. Before Strava I used the WalkTracker Pro app for iPhone, which I got for free from one of those freebee cards that Starbucks used to have on their pickup counter. I loved that app. The developers, apparently, did not, as evident from the fact that it hasn’t been updated as it hasn’t been updated since 2014 and no longer works on current or recent iOS. So I linked to it for sale in the App Store for nostalgia. My point is that once it stopped working for good I deleted it, and along with it all my running history, such as it was. Something in the back of my mind tells me that I probably downloaded all the data and stored the file away somewhere that I would probably never lose it, which it turns out is also somewhere I’ll probably never find it.

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.