Following a moment of inspiration, I laid out my marathon/race bibs on my coffee table and mulled over how they will fit on a poster board in a way that information was not lost. But pasting it onto a board seemed too permanent, and the idea to scrapbook my marathons was the next idea to float by me. I have a sketchbook with hundreds of heavy stock pages that I never used since purchasing it quite a few years ago. And I finally had something worthwhile to scrapbook, something that did not occur to me several years ago when my girlfriends were on a bender scrapbooking their trips (way after the fact).

As an artistic endeavour, it was a great activity. I clipped some logos but also drew logos for the hand-made effect, copied graphics that caught my whimsical eye, and trimmed photos in jagged ways to add visual interest.

As a way to display memorabilia that would otherwise be cast in a filing cabinet forever, it’s a great solution. I used to pull out the “bib folder” a few times a year, after just completing a run to file away the newest bib, superficially sort them (as it’s already sorted), and put it away again.

As an inspiration for further running… I don’t know. Perhaps I have been looking too much at it but I get so bored myself when giving someone the tour of the scrapbook, “Another run in Vancouver. Another run in Vancouver, this one, a 10K, around UBC. Another run in Vancouver….” What can you expect? “Another one in Vancouver” is true for 17 of 29 runs for which I’ve registered.

So I have a new rule: No more blah-blah boring Vancouver races after July 2010.