Once a Runner

"Everything's a story. Dumb stuff happens in your life and you think it's dumb stuff, and then it turns out that it was your history, your life happening." - Again to Carthage

I just finished reading John L. Parker Jr's running fiction trilogy - Racing the Rain, Once a Runner, and Again to Carthage. I've been meaning to read them for a while. Once a Runner was the first published and is somewhat of a classic in the running fiction genre. Racing the Rain is the most recently published, but it's actually the first in the story timeline. I decided to start with it, and I'd say that's a good way to go.

I really enjoyed all of them, as evidenced by my reading them back to back. I saw reviewers complaining there was other stuff in addition to running, which to me is a good thing, I'm not sure how you'd make a story with nothing but running!

This is running at a high level, not your recreational hobby. I've never been involved in competitive running at any level, but I still found it interesting, although slightly depressing. You know that top athletes run much faster than normal human beings, but I never thought about how much faster. A pace that is pushing it for me is a painfully slow training pace for these guys. And the sheer volume of training is incredible. It's amazing that the human body can handle it. This is fiction, but I suspect that this part is fairly accurate. The author was a competitive runner himself.

There are lots of funny parts in the books that made me laugh at loud. The main character admits he's somewhat of a kook. The descriptions of the races are exciting, and by the time you get to them you really care how they turn out.

The main character grows up in Florida and starts out as a basketball fanatic, and only reluctantly starts competing in running. In Once a Runner he's running the mile. In Again to Carthage he makes a come back running the marathon.

If you're at all a runner I think these books will resonate with you, and even if you're not a runner I still think you'll find them a good read. Definitely recommended.

“Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as a diamond; it made him weary behond comprehension. But it also made him free.” - Once a Runner

100 photographs

I put together a Blurb book of 100 favorites from my photographs for the year. (Actually Dec. 2012 to Nov. 2013 because I wanted it ready for Christmas.)  Blurb does a good job. I haven't tried any other companies, so I can't compare, but I don't think you'd be disappointed with Blurb if you wanted something similar.

2013 by Andrew McKinlay

It was a good year for travel and photography. The book includes photos from our train trip around the United States, a climbing trip to the Okanagan, a backpacking trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota, a family trip to Prince Albert National Park, our road trip to Haida Gwaii, a paddling trip to Grey Owls Cabin, a road trip to Wells Gray Park in BC, and of course, many from around Saskatoon.

See also my post about the books I made last year.

Books from Christmas

I try to avoid getting "stuff" for Christmas, but books are my weakness. Mostly I buy ebooks rather than dead trees, but I make an exception for books with lots of photos. Here are the ones I got this Christmas:

National Geographic Guide to State Parks of the United States
I also have the National Parks guide in this series. They're good for armchair browsing, planning a trip, or getting ideas for what to visit in an area. Aside from all it's other flaws, the USA is gifted with a wonderful array of landscapes and nature. Another one that I might pick up is their Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways.

Unexpected: 30 Years of Patagonia Catalog Photography
I've always loved the photography in the Patagonia catalogs so it's great to have a collection of them. It won the award for best mountain images book at last year's Banff Mountain Book Festival. There are also some great essays mixed in. (Too bad the photograph by Rob Owens of Murray Hainer and I in Tibet that was in one of the catalogs didn't make it into the book. )

Fred Beckey's 100 Favorite North American Climbs
At 89 years old Fred Beckey is a climbing legend and one of my heroes. Many years ago I was climbing at Skaha (near Penticton in BC) with Ian Marsh. Standing in the parking lot, he said "I think Fred Beckey is here! (Fred was already legendary, even back then.) I was skeptical and asked how he could possibly know that. He pointed to a beat up wreck of a car and said "I recognize his car." And the reason he recognized the car was because there had been a picture in a Patagonia catalog. (Back in those days we studied those catalogs religiously.)

The Responsible Company: What We've Learned From Patagonia's First 40 Years
Yvon Chouinard is another hero of mine, for his climbing and for his business and environmental work. I just started reading this, so I can't give much of a review yet but I really liked his previous book Let My People Go Surfing. (What is the Saskatchewan equivalent? Let my people go tobogganing?) We saw him in person at the Banff Mountain Festival when he launched the 1% for the Planet initiative. (I got this one as an ebook.)

Thanks to my family for the great gifts!

Lost Mountain

"a searing indictment of how a country's energy lust is ravaging the hills and hollows of Appalachia" - Publishers Weekly

Sometimes I wish we'd just run out of oil and get it over with. Not that I look forward to the upheaval, but at least I wouldn't have to get pissed off at people driving gas guzzling vehicles.

The problem is, we have plenty of coal left. It'll last many years after the oil runs out. And coal is ugly. Burning coal for energy is dirty and puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.

But Lost Mountain by Erik Reece is about another ugly side to coal - how we mine it. Specifically, the strip mining in the eastern United States, where they chew off mountains to get at the coal underneath, and dump the leftovers into the valleys. The mining companies are supposed to do "restoration" but the results are a pale ghost of the original forested mountains. These forests have some of the highest biodiversity in North America. Or should I say "had".

The mining destroys the forest and poisons the watersheds. And to add insult to injury the locals profit very little from it. A few mining companies make money but the locals stay some of the poorest in the USA.

But we all want electricity, and unfortunately, coal is one of the main ways we generate it.

Zero History

Zero History is the latest great book by the Canadian science fiction author William Gibson.

I've been a fan of his books for a long time, all the way back to Neuromancer (1984) where he popularized the term "cyberspace".

His last three books, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and now Zero History have been set in the present, rather than the normal science fiction future. Zero History shares many of the same characters as Spook Country.

But Gibson is well know for saying "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." The bits of the present that he focuses on in these books might as well be the future. He focuses on brand a lot, which is not something I think about a lot, but it's definitely a big part of our world.

If you're looking for an easy read that doesn't require much thought, this probably isn't the book for you. I often feel like I need to reread several times to have a chance of getting the full meaning. But if you're a Gibson fan you won't be disappointed.

Empire of Illusion

Acting, politics, and sports have become, as in Nero's reign, interchangeable. - Empire of Illusions

I recently read Empire of Illusions by Pulitzer prize–winning author Chris Hedges. I found it quite horrifying to read about aspects of our culture from wrestling to porn to universities to corporations to politics. (As you may have gathered by now, I'm afraid I'm not a big fan of our current society!)

With our access to so much information these days, there's a danger of only looking at stuff you agree with. And, like hiring people who will always agree with you, it's not very helpful. I know I'm susceptible to this to a certain degree. But I like to think I'm open to anything that's objective and has some scientific basis. That's a bias too, I guess, but it's not one I'm quite ready to give up on.

More and more I think the United States is on it's way down a major decline. It's easy to say "they're so big and powerful, that can never happen". But every other empire has declined in the end, with similar signs portending their demise. Refusing to admit this possibility is a bit like saying "I know every one else dies eventually, but not me, I'm going to live forever".

Of course, that raises the question of what's going to happen to Canada. We're closely tied to the USA and we have many of the same problems. But in other ways we're quite different. In any case, it's hard to imagine it not having major affects on us.

Anyway, if you don't mind being horrified, I would definitely recommend the book.

Kingfisher

I just finished reading Kingfisher - Tales from the Halcyon River by Charlie Hamilton James.

Now that I'm trying to get most of my books either on my Kindle or from the library, about the only books I'm allowing myself to buy are coffee table type books with photographs. This one was an impulse buy when I spotted it at McNallys. (Finding books like this is one of the reasons I hope bookstores like McNallys stay in business, and why I continue to buy from them.)

Apart from the photographs, I was attracted by the text which told the story around the photos, including some of the background on how they were taken. Obviously, this won't be of interest to everyone, but it definitely was to me.

I have to admire someone who has devoted a considerable portion of their life to taking photographs of one kind of bird. And despite the spectacular photographs, he still talks about how he needs to get better photographs. I guess you'd have to be a bit of a perfectionist to get to this point. I can only shake my head since his photographs (and the lengths he goes to get them) are way beyond me.

We have Belted Kingfishers in Saskatchewan (and much of North America) but they're not quite as colorful as the ones in the book. I've only caught brief glimpses of them. I'll have to keep a closer eye out for them.

If you get a chance, I'd recommend taking a look at the book. I see he has a new one coming out soon - Halcyon River Diaries. It's definitely on my wish list.

You can see some of his photos (including some of the kingfisher ones) on his website: charliehamiltonjames.com

Books, Frogs, and Turtles

I recently read Following the Water by David Carroll and Amphibian by Carla Gunn.

Amphibian is a novel about nine year old Phin Walsh. Phin is a geeky kid, too smart for his own good, frustrated with school and finding his teacher's mistakes. He watches the Green Channel on TV and is upset about the state of the environment. His mother sends him to a shrink and they end up banning him from watching the Green Channel. Of course, this does nothing to alleviate his anxiety. The problem is, the environment is in trouble, and this makes it hard to reassure him that everything is ok. I can't help but agree with Phin that he's the one that's in touch with reality and it's the rest of the world that has its head in the sand.

That probably sounds way too serious, but the book also has a lighter side and had me chuckling numerous times, for example, when Phin and his best friend "jail break" the school's pet frog.

Following the Water is non-fiction, the latest in his series of books about turtles and their habitat, including The Year of the Turtle, Swamp Walkers Journal, and Self Portrait With Turtles. I loved his other books and I loved this one. Of course, that's not too surprising considering I'm a turtle fan myself. You can get a glimpse of the author in a short piece of an interview on You Tube.

This book continues his fascinating real life observations and natural history, and his wonderful artwork. But I can't help but get a bit of a melancholy feeling from the book. He's concerned about the fate of the land where he has roamed for so many years. At the end of the book he learns that the land has been "protected" but this is not the good news you might think:

This landscape, an extensive mosaic of contiguous wetland, riparian, and upland elements, all embracing a lingering wildness and extraordinary biodiversity, possesses an ecological integrity that, in the face of the global loss and marginalization of habitats, becomes rarer by the hour. It seemed for a time that it could go differently here, that this place could be exempted even from the intrusion of "passive" recreation, which takes it own toll on wildness and brings pressures to bear on the functioning of a natural ecosystem. But I did see all the familiar signs pointing to this outcome. And now I see that this has become a marked place.

It is all but universally believed that if development rights are bought up and motorized vehicles excluded, if human presence is limited to foot traffic, dogs on leashes, mountain bikes, kayaks, and the like, a parcel of land is saved and its wildlife habitat protected. But in nearly every case, as will be true here, funding sources and the terms of easements mandate a level of access and recreational use that lays the foundation not for true habitat protection but for a playground for people, a human theme park.

A constant refrain of my advocacy for moving beyond stewardship and conservation to preservation is that I do support setting aside places where people can go, from relatively natural areas to city parks. One frequently hears that there are not enough places for people to go. But where do we not go? We are too many and we tread too heavily. (Perhaps the planet is to blame for being too small.) What tiny percentage of Earth is irrevocably dedicated to providing wildlife sanctuary, to preserving the biodiversity on which, as more people are coming to realize, the health of the planet and, ultimately, of the human condition utterly depends? We cannot seem to allow room for ecosystems to play out their destinies free from human intervention. A room of its own is biodiversity's only requirement.

All too often these days I feel the same anxiety as nine-year old Phin Walsh.

The Smaller Majority

If you like nature and don't mind "creepy crawlies" have a look at The Smaller Majority by Piotr Naskrecki. Your local library probably has it (the Saskatoon library did).

The photographs are amazing and the text is great too.

Where Are We Headed?

I'm in the middle of reading Heat by George Monbiot.  It's a few years old but still an excellent read.

Check out a couple of his recent blog posts.

Not Even Wrong

Should We Seek to Save Industrial Civilisation?

I find it very hard to know what to think of our current situation. Should I retreat to a cabin in the woods and attempt to live a pre-industrial life? But a few people doing that won't save us. Or do I give up and live it up while I can?

The middle ground of making some feeble personal attempts to "reduce, reuse, and recycle" seem almost pointless when the people around me are buying SUV's and McMansions. And when I, myself, hypocritically continue to travel by air, eclipsing any savings I might have made other ways.

The Dominant Animal

"It would indeed be the ultimate tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble that the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."

-- William David Ormsby Gore, 1960

I just finished reading The Dominant Animal by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. I have to admit I'm starting to avoid these kinds of books. I don't need any more convincing and they just make me depressed.

Nonetheless, it's a good book, worth reading.

Talking About Running

I just finished reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist, runner, and triathlete.

I really enjoyed this book and identified with what he talked about. I'm not a serious runner, I don't enter any races. But I've run fairly regularly since I was a kid. Nor am I a serious writer, but I've done a little, and I'm certainly a serious reader, and in some ways my programming is a similar solitary creative pursuit. I'm also reaching a similar age as Murakami writes about - the point where you have to face the fact that your physical performance is past its peak.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next days work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed - and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

This seems very true for my big programming projects.

"It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly: I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I've had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

I've always been happy on my own as well, preferring to run on my own, and happy to read or work on projects on my own.

"I'm in my late fifties now. When I was young, I never imagined the twenty-first century would actually come and that, all joking aside, I'd turn fifty. In theory, of course, it was self-evident that someday, if nothing else happened, the twenty-first century would roll around and I'd turn fifty. When I was young, being asked to imagine myself at fifty was as difficult as being asked to imagine, concretely, the world after death. ... For me - and for everybody else, probably - this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I'm having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely.

"I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself - that when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.

"I expect that this winter I'll run another marathon somewhere in the world. And I'm sure come next summer I'll be out in another triathlon somewhere, giving it my best shot. Thus the seasons come and go, and the years pass by. I'll age one more year, and probably finish another novel. One by one, I'll face the tasks before me and complete them as best I can. Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long-distance runner.