Here I am writing, despite the relative lateness of the hour, the bleariness of the eyes accompanied by a gnawing sense of fatigue whereby slightly hallucinatory images squeeze themselves from every depleted cell; that sense of involuntary continued exertion as though every anatomical fibre strains merely in an effort to relax. Just the sort of fatigue when good quality sleep is surely an impossibility, although that is what your body requires most. Somewhere stirring in countermotion amid that turbulent restlessness is the sense I ought to persevere and write something, lest the elapse of more time and the threshold is crossed when the effort to overcome the friction to write again might as well be infinite; that threshold when all attempts to slip an entry through any blogospherical portal, as small as it may be, vanish into the annals of some past a writer can barely recall.
That said, after such a long absence, few, I am sure will think even to check here anymore, the posts having dried up long ago. So, this will perhaps be much more of a personal diary entry than a missive to be shared with the world. And so, dear Diary, it’s been a while. How shall we re-acquaint ourselves?
I have found Facebook rather to have usurped the time I once spent writing blog posts. I don’t suggest this is necessarily a good thing, since so much of Facebook involves superficial communications and is not really a good medium for more prosaic exposition. Plus there are a myriad other excuses why there is no time for a blog, for that or this, but like TS Eliot’s Prufrock said, “There will be time, there will be time…Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions”. There is always time for those things that are important to us, but never time for those which are not.
So by that vertiginous introduction, here is a brief training summary: having been on the bike just once since September 21, in November I managed to log 500+ km of running, possibly the highest mileage for any single month I’ve ever done. Having signed up for the First Half half-marathon in February and the Albany Georgia Marathon in March, the idea at the moment is simply to build a running base – no intervals, no speed work, and only a little tempo here and there if the mood strikes me. I’m getting very used to ploughing out 20+ km runs nearly every day with some longer ones here and there, at 43-46min 10km pace – a pace that allows me to recover and be able to do it the next day without too much soreness.
For a few runs in November, I’d a run a very hilly circuit – starting at Bear Mt, running down the trails into Goldstream, around Goldstream and once about a third of the way up the Malahat, before returning and back up Mt Finlayson arm, down the other side to Millstream and then back up Bear Mt. A favourite run! I will do a few more of those this December as well, the idea basically to continue to pack on a mileage base while breaking up the monotony of pounding out the miles on mostly flat terrain.
Luckily the only injuries I’ve sustained so far are the results of slips/falls – once on a drainage grate coming out of Demian’s driveway, and another after tripping on a rock around Cedar Hill, of all places! I’ve managed to bang myself up “real good”, but battered and bruised I seem to keep going.
I did take a couple of days off the first week of December, but am now back at it. Definitely feeling tired, and am currently in the midst of an economics course, which, with no plans to travel this Christmas, I’ve targeted to complete by the first week in January. The new work is now nearly four months old, and I’ve been acquiring a mini-medical education for a number of medical conditions understood potentially to affect drivers’ ability to drive. Generally in the midst of it all is a reasonably robust social life and, all things considered, there is little for me to complain about. On that note, the weight of the eyelids dictates.
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