Week 38 of 2026: odyssey

It was one of those weeks with a lot of cancelled plans, but that lead to new plans. Luckily I could complete the odyssey of running from Amsterdam to Zaandam and also finally watched a hyped movie I've been meaning to go to.

Watched

The Odyssey (2026)

This has been on my list for a while now ("you haven't even been to Marthy Supreme yet!" in the back of my mind). There seems to be a barrier between me and going to the cinema, but Friday I finally went for it. You see, I live next to the biggest cinema in the country, yet somehow cinema's all feel far away. I can explain this feeling: I used to have a Cineville subscription, and those are all in the city center, whereas Pathé ArenA is... Pathé. And as soon as I entered the place I knew again: Pathé is fine, but I really dislike the kind of people who go to Pathé. Everyone was noisily snacking, making occasional remarks out loud and drinking stuff. After over a year of soberness, I am really starting to dislike the smell of alcohol and beer in particular. I am not actually sure Cineville theaters are much better these days, but I noticed the cinema is not really the added experience I was waiting for.

That said, I liked the film. Interesting to see the story told this way, and inspired me to read some of the translations I have here at home.

Read

continued The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth 3)
started Odyssee by Homerus (translated by H.J. de Roy van Zuydewijn to Dutch hexameters)

Not much reading this week. Kinda dropped the Autisms book, we'll see if I get to it next week.

As for Odyssee: I don't think I'm really going to keep reading this, but it was nice to read it out loud for a bit. I have two versions of it, both translations to Dutch. One is a prose translation by M.A. Schwarz and the other is the mentioned one by De Roy van Zuydewijn. Both of them I acquired for a course at university when I was studing Dutch literature, so they have been in my book case for ages. (Imagine! How much older these texts are!)

The version I read of is translated to hexameters, meaning: the metrum of the text in Dutch matches the original. I do think this resulted in some freedoms in the translation, but it was famed for how good it was. It was nice to read it out loud, and I seemed to have remembered the first sentence, which now spooks in my head for days.

Played

On Tuesday I ran Escape from Dino Island, a Powered by the Apocalypse one-shot game about... basically Jurassic Park. I've ran it three times and this was by far the least dino-y one of them all: my players went head-first into character creation and made this very complex relational network in which they were all related in some way. I did manage to get some dino-action in after that, but it was a wonky and bumpy ride, with a lot of chaos. Would run this again tho, it's a great game.

I guess I should also mention under this heading that I played Go again, a game older than the Odyssey. Not sure why, but I played quite a few games against bots and I seem to be ranked at 8 kyu still, which is nice considering I haven't played in years and was at 7 kyu at the time. Missed a few embarrassing atari though.

Ran

Dealing with the injury of last week, I hold off of any big runs until Wednesday, when I did a little test run. It was okay, but I didn't dare to do too much, so I kept it at 1km easy, and when I was home I did some of the strength training I've been neglecting for a while now.

On Friday, I did another test, and went for 4km this time. It went much better, but I still felt my calf muscle complaining a bit, so again I did not want to push it to the 12km that were actually on the schedule.

On Sunday, I ran the Dam tot Damloop (16km). This was supposed to be a 17km easy run, and I really tried at the start, but it's just not working with so many people in front of me ... I have to overtake some of them anyway because my easy pace is higher than whatever they are doing, but then once I start overtaking I push to a tempo run and well, the second half of it I locked in with someone who was also going 4:55/km and it was great, just not easy as prescribed.

But the calf seems fine at the time of writing, so I have good hopes that I can do my normal program again for the upcoming week.