Also Being Reconsidered: Black Death, Enemy or Misunderstood Friend?
Thanks LA Times!
1. The goal is to log 2010 miles between January 1, 2010 and January 1, 2011.
2. Loggable miles can be achieved by running, hiking or on the eliptical.
3. No more than 1/4 weekly 40 miles will be non-running miles. Meaning I can hike 10, but I still have to run 30. A week.
4. Logs will be posted monthly, and either confirmed with the Nike Running doohickey or a Body Bugg if I decide I need a Body Bugg, which bugs me because it is spelled with two gs. and that is cutesty and you know, nothing good came of cutesy.
5. There are no time limits on my runs. If I have 10 miles to do in a day and it takes me four hours, so be it. This is about mileage.
6. I really don’t want to quit. So if I quit I should be punished somehow. At first I thought my punishment should be that I have to give money to some organization that I despise, but that seems like a lose-lose. Then I thought “tattoo of Yosemete Sam” but that seems really harsh. I don’t know what my punishment should be for quitting. Maybe wearing a t-shirt that says “I Am A Failure?” to a really important meeting?
7. Starting/ending weight and starting/ending measurements will not be posted until the end, if at all.
I am, at best, a casual runner. Maybe three times a week, when I’m feeling in shape. Maybe five miles each run. So my average year if I’m being really, really generous is around 780 miles. If I run three times a week. And I never, oh, tell myself I need a day or three off and maybe go to the gym or maybe take a hike instead.
I’m out today, desperately trying to get through 3.5 miles because I’m out of shape and tired and Harry wants to chase motorcycles and air molecules. And I am thinking about a goal. A goal I can do that isn’t a race or something.
2010 miles in 2010.
It comes out to 39 miles per week.
Or 6.5 miles a day with one day off.
Now, let’s be honest. 2010 kilometers would make way more sense. And I’m tempted. It would work out to 24 miles a week. I can do 4 miles a day, 6 days a week.
But somehow it feels like cheating. 39 miles per week. If I did 40 per week I could take entire weeks off of running in case of injury.
So I’m doing it. I’ll take from November 1 to January 1 to work up to it. If I’m getting thru 3.5 a day now, I’ll start adding a mile at a time, until the mileage gets to where it needs to be. It comes out to 3 times around the reservoir. I have no idea what it is on our trails, but I’m guessing the trails come out to about five miles, so maybe two runs a day? Anyone ever do this?
I figure, if I’m on target and getting miles in, maybe I’ll end the year with some sort of race or something. And then I plan on never ever running again. Kidding. Maybe. Sort of.
I’ll use the Nike iPod thing to log my miles, so I can’t cheat, and I will post them weekly I guess, in case anyone cares/wants to mock. I think I know how to do that. I have two months to figure it out.
Oh and something I just found out. According to Runners World, if I was training for a 1/2 marathon I would have this mileage:
1/2 MARATHON
RUNNER: Elite
MILES/WEEK: 100-110
RUNNER: Mortal
MILES/WEEK: 30-40
So 40 per week for 51 weeks. That isn’t like… totally insane. Right? Right?
Anyone else want to do this? Hello?
(gulp)
And until he can share it (Twilight: New Moon, bitches) here is the last video he did with her.
A little gem of lovely sexy pixie with a killer video. Le Swoon.
Despite crushing deadlines for both of us, we wandered over to Chavez Ravine yesterday at 3pm and other than the nice Aussie next to us catching a fly ball and Slash playing God Bless America, the game kind of sucked. Well, it was nice to hear an entire stadium cheer for Kershaw, a pitcher whose number is older than he is, and who pitches the kind of slow, steady, almost perfect innings that make you realize how artful baseball is.
Then in the bottom of the 9th with, no lie, CASEY AT THE BAT, the whole game went apeshit crazy. Yes, outfielder Holliday dropped a ball after getting caught between the moon and New York City. No wait, between the sun and the stadium lights. Anyway, with Blake on third and Pierre running it was about the loudest thing I have ever heard. Like this, but ten times louder.
Baseball is a beautiful sport. And when, on a cool October afternoon, a group of athletes win a game like that, and a stadium of people stumble out, half drunk on the fact that they saw the win, and got to participate just by showing up? That is what makes sports an amazing thing to watch. I know Manny is slow as shit and really should be ashamed of himself. And I know Pujols is maybe the best player to be in baseball in, what, forever? But right after that win, with 60,000 of my closest friends high fiving each other and laughing and hugging the restaurant workers and the cop on the corner saying he was from Brooklyn which made him an instant celebrity??? Right after that? Baseball was perfect.
From today’s NY Times:
Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
I feel like every single English teacher in the world just sighed and gave a curve saving C- to the NY Times.
I first saw Eddie Izzard at the Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 95… we had a crazy political jazz play upstairs and he was killing it in the “big room” downstairs. I was traveling with the only black people at the Fringe, and somehow this got us some drinks with Eddie after a set. I remember none of it, only putting it together when I saw his show on HBO one night. And then, then I was a complete convert.
This year we saw him work on material late one night in Hollywood. Three hours of non-stop, erudite gutter humor including a long thing entirely in Latin. He’s beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Go see this. Do it now.
