this morning i was woken up by a large work machine destroying the house next door to our apartment building. that seemed like as good a cue as any, so i snuck into my room--my friends harley and claire are in town and i let them take the bed--to get some shorts. it was raining steadily, but of course it's not a big deal when you know the hot shower is close at hand when you're finished running. i wore a sweater and a "toque" as they say up here. in canada.

i advanced in the program, can't remember if i said that already. now i run for a minute and a half, walk for a minute and a half,  run for three minutes and then walk for three minutes. do that twice.

felt good today. no shin splints yet.

i almost missed my run today. i stayed up pretty late playing link to the past last night, which is cool because i really don't remember the game that well at all (as opposed to the DKC games which i blew through in about 40 minutes each). i do remember playing zelda in my parents house in the room we called 'the den'.

anyway i overslept a bit and woke up about 30 minutes before i had to go to work. so i figured i'd put some bread in the toaster and hit the bricks, but then gabe called me to say he was at the store and that i could wait an hour if i liked. figured i'd better lace up the runners then. so i did.

today i had trouble remembering how long each segment of my jog/walk parts were supposed to be. i kept walking too much and running too little. i made my way around the community center though. it's getting really (pleasantly) cool these days. it's been dark all day today.

i woke up today around 8 o clock, there's now a built-in alarm clock at my apartment building, because they're ripping down the house next door. anyway, now that i'm not in school, the earliest obligation i could possibly have is at 11 AM for work. today i worked at 12, so i had plenty of time to lay in bed and listen to records before going for a run.

i guess it was about 10:40 when i left the house. i ran towards queen elizabeth park and eventually did run up the big hill towards the conservatory. i feel like i could run way way further than this program is currently allowing me to, but i gotta trust that this baby-step stuff will protect me from shin splints, which i have a nasty pattern of getting. somehow i had never been in this one part of QEP, where the basketball courts are. i made a mental note to return and shoot some hoops.

nothing else too eventful happened up on the hill. looks like there were some lawn bowlers and tennis players milling about. i biked past a really fancy tennis club on the way to UBC a couple weeks ago - isaiah told me he got a job dishwashing at the jericho tennis club. not sure if that was it.

last week i started running again. i’m using this program called “couch to 5k” that is supposedly very helpful in working your way up slowly, little by little. anyway my mother used to run marathons and i decided that i wanted to do one too a couple years ago, while i was in the third year of my college program. i think it must have been in like january of 2012 that i had my last run (my mom had photocopied a page out of some running book that had a weekly program that seems pretty similar to this new thing i’m doing), i was in olympia with my band, and i went for a run all around the city in the morning. it was actually awesome. but the tour proved to be detrimental to my training and i soon fell off the wagon, as they say.

anyway, last week i decided to start again - it’s a new season and my first fall that i’m not studying or working on projects or any of that. three days a week i leave my house and pick a different route than the one i did on the previous run day. this program is based on the time spent running rather than the distance (at least to start), so i just run in a certain direction for x amount of minutes and then turn back and run to my house. 

vancouver is a city with two million or so people in it. my life is pretty much contained to like three blocks, because i live really close to the place i work. even when i get out on these runs, i find that i peer into the windows of houses i’ve never before seen in my life, but they’re right in my neighborhood. kinda weird.