Since my modest and cautious update on my knee injury a couple weeks ago, I’ve actually been making some measurable progress in both healing and beginning my re-training.
Then a few days later I went to a tour showing of the Banff Film Festival.
I’m not clever enough to make a proper film, but I do think I have an interesting story to tell as I recover and train for Chicago in October.
So I made a video:
The first of a series, I hope. The introduction to a happy conclusion, that too.
It’s a commitment to try and publicly document something difficult like training for a marathon. But it also commits me to training and trying harder to compete the story.
It’s gonna be a crazy year!
Check it out and give it a like to help me get some interest.
If running three klicks through on a random Thursday evening in January sounds less than impressive, let me introduce you to my Medial Collateral Ligament injury and the fact that I haven’t had a pain-free run outside or beyond the confines of a physiotherapy-prescribed treadmill run in over six months.
I pushed myself back in September in the park near my house and ended up limping home and elevating my leg for nearly a week.
This morning, fourteen hours later, I feel pretty normal. Good. Strong. Hopeful.
I don’t know how. I don’t know when. I don’t know why. All I know is that one day I was running and training and planning adventure runs through the city. The next day I was struggling to climb a few steps in my house.
I figured a couple weeks recovery.
After a month I went to see the physiotherapist.
He told me it may take a couple months, but maybe as long as four months.
It’s been six months and I’m finally feeling like there is something resembling hope in a recovery.
It was -15C on the trails.
My crew meets sporadically but regularly at an elementary school parking lot near an access point a ravine.
In the spring, summer and fall it’s a beautiful asphalt trail descending into the river valley under a canopy of big old trees.
In the winter, its dark and icy and hauntingly creepy.
I recorded a walking tour there just last week and the view hadn’t changed much to last night, except that I was plodding along at one minute run to one minute walk intervals, and listening to the crunch of my feet through the dark forest trail.
My four companions kept my pace for the first of my one minute intervals, but then I purposely slowed and they dashed ahead. On my second interval I almost felt like if I pushed it I could catch up with them. On the third interval they were little more than bobbing headlamps in the distance and by the fourth I had descending into a canopy of eerie trail that was as much like a haunted pathway towards some frozen hell below as it was the scene of my running recovery run.
At eleven minutes I made a u-turn and returned to my truck, logging exactly three slow kilometers of winter plodding and setting the stage for a “now we wait to see how I feel in the morning” scenario.
And?
And?
I already spoiled the lede, of course. I feel fine this morning. I can still walk… have walked. Gone up and down the stairs a dozen times and…
I have an appointment with my physiotherapist tomorrow. Now I need to fess up that I pushed the program. I suppose it all worked out tho, huh?
If you’ve been reading this blog you may recall that my 2023 plan to dig into some vintage science fiction was something I coined the three buck book club, and was the result of some thrifty used book shopping and a notion that half-a-century old science fiction might be worth a second read.
Or in my case, a first read.
I wasn’t particularly wrong.
And my reading has introduced me to a small stack of novels that (chosen by literal chance and randomness) I would never have encountered in any mainstream way.
Great.
But it has also introduced a new problem.
Old books are full of old ideas.
I guess I knew this, but I didn’t think it would punch me in the gut so firmly as it has.
I’m on my second novel of the project and so far I’m two for two on some very misogynistic protagonist characters and a solid one hundred percent for some cringe-worthy bits of colonial-bent racism.
These books are products of their time.
But their time in the past had a few ideas that are probably — certainly — not worth dragging into the present.
Sunlight in Cleansing
Thus, I find my role here a little muddled.
At one end I could turn this into a kind of, to borrow a politically charged idea, “woke witch hunt” against decades-gone authors who had the misfortune to be randomly plucked from used-bookstore obscurity by some guy looking for something cheap to read.
On the other end, I (as a middle-aged Caucasian man in a position of privilege) could articulate that perhaps it isn’t my place to talk and write about that particular aspect of these books and focus on the stories they tell.
And yet…
An yet there is a tangled mess here that isn’t so easy to unravel.
I tend to think that discussion and education are pretty good solvents for bad ideas.
I can’t undo what these folks thought, believed or wrote. I can’t change the fact that uncountable numbers of cornball science fiction books still exist on shelves around the world filled with deeply rooted concepts that today would bin those stories before they made it past an agent. I can’t change any of that.
I can acknowledge it. I can call it out. I can make sure that as I pry open their dusty covers and look for the bits of vintage treasure inside that I also try to make sure everyone understands that there is some rot in there too.
Inevitably someone else is going to find copy of these books, and if they are anything like me google the title and read or watch what comes up. And there on the screen is my article, my video…
The kind of fog that sets in, sinks to the cervices of the city and holds its place.
I drove to work this morning and where usually the sparkling towers of downtown greet me from across the valley, glass and concrete pillars of light twinkling through the morning twilight, today it was just ghostly silhouettes and hints of light pushing through the frozen moisture in the air.
A few hours later I walked to the edge of the valley and took some video of the haunting scene. Normally a view south that reaches across the valley and traces the shapes of the urban sprawl on the other side, this morning an ethereal vanishing point barely stretching to the far side of the river below:
The fog is with us for a few days though.
We are in a scenario where the temperatures above us are warmer than at the surface so the air is trapped close to the ground. No wind, no flow – continual pumping of air pollution -> poorer air quality.
AG, the meteorologist with whom I run
And as a number of sources suggest, it is more than fog. It is a weighty air mass full of poor air.
Folks have been advised not to work or exercise outside.
So.
In the summer we get smoke from forest fires.
In the winter we get killer fog.
So.
That’s our world now.
It certainly is hauntingly pretty though. On another walk for my early lunch I strolled through the city square in front of City Hall, a square named for a British Prime Minister, Churchill. The fog had receded a bit, but the ethereal vibe was still strong there, too.
…basically the air around us is in a stable situation and things are in balance. When things get out of balance that’s when it blows. Kind of similar to life.
