Testing out Mattrbld, a new content management system app designed for static sites (like this one). If you see this…it seems to be working!

After training imploded last week I set out this week to get back on track. And…back on track I seem to have gotten? Four runs up, four runs down, with today’s nine miler going about as smooth as I’d have hoped, despite the ice left behind by yesterday’s rain.

Now, with any luck, maybe, just maybe, I can get back onto a regular schedule next week, and maybe, just maybe, enjoy the benefits of at least a little bit of consistency?…for a change of pace? (I’m ready to get that rest day back before the long run days; these four day streaks are not for me!)

Saturday night. Watched Steven Spielberg’s Duel. Enjoying some beverages. Continuing to give Mattrbld a test drive, from my phone. A momentary respite.

Testing out Mattrbld, a new content management system app designed for static sites (like this one). If you see this…it seems to be working!

Saturday night. Watched Steven Spielberg’s Duel. Enjoying some beverages. Continuing to give Mattrbld a test drive, from my phone. A momentary respite.

After training imploded last week I set out this week to get back on track. And…back on track I seem to have gotten? Four runs up, four runs down, with today’s nine miler going about as smooth as I’d have hoped, despite the ice left behind by yesterday’s rain.

Now, with any luck, maybe, just maybe, I can get back onto a regular schedule next week, and maybe, just maybe, enjoy the benefits of at least a little bit of consistency?…for a change of pace? (I’m ready to get that rest day back before the long run days; these four day streaks are not for me!)

My office snake plant is popping off its second (!) baby right now, while my hoya has a two-foot-long-or-so shoot that’s trying to crawl up into the ceiling? If you see me, and I look a little green, just know the plant people have won. (And I’m probably better off under the care of my new plant overlords.)

Planned on running today, planned on this finally being the first week of this marathon training cycle where I’d get all the runs done and all the runs done on the day they were scheduled for, but I also knew it was going to snow like three inches overnight, so when the alarm went off this morning I was like, naw, I’ll just push it off to tomorrow, and I snoozed for another hour, and then when I got up and checked the phone, I confirmed yup must be nasty outside, the school’s closed for the kids, and then I looked outside and didn’t see so much as a flake of snow on the ground, and I was like well this is weird and lame and I totally could have gotten up to run this morning, and then I got ready for work and I stepped out the door and as soon as my foot hit the first step on the way down to the driveway WOOMPH WOOMPH WOOMPH all the way down to the ground and now my elbow hurts and my side hurts and my pride hurts and I guess I’m really glad I didn’t actually try to run this morning after all.

So now I’m wondering if I can actually get through the entire marathon training cycle with zero weeks going exactly according to schedule? How many completely inconsistent weeks can I complete in a row? H’mm.

Still feeling sore after this week’s fall. Unless there’s a bit of magic in store for me here (he says, watching icy snow fall out of the sky) I think I’m missing this weekend’s long run. Which upends my training cycle once again and so at this point this entire affair has been such a comedic mess that I think I’m ready to toss it in the trash and move on.

Which is fine! I’m actually not mad. I kind of knew going into it that getting prepped for a spring full was going to be a stretch anyway, and I’ve had “just do the half marathon instead, dummy” as my back-up plan since day one, and I’ve got plenty of time left here to reset, recenter, and refocus on that as my goal, so…I think I’m going to do that, with an eye toward some kind of fun spring half goal that preps me to segue smoothly into summer training for a fall marathon.

To be perfectly honest this probably makes more sense for me anyway. As much as I want to keep going through the winter, I really don’t want to stop running for like three months every year, I know what a mess it can be, even when it’s going well, and this last month has maybe felt more stress-inducing than stress-relieving, and so maybe just adjusting my expectations going into the winter season is the right move anyway. Seems like a perfectly reasonable time to just do less and worry less about it for a while, and maybe actually figure out a treadmill situation ahead of time for next year to make life even easier next time around, theoretically.

For as much as I know summer comes with its own trials and tribulations I sincerely believe I had much more fun training through the heat than I have through the cold and at the end of the day (or, well, beginning of the day, as I wake up before everyone else to get these runs in) this whole thing is supposed to be fun, darn it.

I don’t have much to add here, other than—this feels like it should be required reading for anyone in tech right now.

The beliefs of these CEOs aren’t incidental to the AI product they’re selling us. These are not tools designed for us to benefit from, but tools designed to exploit us. To poison our access to jobs, and our access to information at the same time.

I just don’t understand what we’re doing with these tools, why we’re so excited for them; it feels like we’re committing the death of a thousand cuts, and each cut is self-inflicted. We’re not producing a better world with them, we’re getting through the next ten minutes with them, over and over and over again. It’s all so frustrating and annoying and sad.

In other news, went for my first run yesterday since slipping on the ice two weeks ago. It was okay! But also I still dislike winter. Strongly. Angrily.

All things going well there’s another shakeout run today in store and then I’ve got twelve weeks of half marathon training ahead of me. All things going well. Which they have...not been, this year. But maybe now they will! Consistency would be sweet right now. We shall see.

Got done did ahakeout run number two this morning, a four miler. (I’ve been over the “starting over again” hump enough times to know the drill, but oh boy is warming back up from an extended zero miles streak awfully unfun…)

Week two of twelve of half marathon training. (Note to self: sign up for half marathon.)

This training cycle I’m making the jump up to five days a week running for the first time, which so far so good, with one whole week down, I guess? It works out well as the first week’s runs were all pretty low mileage so I figure it made for both an easier ramp up after the injury break and also easing into the extra day’s running each week. We’ll see how it goes as I progress.

Every other week there’s two days of race pace running and we’ll have to see how that goes, if it goes. I figure I’ll at least try to attack the first day’s race pace and if the second happens great but if the second just winds up being a casual run for mileage that’s fine too. Today was the first race pace run and after a warm-up mile I did four miles all down around 9:30/mile which felt like a real stretch today. (As I joked to my wife when I got home: “One mile in I thought: no way I’m going to keep doing this…and then I kept doing it for three more.”)

Theoretically my big ambitious half marathon goal would be to break two hours, but that was originally when I was going to be doing this in the fall after getting a spring full under my belt, so right now I’m just going to try to fall somewhere between 2:00 and 2:10 and that’ll be just fine. (Actually, that’s plenty ambitious enough!)

Week two of twelve done. Today’s five miler was a little rough feeling after yesterday’s pace run but I got to do it in the sunlight so it was okay. The second pace run worked out well, three miles right around where I was at for four miles Tuesday. All in all I’m pleased and it was nice to finally have a week where all the planned runs happened on the day they were planned for at about the planned time and in the planned way. It’s almost like consistency!

Next week will be a little down week, which’ll be nice as this whole ramping back up thing continues happening. Also feels like maybe we’ll get some more above-freezing temperatures again which will be really nice. Almost enough to make up for the theft of daylight from my morning runs thanks to daylight savings time. Grr.

Into week four. Got done a five mile pace run this morning. A little bit slower than the last couple pace runs from two weeks ago, I think, but, I still got the pace mileage done in my target zone, so it’s all good. I will say I felt like I was enjoying the pace runs more earlier in this process, when they were fresh and interesting; today’s felt a bit more like a, uh, mm, more like an uh-oh, like a, well, I guess this is what I gotta do now, huh? If nothing else they make me appreciate the surrounding chill runs way more.

I enjoyed writing. I wrote and finished an entire novel and I wrote and finished a lot of short stories and I wrote and finished a lot of poems and I enjoyed doing all that and I wrote and did not finish other novels and short stories and poetry and I enjoyed doing all that too. I’ve written plenty of blog posts and I’ve written a number of book reviews and that’s all been fun, too. Writing can be annoying and it has gotten more annoying over the years as it has become something I used to like doing and had time to do but is now more something I feel like I have to do sometimes and want to do it but it’s hard to do it well or at all. I guess it’s less that the writing is annoying as that the act of it became less pure, less a thing I had an active place for in my life, more something that I try to sneak in between day job work and dish washing and laundry folding and child raising and doom scrolling.

If I feel like I’m bitching it’s because I probably am, but in my defense this blog was never supposed to be nothing but updates about my running (I’m working my way through week five right now and oh boy am I looking forward to my rest day tomorrow) but was also supposed to be about literally whatever else I wanted it to be about. This isn’t a good defense.

Is it less fun to write knowing it’s all just going to get slurped up by some fucking AI bot and turned into shareholder profits against my will? Yeah.

Is it hard to feel inspired to write anything in a world that feels absolutely hell-fucking-bent on being the least inspiring version of itself? Yeah.

Is it annoying that despite everything I still get ideas for things I’d like to write (I’ve got not one but two novel prompts bouncing around in my skull right now like manic marbles) but finding the time and/or energy to do anything with those ideas is nigh impossible? Yeah.

Is it aggravating that this whinge of a post feels like the best I can do right now? That it’s better than nothing? Ish? Yeah.

Week six! After ramping up pretty hard the last two weeks this one’s going to be a bit of a rest week, which is going to feel nice. And necessary. The schedule I’m on has a 5k race slated for the weekend but I think I’m just going to run some miles on Friday then take the weekend off to let everything calm down a bit. Not that anything is really bothering me, but, I mean, I know when a bit of a rest is a good idea.

I’ve been keeping up fairly well with the pace runs which has been interesting. That said after Friday’s three mile pace run I was feeling a little gross, like maybe I was overdoing it a little bit. So for today’s six mile pace run I decided to just not try to do what I’ve been doing and kind of see what happened? And if nothing happened that would be fine. But what basically happened was I wound up just keeping the first couple miles a bit more on this chill side and then my pace naturally lifted up closer to where I’ve been doing the pace runs to date, and that actually felt nice, like I was having fun with it instead of just running myself to death. So, I don’t know! I think I’m still setting myself up to PR the half in May, which will be fun, and should give me some confidence toward going after something mildly ambitious for the full in the fall, assuming all goes well.

Ran seven miles this morning. It was about 26 degrees outside. It’s the eighth of April.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Here’s a post about some things that don’t involve running.

• I don’t usually listen to soundtracks outside the source material, or without having experienced the source material first, but I’ve made a willing exception for the Floating Points portion of the soundtrack to Shinichirō Watanabe’s show Lazarus. I’m going to watch the show eventually but for now the soundtrack makes me happy. (Bonus points: had my youngest kid at least briefly grooving to it in the car this morning.)

• I hit the elliptical once a week and I’ve finally started watching What We Do In The Shadows on it and it’s great but I think I kind of need something plottier to make me actually want to hit the elliptical once a week. (Recent entries in my elliptical watching events have included The Diplomat (perfect elliptical show) and Black Doves (a good show hamstrung by the fact that it’s maybe a little too moody for elliptical watching and that I came to this extremely Christmas-themed show in, like, mid-January, which made it feel discordant, at best).) I just switched over to the Netflix anime Cyberpunk Edgerunners yesterday and two episodes in and I like it? It’s nicely propulsive, I want to know what happens next, and it’s all short enough that I can probably wrap it up in four or five weeks of elliptical time which will help me feel like I’ve accomplished something, which is cool.

• It’s funny, though, thinking about my relationship to “cyberpunk” as a concept or as a genre. Thinking about the interesting disconnect between my youthful interest in it, the aesthetic of it, the cool factor of it, the more sort of naive view of what cyberpunk is, versus the more nuanced realization or understanding of its value as criticism, as a critique. I mean I’m barely into the show and I never played the game but it’s kind of delightful how it seems to…ahem…run the edge of absolutely nailing what my inner thirteen-year old boy would imagine a cyberpunk future to look like, while also making it clear that, it’s, like, actually about the way we are now and how things are pretty shitty, the future not being equally distributed and all that.

• Thought for later: is cyberpunk the genre that most depends on while toying with the idea that the viewer assumes that they would be the one who is, like, the most cyber of the punks? Is this a bad thing, in current context?

• I guess this post is like eight-ninths about how I have a very low key interest in anime and how it’s kind of fun to be watching one right now and how there’s another one starting up right now that I also want to watch. That said I’ve never actually watched all that much and I’m probably not going to be, like, doing deep dives into anything but the real top-line stuff. I think this recent sudden interest is at least in part a result of me taking the kids to see the Looney Tunes movie a couple weeks ago (it was fun, I liked it, it was clearly made with love for the source material, right down to the silhouette-leaving-the-theater joke, that sort of thing) and the pleasure of seeing cool, fun animation on a big screen and just wanting to go off into a make-believe land of animated stuff for a while.

• I’ve also been thinking a lot about how it’s fun to just watch some bullshit sometimes. Like, there’s so much stuff I’ve flung into my Netflix queue over the last six years and after a while it just kind of becomes this towering pile of, like, bullshit, you know? And dipping into that for something that doesn’t feel like an important piece of viewing now and then is kind of fun. I’m having trouble kind of explaining this even to myself. Because “bullshit” isn’t even about the quality of the show or whatever, it’s just…there’s kind of a lot and when you watch as little as I do that “a lot” can become really quite a lot. I don’t know.

• My wife and I have been rewatching the Mission: Impossible movies over the last couple months in preparation for the last one. No surprise here: they’re still fun. I, for one, am ready to trust Tom one last time.

• I am reading…a lot. I need to blog about it.

• I’m angry about AI pretty much all the time.

• I’m angry about US politics pretty much all the time.

• Pour one out for my entire thermos of coffee, which I forgot at home today.

Pace runs! Pace runs are interesting. I’m at a weird point right now where I have like three kind of piled up inside a week, with a four mile pace run last Friday then a seven miler this morning and I’ll do five on this Friday (all with a warm-up mile tacked on the start) and then it’ll be a slight break from those for a bit. Today’s was overall slower than Friday’s as I’m consciously trying to play with pace and figure out what actually feels maintainable (and also doing more than one of these a week feels like A Lot!) but I still averaged out to something I’d be beyond thrilled to maintain for, hmm let me check my notes here, like five more miles than that, what the?!?

Anyways pace runs are kind of a lot! I’ll both miss them and not miss this version of them when I shift gears into marathon training mode after this half marathon cycle is done. I mean I still have them in the marathon plan but I sure as heck won’t be trying to maintain this version of pace for that long a run. They do make for an interesting challenge, though I’m wavering quite a bit on just how much I’m looking forward to them each time they come up in the schedule.

It’s also weird to be back up to that point when—an eight mile run, period, like today’s, was once a huge stretch goal for a weekend long run, and now I’m doing it on a Tuesday morning and fast-for-me? Wild times.