Run 434 Average pace: 5:37/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Distance: 5.16 km
Time: 28:15
Weather: Overcast
Temp: 17-19ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 166
Stride: n/a
Weight: 160.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 3482
Device used: Apple Watch and iPhone 6
Also unofficial walk-your-dog-unleashed day based on the number of people I saw with their dogs off-leash (nearly every dog I saw).
Today was my second run after the six weeks off and the weather was near-perfect, though a bit poopy if you were just looking to go outside to celebrate Canada Day. The temperature stayed in the high teens and the sky was cloudy, making it a lot more comfortable than last Sunday’s run in the sun with unseasonably high temperatures.
I again worked to maintain a steady but not fast pace and the conditions allowed me to do so more easily today. I ended with a pace of 5:37/km, besting Sunday’s pace by 14 seconds. My BPM were also down to 166 from 169–still higher than what I’d expect when I’m conditioned but about right for this early in my renewed running.
My big concern was The Leg. The calf and muscles behind the knee (not the knee itself) of the right leg began to feel a bit sore midway through the run but the soreness peaked early, never getting worse nor getting bad enough to affect my pace. Even better, the soreness disappeared on the nine km walk back home, which was done at a fairly brisk clip of 8:42/km. I am pleased by this result, though I’d have preferred no soreness at all. I’m guessing I’d have needed to sit out for two to four months to guarantee that.
Still, I am happy with the progress made. I am tentatively planning on a third run on Sunday so we’ll see if things stay the same or improve. If they get worse instead I will be sad and make a sad face.
Nope, no ideas yet. My brain is in that mode where if I try to come up with something it just freezes over like a pond in winter. There’s probably some nifty trick to get past this–maybe I’ve even used it in the past and just forgotten–but it eludes me at the moment.
Still, no need to panic. I still have almost 24 hours to do that.
I asked a pair of co-workers for ideas. They suggested:
a Die Hard remake set on a zeppelin (or the Titanic)
some kind of love story featuring Herbie the Love Bug, Knightrider and their possibly illegitimate offspring, some kind of smart car
a person driven to (ho ho) madness by traffic and daily commutes. I suggested the title Honk.
If I do most of my writing during lunch I will be using my Surface Pro 3, which works well enough, though I still think I’d like a real laptop, mainly for the better keyboard and slightly larger screen. A person on Broken Forum said he switched to using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement. When asked why he said it was mainly because of weight and lack of distractions. iOS has never been great at multitasking so you just tend to focus on what you’re doing instead of constantly flipping between different things. Hopefully he hasn’t heard of split view…
While using the iPad Pro intrigues me, the price is hard to take. It costs more than some (pretty good) laptops and that’s before you add things like a cover, keyboard or whatnot.Then again, it looks almost cheap compared to the Surface Book, one of the laptops I’ve considered (which can go for over $2000 after tax. That’s a lot of money, even in Canadian dollars).
Maybe I’ll write a story about a man who can’t decide what to buy and somehow the decision gets made for him and he has to live with the consequences. If it was a horror story, I’d end up with an 11″ Chromebook.
A few days ago a fellow forumite (and published author) on Broken Forum solicited invitations to join him in taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo. This is basically National Novel Writing Month done in July, with looser rules and a summer camp theme, including but not limited to putting people into cabins and where you can share spooky stories around the virtual campfire about how your muse left you frightened and out of ideas.
Since being invited to a cabin requires a project, I slapped in my failed 2013 NaNo effort, Start of the World (one of the worst working titles I’ve ever devised). I don’t know if I’ll actually try reviving it but I only have one more day to mull it over before the writing begins, so the suspense won’t last long.
It may turn out that Camp NaNoWriMo is just the thing I need. Or it could be another dismal petering-out. Or it could even be both.
Mostly I think I’m going to get up on July 1st, revel briefly in being Canadian, then spend the rest of the day shifting between writing paralysis and spewing out nonsense that sees me getting intimate with the backspace and delete keys (or on the Mac, the delete and other delete key–what’s up with that, anyway?)
Stay tuned for exciting and/or painful updates soon™.
Run 433 Average pace: 5:51/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Distance: 5.26 km
Time: 30:50
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 21-26ºC
Wind: light
BPM: 169
Stride: n/a
Weight: 161.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 3477
Device used: Apple Watch and iPhone 6
I held off running for longer than planned due to a combination of weather (resuming runs in the rain makes for fine alliteration but it’s hard to motivate yourself to begin again while getting soaked) and general trepidation (mainly the fear of resuming too soon and risking aggravation of injury).
But today I finally committed to myself to head out on a basic 5K for the first time in six weeks.
I started by sleeping in. Whoops.
I eventually headed out around noon and started the run clockwise at Burnaby Lake around 12:30. Today also happened to be the day the summer switch got flipped back to ON and it was 21ºC when I started and rose to 26º by the end. It felt quite warm and I was thirsty and sluggish and the idea of aggravating injuries seemed the stuff of fantasy because I felt like I was barely moving.
My pace turned out to be 5:51/km, ten seconds slower than my last run but in line with what I’d expect after the month and a half of inactivity. My heart rate was up significantly, from 160 bpm on the previous run to 169 bpm today, but that can be attributed to the heat and greater overall strain in running.
On the plus side the only negative effect was my left foot feeling a little sore but not enough to slow me down or really make a difference. It was more like an annoying bug you can’t swat away. That analogy sucks but mainly it wasn’t an issue. I did not feel any other pain or soreness during or after the run, so that was encouraging.
The current plan is to resume a regular set of 5K runs and see how they go and eventually move back to 10K. I’ll try another 5K on Tuesday and see if it goes well. If so then yay. If not, then boo. It’s pretty simple.
The trail was in good condition overall, most of the puddles having dried up after recent rains–except for one giant puddle that was hidden around the corner, at the end of the path that leads out to the athletic fields. This puddle was big enough to be unavoidable and had the curious effect of leaving my feet utterly soaked even as I felt as parched as a nomad wandering the desert without a handy bottle of Gatorade.
Overall I am pleased that I got through and got through without any pain. We will see what Tuesday brings.
The Chronoliths takes the same broad theme of Wilson’s later novel Spin (mysterious giant objects appear around the globe) and uses it to frame a bleak look at a near-future where environmental and economic collapse have left the world vulnerable to military conquest on a level not seen since World War II. The twist is that the conquest is set to happen twenty years in the future and is foretold by the arrival of chronoliths, giant towers of indestructible stone and ice that commemorate the victories of someone or something only identified as Kuin.
With chronoliths spreading from Asia to South America and beyond, and pro and anti-Kuin forces forming, the story follows software developer Scott Warden as he witnesses the arrival of the first chronolith in Thailand and then becomes entangled in what Warden’s former teacher and scientist Sue Chopra calls “tau turbulence” in the quest to stop both the chronoliths and Kuin.
Written in 2001 and predating the 9/11 attacks, The Chronoliths is informed by a present that didn’t anticipate the arrival of the smartphone (it predates the launch of the iPhone by six years) and as such, even though it depicts a mid-21st century where video phones and terminals are commonplace, it feels ever-so-slightly out of date. This is not a real criticism, just a reflection on the likelihood of science fiction that chronicles near-future events not quite hitting the mark. Predicting the future is tricky business, which is ironically (and as Chopra would point out, not coincidentally) what the story is about. Reading the novel when it was published in 2001, these incongruities are non-existent. In 2016 you just have to keep the story in context of when it was written.
That said, the story moves along briskly and Wilson quickly ensnares Morgan, his friends and family into the future of the chronoliths, making Morgan’s actions and decisions both momentous and personal. He may not necessarily want to save the world, taking a rather jaundiced view of it, but he does want to save the people he loves. As more chronoliths appear and Kuin’s victory seems more and more inevitable, the tone becomes increasingly one of despair and hopelessness. Told from the first person perspective, the character of Scott Morgan deliberately feeds into this, framing the tale as one in which many terrible things happen. And they do!
I won’t spoil the ending but Wilson does kind of pull a rabbit out of a hat and it works. As with most stories that have a time travel element it’s best if you don’t try to pull the logic apart. In the case of The Chronoliths, Wilson makes that easy with a style that effortlessly moves the plot along.
Crawford draws on theories and ideas from Kant to Freud to Nietzsche and more, both favorably and negatively, as he makes his case for how we in the western world are suffering from distractions both insidious and incidental, all of which collectively diminish what we can achieve by working to make us conform, to comply, to passively listen and not question. Crawford isn’t talking about the people walking down the sidewalk with their eyes glued to their smartphones–though he touches on such digital distractions–but rather bigger and more encompassing things that work to grab our attention, usually because some corporate or other vested interest has deemed our eyeballs and ears too valuable to leave alone. We are fed muzak in public spaces with no option to turn it off. A children’s TV show (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) presents life as a no-risk endeavor where every potential hazard can be overcome with miraculous devices and conflict is smoothed over quickly, if it ever happens (he contrasts this with the earliest episodes of Sesame Street where characters regularly fight and yell at each other). Slot machines (machine gambling) are carefully engineered with newer technology to maximize their addictive quality, at the expense of those that fall victim to the addiction. We are pushed to know a little of everything and away from specialization.
He laments that classrooms are largely comprised of students sitting at desks passively listening to a teacher presenting information that may or may not be relevant to them, and counters with examples of people engaged in occupations that make use of skills that are learned from other craftspeople/masters as well as drawn from the lessons of those who came before them in the same field, putting together a picture of how we can become more individualistic not by rebelling or isolating ourselves from others, but instead acknowledging and working with the people around us and our society.
He turns to examples ranging from efficiently multi-tasking short order cooks and, in greater detail, an organ shop that restores and builds church organs, to illustrate how focused craft and skills can produce more productive and engaged citizens, while criticizing the trend toward general, non-specific (shallow) knowledge. The loving detail to these examples and his own affection for building and working with tools is alluring. You may not want to assemble a motorcycle or build a church organ when you’re done reading, but you’ll probably want to make something with your hands.
The writing itself may be challenging for some, falling (sometimes awkwardly) between casual and academic. The footnotes alone are more than 40 pages. This is not a self-help book or one with quick fixes or bullet point lists of easy solutions. Instead it is a meditative exercise on where we can (or should) go as a society and the dangers of continuing along our present course. There is a lot to chew on here and I suspect I will return to this book from time to time to re-read key passages, while carrying the central message that the individual, crafting and building, is a wonderful thing.
Writing exercise: It's five minutes before a massive meteor is set to directly impact the Earth. There are plenty of theories on what will happen, but they all share one grim thing in common: the near-certainty that humanity will be extinguished.
Write from the perspective of someone waiting during those final five minutes.
Writing exercise writer's note: I left this for a few months, having struggled to come up with a better ending than just stopping abruptly. I also wanted to make it better fit the parameters of the exercise (spoiler: the exercise goes on after the meteor hits). Instead, I've decided to post it as is because the pursuit of perfection is noble but also dumb when I could be pursuing another imperfect writing project.
I reserve the right to come back to this some day.
Enjoy!
I’m looking at the battery indicator on my MacBook. It estimates I have just over four hours of juice left. That should be enough. More than enough, really.
I’m sitting on a large, weather-smoothed boulder, legs dangling off the edge, the MacBook precariously balanced on my lap. One wrong shift and off it goes, bouncing down a rocky hill to its inevitable destruction. It would cost a thousand bucks to replace but I’m not concerned. Laptops are about to become a relic of the past.
Three days ago an amateur astronomer in Hawaii spotted an asteroid ten kilometers wide.
The boulder I’m sitting on is in a park on the coast, near Vancouver. I look out at English Bay, the water is sparkling and calm, and then look up, trying to imagine the asteroid against the soft blue of the mid-summer sky. I can’t. I can’t wrap my head around a chunk of rock ten kilometers wide, not one hanging up there impossibly in the sky.
Big asteroids blasting the Earth are pretty rare. The last one this size came down 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
This one was sneaky—if you can imagine a ten kilometer rock being sneaky—in that it came toward us from the sun. It wasn’t until its trajectory curved out and beyond the blinding light of our solar furnace that anyone knew it existed.
I saw the amateur astronomer in Hawaii interviewed twice. The first was on discovery day. He was gleeful, practically bouncing off the walls, unable to contain his excitement. Amateurs don’t make a lot of these discoveries. The second interview was this morning. He was ashen and never looked directly at his interviewer or the camera. He appeared to have lost weight, though I wasn’t sure how he could lose enough for it to be noticeable in just three days.
A sneaky asteroid—that is, one arriving largely unseen because the sun has obscured its path—is not necessarily a bad thing. But in this case it is. Its path is predicted to intersect with our mostly lovely planet with a 99% degree of certainty.
In about five minutes, if estimates are right.
There are ideas on how to deal with these kinds of celestial threats, but that’s all they are–ideas, theories on paper. We have nothing prepared.
The first day was one of confusion, but a growing sense of panic was palpable by nightfall. The second day was confirmation of the worst from many sources. Political leaders made awkward speeches calling for calm, offering reassurances that were naked lies. Then they disappeared. The end of Day Two spun off into bedlam.
People didn’t exactly riot here, but there was a lot of looting. Police initially attempted to keep order but quickly retreated. Then everyone retreated. The city streets filled up as people attempted to get out. The few remaining looters were swept away by crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Violence was inevitable. I managed to pick my way through back yards and alleys to escape unscathed. I came here, to this park, for the end. And for the view.
Fires dot the skyline. When I turn my head to the east I count nine columns of smoke over the downtown core. There are more beyond that. I appreciate the irony that the destruction began before a single speck of meteor dust entered the atmosphere.
The likely point of impact—also with that reassuring 99% degree of certainty—is the Pacific Ocean, which I am looking at. A breeze is picking up, but it’s just a breeze, gentle and refreshing, carrying the cool tang of sea air. While exact angle and speed of impact are yet to be determined—or maybe I missed the report amid the chaos—it’s reckoned that Ol’ Snuffy (my name) is going to leave a dent in the planet roughly 200 kilometers from where I’m sitting. It’s not Ground Zero but it’s close, relatively speaking. I looked up the effects on the internet—also about to become a relic of the past—not because I’m ghoulish but because I like going into situations with my eyes open. You know—give it to me straight, doc, how bad is it?
The good news is I won’t be vaporized.
That’s actually not good news because vaporization would be swift and painless.
I can see it in the sky now. Even this far away, there are streaks descending. They said it would break apart and once again those brainy scientists were right. I suddenly gasp and realize I’ve been holding my breath. My brain is trying to process a lot of things right now. If those internet sites are right, I could be dead and gone in fifteen minutes. Or I might survive. If I do I will find myself living in a world transformed into an unrecognizable hellish landscape. That could be interesting.
I count the streaks. There are eight that I can see, slowly fanning apart from each other. One of these glows bright, too bright to look at directly, almost a mini-sun, the core of Ol’ Snuffy making a beeline.
I look at the clock on my laptop. 3:21 p.m. A sequence of descending numbers, like a countdown.
My first kiss. Should I be thinking of that? It’s one of those first meaningful moments, so I suppose it should come to me swiftly and with fond remembrance. But I’m not sure who it was. Suzanne? Peggy? Jennifer? I don’t want to claim I was some kind of scoundrel, but I had a definite “kiss all the girls” phase and it rolled straight into kissing for real, advancing beyond kissing and running away before finding out what happened next.
3:23 p.m. now. The streaks have vanished over the horizon. I hold my breath again.
It was Peggy. I’m sure of it. I had a mad crush on her. Red hair, freckles. She liked to arm wrestle and she could beat me since I had scrawny scarecrow arms. I have no idea where she is now.
Nowhere safe, though. The scientists told us no such place existed.
I experience it first as a vibration that comes up through the boulder, tickling my bottom. The horizon suddenly changes, the fuzzy white sky is suddenly cast in bright colors—orange, red, mixed with muddy browns and blacks. Ejecta. The fact that I can see this from two hundred kilometers away is impressive. I could be terrified but am fascinated instead. How many people will ever see something like this?
The shockwave hits next. I don’t know how long it takes to reach me. It feels like minutes but is probably seconds. I am swept off the boulder. The MacBook blows away as if made of paper. I tumble onto the ground but am fortunate that recent rains have left it soft, almost spongy. I roll up against a cedar and remain there, unable to move for a time. I hear a loud crack, then many loud cracks, like a series of explosions.
For a moment it gets very hot. I wonder if I will be boiled in my own skin.
The shockwave passes.
I slump away from the cedar and realize it is no longer standing. Most of the trees have been snapped and lay flat. I wonder how none came down on me. The boulder has shifted to the left and looks a little wobbly. It must weigh a couple of tons.
My hair is a mess.
I stand up and see blood on my hands. Rivulets of blood run down both arms. My legs threaten to buckle but I manage to stay upright, for the moment, at least.
Apparently it is more than my hair that is a mess.
The ejecta is spreading out now, an ever-expanding mushroom cloud of debris. Acid rain will start falling soon. I’ll need to find some place to hide…for the next six months to a year.
I laugh. I didn’t expect to survive. This kind of sucks.
The rain shouldn’t be a problem if those internet sites were right, though. Something else will come first. I cup a hand to my left ear and listen. The sound is muffled, like it’s caught in a bottle. Did the shockwave shatter my eardrums? I don’t think so because I definitely hear something.
A distant roar. Is it real? I think it is.
The mega-tsunamis promise to be as tall as skyscrapers. They will be impressive sights.
I don’t swim very well.
I stagger over to the boulder—my right leg hurts like hell, there’s probably a broken bone or two shifting around inside—and set a hand against it to steady myself. That’s enough to start the boulder rolling. It lumbers down the hill, picking up speed before plunging over the edge and landing in the water with a satisfying dunk.
I fall over, too weak to stand unaided, and curl up, leaving the right leg extended. I am facing away from the water.
I want to see.
With pain bursting like bombs in my right leg, I shift until I am propped up on my elbows, looking across the bay. I can’t hold the position, though, and collapse onto my back. The sky above is still hazy blue, as if nothing has happened. As if this is all a dream.
My dreams never have this kind of continuity, though. The roaring is louder, much louder. I loll my head to the left. There is a cedar stump still stuck halfway in the ground. I could prop myself up against it. But even though it is nearly close enough to touch if I stretch out a hand, it looks very far away. I don’t think I can do it.
Instead I lay back again, pushing my head against the soft, spongy ground. I close my eyes.
The roar grows until it hurts my ears. I make feeble motions to cover them but give up. I wait for the tsunami to claim me.
It is geography—the earth itself—that saves me. Vancouver Island absorbs most of the energy of the tsunamis, and the waves that make it through the strait are big but not deadly. I feel water come up around me, nearly buoying me, then I settle back onto the ground as it flows by and eventually retreats. There will probably be other waves but my swimming skills aren’t going to be tested.
The sky’s transformation is hastening, though. The threat of a burning rain draws near.
You may never want to open a story with one of these sentences.
It was a dark and stormy kite.
Brent Entwhistle knew he would get in trouble one day for peeling the banana from the wrong end and now that day had come.
“It’s the new watusi!” Cyril bleated.
John “Hawk” Dirk examined the bomb with great care, noting the timer only had forty seven days left on it.
She whipped her luxurious golden hair around, like a yellow bed sheet flapping in the wind.
“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” Byron said to the boy as he rode past on his bike, suddenly realizing that that curse of speaking only in Elvis song lyrics had come true.
Abraham Lincoln swiveled around and pointed a Howitzer at Booth, thus beginning the craziest version of history yet.
The family reunion would be awkward this year, Jane knew, but all she could do was hope the others would forget about her out of control bionic peg leg and move on.
The killdozer thundered relentlessly toward the tranquil town of Sleepyville, but it would meet its match with the murderhoe that lumbered to meet it.
“I’m only one man,” Ben said to the desperate crowd assembled before him, “but if you clone me I could be a hundred men!”
The first and only rule of writing is to write (so I say).
Today the weather changed from weirdly hot to slightly cooler than normal, clouds gathered up in the sky (their favorite gathering place) and presented the threat of showers (it sprinkled a little). I opted to skip my lunch walk because I don’t like walks in the rain or on the beach or around candlelit dinners or mostly because I was paranoid the sprinkle would become a downpour and I’d return to work sopping wet. I also wanted a day off from the walks to show my right leg how beneficent and kind I am, to encourage it to heal and be wonderful and normal once more.
My usual plan when I skip the lunch walk is to curl up (well, not actually curl up, that would be uncomfortable) with my Surface Pro 3 in the staff lounge and do some writing. How much writing did I do at lunch today?
None.
But I surfed the internet. Oh yes, I learned about new gadgets, read opinions on various things and caught up on the news. But writing? Not a word.
I felt bad and proceeded to have an afternoon filled with cascading or at least remarkably coincidental failures. Karma? Perhaps.
I went for another long walk today and once more wore my Hokas. The weather was much warmer, edging past the mid 20s as one of those fancy high pressure ridges has formed over the area (Weather Underground has a post about “dangerous, extreme heat blanketing the west” this weekend).
After completing the 18+ km route (walking counter-clockwise around Burnaby Lake this time) I noted the following vs. the last big walk:
my overall pace was even faster, 8:38/km vs. 8:54/km
my right leg started to feel achy after only one km; once the endorphins kicked in it wasn’t too bad
the right ankle twinged briefly again at the 8 km mark. Very weird that it would be that predictable.
the right shoe was rubbing one of my toes, which didn’t happen last time. Maybe the socks made the difference? The toe was rubbed red but never got to where it started bleeding
I jogged a few times in brief bursts and felt okay while doing so
I actually felt a strong urge to jog several times, simply to get back sooner because the shoe rubbing on the toe was bugging me a lot. A strange and unpleasant incentive, but at least it gave me the opportunity for a few test runs (ho ho).
The heat didn’t bother me. It’s much more tolerable when walking vs. running.
Oh, and the dirty corgi? This was a little weird. I passed by a number of people, given the zippy pace I was keeping, and one couple had a dog with a docked tail. I think all dogs should have big tails that can effortlessly sweep items off a coffee table and it strikes me as a little cruel to dock tails simply because it’s tradition or whatever. Anyway, it made me start thinking about other dogs that usually get docked and the corgi immediately came to mind. A few minutes later I passed a couple with a corgi. How strangely coincidental! The corgi was unleashed (no surprise there) and was distracted by a small mud puddle that had lingered since the last rain, so I (seemingly) walked by unnoticed. After sating its curiosity, it ran up to me from behind and for reasons only it will know, jumped up to say hi. Being a corgi, it only made it as far as my left hand, which it covered in water and grit from the puddle it had waddled through. I was both amused and annoyed. I washed when I got home.
I don’t like dogs. Still.
The walk was a mixed bag. The pace means the soreness of the right leg wasn’t enough to slow me down and the little joggy bits seemed fine, but after three weeks without runs I’m still uncertain whether I should try a run now or wait a little longer.
If you ever talk to someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings books, it’s inevitable that you get to that question: Did you read the songs?
For me the answer was not a straightforward “no” because I did read some of them, then I read fewer as I worked my way through the story, then I just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading The Lord of the Rings.
The same can be said of Neil Gaiman’s latest collection, Trigger Warning, which intersperses a few poems–the equivalent to Tolkien’s songs–in among the short stories. In his second collection, Fragile Things, he describes the poems as “bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.”
I read some of the poems, then read fewer of them, the just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading Trigger Warning.
This is a hodgepodge of stories, covering everything from modern horror to high fantasy, all of it presented with Gaiman’s usual dry wit and depiction of the world as a place both dark and beautiful.
I enjoyed all of the stories but being who I am, the ones I enjoyed most were the Twilight Zone-esque “The Thing About Cassandra” in which imagined loves are perhaps not so imaginary, “Orange,” which uses a question and answer format to show the transformation of a young, tanning-obsessed woman into something rather more cosmic and “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” which paints a chilling portrait of a man who forgets words, with more impact than one might expect. Stories based on Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes are well-executed and the final and original piece, “Black Dog” features Shadow from American Gods, in a story about murder, ghosts and the power of the mind to both protect and destroy.
This is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys Gaiman’s writing, but I feel there is enough variety here to entice those unfamiliar with his work.
Today I woke up with an immense pressure headache.
I also went to bed the previous night the same way, though the pressure was not quite as immense then.
I’ve also been stuffed up the past few days so perhaps this is a renewed mega-allergy attack for an allergy that I have yet to identify but may be associated with pollen or other spring-related junk in the air. Whatever it is, it made me feel almost dizzy just to stand up. Bending down to tie my shoes was like diving in a submarine to the depths where The Great Old Ones await.
I opted to take the day off work then self-medicated with some Advil. After letting it kick in I decided to get outside, thinking that some fresh air might help and the exercise (probably) couldn’t hurt.
I tracked the walk, which took me to Burnaby Lake, around it and then back, a total of over 18 km. My pace over the first few km was in line with recent walks, starting around 9:30/km but then something strange happened (this is the first strange part of the walk). My pace picked up and continued to pick up. Save for the final km, when I finally started feeling weary, I stayed at or under 9:00/km for an overall average pace of 8:54/km. This is my best walk in months and rather unexpected. Even stranger (part 2) was that my right leg and foot (and my left foot, for that matter) felt fine throughout. I had a brief twinge in the right ankle around the 8 km mark but it lasted only a few moments and never returned. The leg continued to feel fine post-walk. It feels fine now.
What was so different about this walk compared to the others where the leg and foot have felt cranky and sore?
I wore my running shoes. The color migrating Hokas, to be precise. And I think that was enough. The Hokas may not retain their color well but they do provide a noticeable level of support. My normal walking shoes are Scarpa light trail hiking shoes. With my orthotics inserted in them they are eminently wearable but without them my left foot will start crying about me being a mean-spirited barbarian sometimes within mere minutes of walking out wearing them. Could the shoes really make that much difference? Possibly.
I’m going to wear my new Brooks Cascadia shoes for the rest of the week and see how they compare. Hopefully the results prove interesting, just not ancient Chinese curse interesting.
The third and final strange part of the walk came near the end. I had just exited the Brunette River trail onto North Road. There was a car in the curb lane on the bridge facing south with its hazard lights on. The rear bumper showed signs of damage, presumably from a rear-end collision. There appeared to be bits of the car on the road, under the bumper. None of this is strange because, as they say, accidents happen.
The strange part is there was no sign of the other presumed vehicle in this presumed accident. And no sign of the driver. Or any drivers. Or emergency vehicles. Or anything or anyone else that might be related to this looks-lik-an-accident. Just a slightly damaged car sitting in traffic by itself.
I got out of there quick, not just because the strangeness perturbed me, but because a car sitting on a busy road as rush hour commenced seems like a good way for more accidents to happen.
