Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud
Temp: 9ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:53/km
Total distance to date: 1130 km
Despite a weather forecast calling for rain it turned out to be pleasantly sunny and mild for the run today. I chose to run Burnaby Lake clockwise or the ‘easy’ way (the north side of the trail slopes in a more downwardly direction if you go clockwise) but the week off took its toll and I found the first half of the run especially hard to manage. The second half was easier as I fell into a slow, steady pace that insured I would not be fighting cramps (or for my own breath).
Various observations:
no, you silly bug, my nose is not a secret shortcut; please stay out
a goose was sitting dead center on the trail. It moved as a I approached but ruefully. I could tell it was comfy.
despite the nice weather I did not see anyone for over the first 4 km
the titular skunk cabbage is indeed starting to bloom again and certain patches are beginning to live up to its name. Without prevailing winds it’s not so bad — yet!
With an average pace of 5:53/km I have backslid again. That’s the bad news. The good news is it’s no worse than my previous low so I’m at least treading water, so to speak. My first km reversed the trend of slower starts by being quite a bit quicker — 5:03/km vs. the last run’s 5:13/km. This was not planned so it’s nice to see.
The two genres I read the most are science fiction and horror and with horror I especially like anthologies and collections because horror stories work well in short form where it’s easier to suspend your disbelief because the shambling monsters have to caper for only a few dozen pages or so and not hundreds.
A few years ago I started a thread on Quarter to Three asking for horror story recommendations (the first reply is still classic — I specifically said I was not interested in series or vampire stories and the initial suggestion is for a vampire series) and one of those recommendations was for the then-new anthology Poe’s Children: The New Horror (2008). It featured a good mix of famous and lesser-known authors and hey, how could you go wrong with Peter Straub as editor? Even if it seemed a bit odd that he would include one of his own stories. Editor’s privilege, I guess.
My first creeping doubt came as I read Straub’s introduction, in which he frames the collected stories as part of a new wave of literary horror while at the same time almost apologizing for them being labeled horror at all because horror stories are apparently the domain of hormone-fueled teenage boys or something and this presumably makes them worthy of nothing more than scorn. I get the impression that the best way to read these stories is with pinky extended. So I extend my pinky and start in.
The opener is “The Bees” by Don Chaon and it’s fairly conventional, a ghost revenge story that comes together neatly and for the protagonist, horribly in the end. Its worst flaw is it didn’t take me long to start poking away at the plot holes but hey, it’s a short story, so time to move on.
Elizabeth Hand’s “Cleopatra Brimstone” features a young American woman house-sitting in England. She has a fascination with moths that extends to being able to transform her sexual conquests into them. It’s a quirky premise and is handled well. My only real complaint with the story is that it went on too long. The various conquests did not distinguish themselves enough to warrant having as many as there were detailed. A snappy ending concludes the story on a high note.
And then we get to a funny thing, a ‘story’ called “The Man on the Ceiling”. I put that in quotes because it’s not a conventional story as such, more a meditation or mood piece, with repeating imagery, shifting viewpoints and no specific focus, just overlapping feelings of dread or wanting and such. Sound interesting? The author notes at the end of the book inform me that husband and wife authors Steve and Melanie Tem’s effort is ‘the only work ever to win the International Horror Guild, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards in the same year’. And I found it boring, pretentious and pointless. I cannot recall the last time I read a short story that actively annoyed me as much as this one. If this vapid, indulgent piece of nonsense is what passes for ‘literary horror’ I think I may stick to lurid tales for oversexed boys. I suppose this is a case of different strokes. I am left so dissatisfied that at this point I actually set the book down for some weeks before pressing on.
The next few stories are decent enough but the overall theme of the anthology is becoming clearer, as many of stories are more mood pieces, veering away from the concrete to the ethereal, using words to create images that are fuzzy around the edges, leaving out details deliberately to confuse or beguile. I’m okay with this. I freely admit I prefer my fiction more straight-up because I’m more interested in being entertained than challenged but a change-up on occasion is like cleansing the palette. And my palette is about to get cleansed with the literary equivalent of bleach.
“Louise’s Ghost” is a story that shows off its cleverness with broad strokes. A little girl loves the color green, so everything must be green. The two adult protagonists are both named Louise so at times it’s difficult to distinguish who is saying what. But it’s clever because it blurs their identities and makes a statement about how interchangeable we all are or whatever the hell point author Kelly Link was trying to make. Maybe it was to simply give the reader a headache, in which case she succeeded with me. The story is further addled with dialog that is twee as all get-out. I will give Link credit, though — there are moments when all of these elements actually pull together and it really is clever and witty. I also give her points for offering something that isn’t Very Serious.
“Plot Twist” is a self-referential piece that does its shtick very well — three people stranded in a desert, running out of supplies and wondering why no one ever comes along the road they walk along. As is often the case with these kinds of high-concept pieces, David J. Schow’s ending seems gratuitously ‘shocking’ and isn’t really satisfying. Still, the journey to get there is worth the trip.
Along similar lines is Thomas Ligotti’s “Notes on the Writing of Horror”, although the gruesome ending is to be expected with Ligotti. His darkly comedic prose may not be to everyone’s taste but I find the more of his work I read the more I want to read, so it is apparently a taste I like.
Neil Gaiman’s entry “October in the Chair” is vintage Gaiman, a warm tale of a young ghost in a forgotten town.
I skipped Stephen King’s “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” because I read it nearly 30 freaking years ago.
Peter Straub’s “Little Red Tango” produced a weird effect for me right from the title. I jokingly referred to a short guy I thought was one hot tamale in college as Little Red and after doing that for two years it’s difficult to see the phrase and not think specifically of him. In Straub’s story the titular character is a kind of idiot savant who lives in a hoarders-style apartment and does weird and magical things for musicians and music lovers with his vast collection of vinyl records. The story is quirky and magical but grounded in the everyday, the grit and discomfort of ordinary living mixed with extraordinary events. In the case of “Little Red Tango” Straub was correct to invoke editor’s privilege and include it.
The collection ends with “Insect Dreams” by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Set in the 17th century, it tells of a trip a young woman named Maria Sibylla makes from her native Netherlands to the lush jungles of Surinam in South America, there to study the insect life both as a researcher and artist. The prose is written with a languid and poetic style, with a formal and sometimes melodramatic flair. Although slow to get going, the story drew me in as it progressed and I became more interested in Maria’s experiences in this strange and dangerous land. The closest the story comes to horror, however, is when a ‘monster’ turns out to be a plantation owner who treats slaves sadistically (one scene has him literally pull the arms off a girl who resists his advances) but this — as terrible as it sounds — is treated more an incidental to the main story. Were it not there the story would not really fit in a horror anthology at all, literary or otherwise.
In the end I came away from Poe’s Children disappointed. There are some very good stories here and there is decent variety despite the classification as ‘new horror’ so if you like gore, you’ll get some of that and if you like explicit sex, you’re covered there, too (so to speak). I found the collection very uneven, though and can’t recall the last time multiple stories in a collection actually annoyed me. Finishing the book was more a relief than anything.
Thumbs down for me but it is quite possible that I’m just too dang juvenile to appreciate art when I see it.
Distance: 10.05 km
Weather: Sunny!
Temp: 7-8ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 702
Average pace: 5:50/km
Total distance to date: 1120 km
I again ran clockwise today but I had a feeling this was not going to be a great run, despite the weather being absolutely perfect. I opted to not wear a jacket and that was wise, as I would have overheated, especially with the sun out.
The day started out with me oversleeping. I had a late breakfast and set off to run a few hours later. Despite the excess sleep, I actually felt a little tired just doing the 4K walk to the lake. Hence the whole ‘I have a bad feeling’ thing. I started off and my initial 1 km was off by a full three seconds — 5:13/km. There’s pacing yourself and then there’s just plain slow. I pressed on and finished with an overall pace of 5:50/km, six seconds off my previous run. I’m not too happy with that but I’ll chalk it up to mitigating factors (excuses!):
the sun was out; the sun also tuckers me out a little when I’m not used to it
I was over-rested and felt ‘off’ because of it
I missed Wednesday’s run due to hail (!), making it harder to build off of Monday’s run
I experienced some cramps
I stopped briefly to pause two times. The first was when I came upon a truck on the path that had two men shoveling out gravel to fill in potholes (I had already passed the woman running a small tractor that was smoothing down the gravel). It seemed safer to carefully walk by than continue running. And it was a convenient way to catch my breath. I next paused at about the 6K mark and that was because I was plain pooped. I pressed on after that till the end, though. The whole run felt hard.
Still, I am obviously far off peak condition so I accept this as just another step to getting there. Excelsior!
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 5ºC
Wind: calm
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:44/km
Total distance to date: 1110 km
Today’s run was much the same as Friday’s but with one change — I ran counter-clockwise. I was interested to compare this to my last few runs because CCW around the lake requires a smidgen more effort as it is has a fair bit more uphill parts.
This turned out to have no impact, as I easily beat my previous average pace by 9-10 seconds (iPod =10, Nike+ site= 9, me=wishing Nike would fix this nonsense so the two would agree with each other).
Animal-wise, the geese were back. No hissing incidents though a (likely mated) pair crossed in front of me when the trail intersected a path leading to a viewpoint on the lake. There was enough space between them to charge forward but I moved around instead because I wasn’t in the mood to test how quickly a goose can snap its head forward and pack me in the leg. The clouds of bugs were back in the usual spots and I swear they have mutated to giant size. Yuck. I’d say I hope the cold kills them off but that’s mean and spring starts tomorrow so also quite unlikely.
Not that it felt overly spring-like. A mix of mostly cloud and a little sun and hovering around 5-6ºC, still unseasonably cold for this time of year. The last few km of the run were hard but I worked to maintain pace and managed to stave off cramps though I felt a little bloaty because I foolishly drank a little Coke Zero before heading out.
Chart:
Mar 19
Mar 16
Mar 7
Mar 5
Feb 6
Feb 3
1 km
5:10
5:08
5:06
5:02
5:06
5:06
2 km
5:20
5:22
5:22
5:17
5:15
5:21
3 km
5:26
5:32
5:30
5:24
5:21
5:31
4 km
5:31
5:37
5:33
5:30
5:25
5:37
5 km
5:34
5:42
5:35
5:33
5:28
5:39
6 km
5:36
5:47
5:38
—
—
—
7 km
5:38
5:49
5:40
—
—
—
8 km
5:41
5:51
5:42
—
—
—
9 km
5:43
5:52
5:45
—
—
—
10 km
5:44
5:53
5:47
—
—
—
Bonus chart! It seems the Nike+ site now shows split times for your runs. Neat. No idea how accurate the data is but here it is, anyway. I have used a new plugin to generate the table called Websimon tables in the vain hope that it would make table creation a bit easier. What would be nice is if the Nike+ site allowed you to export your data to…anything. Maybe in the summer.
Today I had some blood drawn for some standard tests prior to my check-up. It could have gone worse, it could have gone better. I’ll edit in the summary I write on Broken Forum. For now a haiku:
Draw some blood for tests
Fasting first leaves me woozy
Some pain then float home
Yes, Bejeweled is 10 years old and has been out for the iPhone (and iOS) for ages, so why review it now? Because I can!
And also because I have a scary number of hours invested in it, as it’s my go-to game when I tuck myself into bed but am too tired to read. Yes, Bejeweled is the equivalent of a warm glass of milk or sleeping pill for me, something PopCap probably won’t use as a bullet point in their features list.
In terms of presentation there’s nothing to really complain about here — the screen is bright and clear, controls work well and I’ve never noticed any performance issues. It’s a match-3 game and they are generally pretty hard to screw up. The one graphical failing is that the yellow gems, when they are turned into fire gems, look too much like orange gems.
The worst thing about the gameplay is the randomness. There’s no way to see what gems are coming up so you can only plan based on what is on the board at the moment and unless you’re in Zen mode the game will eventually give you nothing to match at some arbitrary point. You can delay the inevitable by keeping a hypercube in your pocket (made by matching five gems) because that matches with any gem adjacent to it and usually opens up enough of the board to present new combinations.
Compared to the now-pulled Bejeweled 2, this version (based on the PC Bejeweled 3) lacks the standard timed mode, which I enjoyed as a change of pace and replaces it with Diamond Mine, which would be more intriguing if the difficulty didn’t ramp up almost immediately. In Diamond mine you must dig down and uncover artifacts to keep the game going but because the random mechanics are still in place and you have a timer, it’s all too easy to quickly have no viable moves. This mode more than any seems to rely on sheer luck and the added depth of the gameplay is short-circuited by randomness.
Butterfly mode was added recently and it’s always nice to see new content show up in a game you already own. The idea is interesting — random colored butterflies appear at the bottom and move one row up each time you make a move. If a butterfly reaches the top it is eaten by a spider and the game ends. So far so good. But there are two problems affecting this mode. The first is the same randomness. Too much of the game is simply out of your control. Making matters worse, the number of butterflies increases very quickly, making it even more difficult to find viable means to clear them. On the plus side, it may actually make you better at the base game because you need to use all the strategies in Butterfly mode to simply keep advancing. It’s not enough to match three, you must also work out ways to get butterflies to collapse back down instead of reaching the top, create chain reactions to take out multiple butterflies and so on. It’s a shame there is no difficulty setting because the games are ultimately too short to be satisfying.
In the base game the addition of glowing gems, created by intersecting two groups of three, is a nice addition. Match a glowing gem to two others of the same color and you get a satisfying cross-shaped explosion. It’s even better when one triggers another. In fact, explosions may be the best thing about Bejeweled. Matching two hypercubes ‘fries’ the entire board and gives you the hypercubes back, too. This is part of a major improvement over 2. In previous versions it was very easy to accidentally blow up stuff you were laying out. In this edition explosions have been restricted to adjacent gems only, so you can be a lot more precise and if you create a special gem in an explosion it will still be there after. Who knew improving explosions would be the best thing in a Bejeweled game?
Profiles, stats, achievements and leaderboards (local only) round out the presentation and all are presented well. There is also the Blitz mode that ties in with Facebook but I do not play Facebook games because they make my teeth itch, so I can’t offer any opinion there.
Overall, this is ultimately a slickly-presented but shallow match-3 game. At some point the game will decide it’s time for you to lose. Sometimes it’s on the second level, sometimes it’s on the 14th. But as a ‘I’m in bed and kind of sleepy but would like to engage my brain in some small way’ Bejeweled is A-OK. It’s available on the App Store for 99 cents.
P.S. WHY DID I WRITE SO MANY WORDS ABOUT BEJEWELED? I DO NOT KNOW!
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:47/km
Total distance to date: 1090 km
With conditions about as good as you can get for the first week of March, I set off on my second return run today and I had a nutty plan.
I was originally planning on running 5Ks this week to work on getting my stamina back up but I felt surprisingly good after Monday’s run so I devised a plan that would encourage me to run a full 10K.
First, I set the actual Nike+ sensor to track a 10K run instead of 5K. I’ve done this before and nothing bad happens if you don’t run the full length, you just don’t get the countdown in the last km if you quit early and your run report shows it was set for 10K when you only did 5K, you wimp.
Next, I plotted my route. Unlike Monday I did not take the SkyTrain to Burnaby Lake. Instead I walked there, a distance of about 4K. Once there I chose to start out on the south side of the lake and would quickly reach a point of decision: I could either run 2.5 km, turn around and get the 5K that way or I could keep running to get the 5K and if I was too tired to continue could walk the rest. But that would put me halfway around the lake and mean I’d have about a 10 km walk back home (and no transit tickets or money to cheat my way out of it). So this would encourage me to keep running to…avoid walking.
And it worked!
As the chart below indicates, my pace was slower even from the start vs. my 5K on Monday but that was deliberate. I wanted to avoid cramps if possible and the more measure pace did just that. You can also see after the initial few km of ‘oh god this is what it feels like to be running again’ my pace moderated and settled down.
In comparison to my first-ever 10K on December 30, 2009, I was actually three seconds faster — not bad for not running one in six months (and considering that first 10K was just the capper on regular runs that had me going up to 8K).
Temperature-wise I didn’t need the gloves I took and the jacket was probably optional, though I wasn’t overly warm wearing it. The air still had that last kick of winter in it. As the title of this post suggests, though, it is now warm enough for the bugs to be back. I had to wave them out of my face a few times but had no intake incidents.
Released in March 2011, Collapse Into Now is R.E.M.’s 15th studio album, coming 28 years after their first (Murmur, 1983). It also fulfilled their five-record contract with Warner and, as it turned out, was their last studio album period, as the band announced in September 2011 that they were ‘calling it a day’. Despite an interview around that time where Mike Mills, the bassist, had claimed relief at being free of the contract, Collapse Into Now doesn’t sound anything like a contractual obligation album. Instead, it is a fitting end to a career that spanned three decades.
Before getting to the album itself, a little background on the latter half of those 30 years is worth exploring.
First, this chart:
The last two albums are missing from the list but according to Wikipedia, the sales for them were:
Accelerate (2008): 350,000 in North America, combined worldwide sales of 627,500
Collapse Into Now (2011): 142,000 in North America (prior to the band’s announced breakup)
Out of Time is easily the band’s biggest success commercially and despite being a ‘dark’ album, Automatic did very well, too. The band changed course with Monster, going for a grungier straight-up rock approach but the majority of fans stuck with them. That changed with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which (barely) failed to reach the coveted 1 million mark. The decline continued apace and didn’t reverse until Accelerate. Collapse Into Now sadly failed to catch on, performing even worse than the somnambulant Around the Sun. It’s hard not to imagine the tepid reaction factored in the band’s decision to break up.
R.E.M signed a gigantic contract in 1996 and at the time it was widely viewed as too rich but the band had proven their worth to Warner with multiple million sellers, so it seemed like a small risk at best. Two things happened, though, that made that risk much larger than it initially seemed. First came Bill Berry’s departure in 1997. While he left on good terms and went on to periodically play with the band, it created the first stirrings of break-up talk. It also coincided with a restlessness the band seemed to be experiencing. New Adventures has a number of good tracks but to me the album feels like an at times uneasy hybrid of the feedback-laden Monster and the darker, more acoustic sounds of Automatic. The impression is that of a band exploring and trying to find new things to stay interested and engaged in the process of creating music, with mixed results.
With their drummer departed the band seized on the chance to play with drum machines or to completely de-emphasize percussion, leading to 1998’s Up, an album that opens with the murmuring echo of “Airportman” and overall has a melancholy feel to it. The band shed most of the melancholy for the follow-up, Reveal (“Imitation of Life” is classic R.E.M.) but the arrangements were becoming ever-denser and elaborate, almost baroque (see: “Saturn Return”). By 2004 the band was adrift and Around the Sun, though opening strongly with “Leaving New York” is a muddled affair, none of the songs actually awful but likewise none distinguishing themselves in the mid-tempo morass that comprised the album. Sales cratered.
In 2008 they decided to strip things down and came up with Accelerate, a 34-minute album that lives up to its name, starting out with the propulsive “Living Well is the Best Revenge” and ending the same way with “I’m Gonna DJ”. In-between the album does slow down to catch its breath on a few tracks. Audiences responded by lifting its sales past Around the Sun. But something happened after that. It’s almost as if a large contingent of fans felt they had met their own obligations in supporting the band so when Collapse Into Now released, it debuted decently (#5) but sank quickly. (The negative-sounding album title and first track “Mine Smell Like honey” probably didn’t help.)
And that’s a shame (here comes the review) because Collapse Into Now is the band’s best album since 1996. It builds on the strengths of Accelerate by maintaining the energy and joy of that album while expanding the musical palette to include a better mix of songs and styles. Still exploring, the band reins in a lot of the excesses of the post-Berry era and for the most part delivers a worthy coda to their career.
Two of the same keys that worked on Accelerate are featured here — Mike Mills’ prominent backing vocals and keeping the percussion forward in the mix. At the same time the album breathes more freely than Accelerate so quieter tracks like the plaintive “Walk it Back” and “Oh My Heart” fit better as part of the whole. In a callback to their earliest albums Michael Stipe’s vocals are often pushed back in the mix. Not that he seems to mind, as he whispers, shouts and croons with enthusiasm throughout the record.
The standout tracks are the opening “Discoverer”, “Uberlin”, “Oh My Heart” and “It Happened Today”, all if which can easily stand beside the band’s best efforts. The latter features soaring, wordless vocals for much of the song, recalling a similar approach used in the chorus for “Orange Crush” from 1988’s Green. “Discoverer” is a speeding train of an opener, an energetic track that segues into the similarly up-tempo “All the Best” before pulling back for the simple acoustics of “Uberlin”. “Discoverer” reappears as the coda to the album’s final song, “Blue”, closing the circle and perhaps hinting at the band’s coming demise. “Blue” is a great example of R.E.M. going back to its older material for inspiration, with Peter Buck’s mournful guitar at the beginning echoing “Country Feedback” from Out of Time and Stipe’s spoken word performance calling back to the same album’s “Belong”. Heck, even Patti Smith shows up, providing ethereal backing vocals just as she did on “E-bow the Letter” from New Adventures.
In the end, the lack of commercial success for Collapse Into Now doesn’t matter much as R.E.M. is no longer an ongoing concern and the bandmates have vowed never to reunite. I wonder if it will some day become the ‘forgotten classic’ of R.E.M.’s catalog. It would be worthy of the designation.
Unlike most of the links I have listed under the My Links category, I am actually using this site on a daily basis!
While the name is a bit cutesy for my taste, MyFitnessPal is a fairly good tool for tracking diet and exercise and since I’m a wee bit off from where I’d like to be weight-wise, it seemed like a good idea to start using it. There is a thread on Broken Forum where a bunch of us have become fa(s)t friends and signed up. I was also having issues with the Livestrong app I had been using (and paid for), including an obnoxious issue where it kept popping up daily reminders on my phone, even after I had turned them off, so I was ready to make a switch.
MFP is much better-behaved and the website makes entering info easy as pie. Mmm, fattening, delicious pie.
Distance: 5.02 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: gusts up to 50+ km/h
Calories burned: 351
Average pace: 5:33/km
Total distance to date: 1080 km
A funny thing happened a month ago.
I completed my run on February 6th and all seemed well. I had improved on my previous time and seemed back on track for a )hopefully) successful year of running.
The day after that run I was walking to the store to get a loaf of bread or BreadQuest as I like to call it. As I walked I felt a funny little twinge around my right ankle. When I got home I poked and prodded and discovered that the spot on my ankle that had been sore — and that I had just taken three months off from running to allow to heal — was every bit as sore as it ever was. Not wanting to risk further injury, I very reluctantly decided to hold off on further running until I could have it looked at.
This time I chose not to go to a walk-in clinic but to sign up with an actual doctor, the same one my partner has had for years — keep it in the family, so to speak. We had a consultation on February 29th and he told me the likeliest cause of the soreness was a small hernia. Unless it gets severe there is no specific treatment apart from icing it and basic monitoring. So I was cleared to run again. Woo!
Today I did just that. It was a chilly but sunny day and also windy as heck, with gusts over 50 km/h. I do not like running in the wind, so I waited until later in the afternoon, hoping it would die down. The good news is it clouded over in the meantime. Wait, that’s not good. As I headed out I quickly realized a single layer was insufficient and came back to grab my jogging jacket and a pair of gloves. The jacket was a good move, the gloves proved unnecessary as my route around Burnaby Lake proved an excellent windbreak due to the copious stands of trees alongside Cottonwood Trail.
The route I took:
Sapperton to Sperling/Burnaby Lake SkyTrain station. Total calories burned: about 10.
Sperling SkyTrain station to Cottonwood Trail at Burnaby Lake (approx. 1 km). Walked briskly.
Cottonwood Trail at Burnaby Lake, north side: 5:02 km.
Central Valley Greenway to home (approx. 4 km). Walked briskly.
My average pace of 5:33/km was down from my previous run of 5:28 but considering I’d been off for a month, that’s not bad (and better than the run prior to that when I came in at 5:39). At the 2K mark the cramps became fairly bad so I walked them off for 15-20 seconds and then finished the run without any further issue. The legs feel fine now, no soreness or pain.
I expect a little soreness tomorrow. And a good sleep tonight.
My next run will be on Wednesday if all goes well.
Since I am not so much exercising the body at the moment (more on that in another blog entry coming real soon™) I have decided it is time to exercise that other flabby part of me: my brain.
I am going to start out simple with that old standby, the haiku. I dedicate this one to writing.
I shall write some more
To remove words from my head
And set them amok
Distance: 5.03 km
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 10ºC
Wind: none
Calories burned: 351
Average pace: 5:28/km
Total distance to date: 1075 km
Today I started my first full week of running and the weather was again perfect: 10ºC, no breeze and sunny skies. I did things a little differently by riding the SkyTrain to the Sperling/Burnaby Lake station and walking about 1 km to the Burnaby Lake trail, specifically to the bridge that serves as the unofficial halfway point of the 10K or so loop. I then ran along the north side of the lake, toward the Brunette River portion of the Central Valley Greenway, with the intent of doing a brisk cooldown walk for the 4 km remaining after the run.
All went according to plan and even though it still seemed to take ages for each km to be called out on the iPod, I managed to keep going without stopping, the cramps kept more in check this time.
As for the strobe light effect, there is a fairly long stretch along the north part of the trail that is nearly completely straight and the angle of the sun and proliferation of thin, leaf-free trees combined to create a rapidly blinking light effect on my eyes, constantly flashing like I was in a disco. It was almost seizure-inducing but had the neat side-effect of distracting me from the aches and soreness of being horribly out of shape, so it all worked out.
In other good news, I improved my pace by a good amount, knocking 10 seconds off my average pace.
