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.

Here are some more things for you.

• Jigsaw puzzles. You know what’s cool? Jigsaw puzzles. I’ve wanted to get into them for a while but it always sort of felt, like, a little corny, I guess? Like, oh, what are you doing with your free time, jigsaw puzzles, what? But then we went and had a couple kids and I’m a dad now and it’s like if I can’t go full cornball now when can I? In theory they were a fun thing we could set up and do with the kids here and there but in practice it’s been a lot of just me really getting into puzzles. My wife’s gotten sucked into a couple, for sure, and the kids do help, but they’re a bit more interested in the kid-strength puzzles than some of the bigger puzzles I’ve been drawn toward.

  • Like, I just finished this one, and it is an absolute beaut. Yes, Liberty Puzzles are a bit bougie, a bit the-Cadillac-of-puzzles, but I don’t even care, they’re so fun, they’re fun treats. That one I linked to was hard, too. Something about the format—that tall vertical orientation—and the fact that the colors are just all over the place…it kept me guessing for a while. (We recently just splurged and got the kids a couple of the kids’ Liberty puzzles (here and here) and they had a lot of fun with those.)

  • I’ve also enjoyed a couple of the puzzles from Piecework. (I did worry for her sanity when my wife was working on the Meta Puzzle.)

  • A while ago I cracked and got one of the Areaware gradient puzzles in blue-green and it’s not as hard as you think it’s going to be going into it? A little more meditative, a little more systematic of a build, once you get the frame done and have a sense of where pieces are going to land within it. I enjoyed.

  • Sometimes I wonder what kind of podcast I would start were I to start one knowing that nobody would listen to it and to that end it would be amusing to do a jigsaw puzzle podcast because why would anybody listen to that? What a silly idea.

• I’ve got a snake plant in my office and last year it had a baby down at the bulb or root level or whatever. I dug it up and sliced it off and repotted both and the baby’s doing fine I think though it’s a bit on the slow side. At least compared to the entire-ass second baby the original plant had right back off the point where I sliced off the first baby. I’ve left that one attached because what am I going to do, go into full time plant baby doctoring, here? And probably obviously but also much to my surprise the second baby is nuts. It’s about as tall as the original plant now. I mean it’s like over two times the size of the original separate baby. Anyways, snake plants are pretty cool, and you know who had a lot of snake plants? Fred and Renee Madison, the married couple from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seriously, last time I watched it, I was like, jeez, look at all those snake plants. Fun facts!

• I’m still using Mattrbld to manage content on this blog. It still works! I like it.

• A long time ago I saw the movie The Tree of Life in the theater when it came out. Didn’t care for it! Thought it was kind of boring. I think I was sleepy. Flash forward a few years here and for various reasons I’ve decided to watch all of Terrence Malick’s films in order. I’ve done Badlands and I’ve done Days of Heaven. Liked ‘em both! My incredibly spicy hot take is that Days of Heaven is probably technically a better movie but I think I liked Badlands more. This probably has something to do with the fact that Badlands involved the use of elaborate Home Alone-style traps whereas Days of Heaven did not.

  • The various reasons here include the fact that for various reasons I have taken a recent interest in 70s movies, and, hey, this guy made some movies in the 70s. It was also a bit (in related reasons) because I’ve been watching some but not all Spielberg movies alongside the Blank Check podcast and one of them was The Sugarland Express and in the episode for that they cited like three or so 70s movies as being similar or related or just of the same ether in the air at the time and Badlands was in that list. One thing leads to another and now I’m watching an entire guy’s filmography, slowly, without any podcast to support me in this journey. Fun.

  • That said I feel like The Thin Red Line is going to hold me up for a while because while I’m okay with splitting long movies up across multiple nights sometimes I feel like maybe I’m going to not want to do it with that one and when on earth am I going to find a night I’m awake long enough to get through all three hours of that in a single sitting? Probably not while I’m at the peak of race training oops. I’m going to do it, I’ve wanted to see it for a while now, but. Yeah.

• After forgetting my coffee that one time and I told my wife about how I get real anxious all the time about maybe did I forget to put my coffee in the trunk that morning on my way to work my wife joked I should take a photo of it every day to calm myself down. So now I’m sending her a photo of my coffee every morning after I put it in the trunk. It’s a wonder she keeps me around.

• I’ve listened to a couple episodes of the The Sixteenth Minute podcast this week and it’s made me feel like I’m just going to be angry about the internet all the time, now.

  • It’s seems like a good show though, based on this episode and this episode.

  • I wish all podcasts worth listening to had their own dedicated websites that looked nice and helped pitch the show better to potential listeners instead of just being garbage looking lists of episodes at some umbrella podcast app website’s garbage site. I am angry about podcast websites (or the lack thereof) all the time. (Hey podcasters: got money? Call me. Give me some money. I’ll make you nice websites.)

• I added a better footer bar to the post pages here that make it at least theoretically slightly easier to respond to these posts in appropriate fashions. I still wish I had it a little more, like, automated, or personalized, or something, but there’s no time and that annoys me.

  • Also as much as I like the design thing I’ve set up on this site I’m also already completely over it and kind of want to throw it out and start over. Annoying.

Finished up week eight with a ten miler today and 33-and-change total for the week. Got absolutely poured on from like mile six through eight today which was fun. Fun because it was like in the 60s outside aka not miserably cold, finally. Spring!

I know folks run more miles than this all the time but still crossing that 30 miles in a week line feels like a real, well, this is real, huh, moment for me. Particular true this week either way two of those runs being pace day runs. Suffice it to say I feel like I’ve earned this week’s Saturday night beverages.

Over the weekend I finally watched The Substance and a few weeks ago I watched Anora and I’m finally here to give you my red-hot 2025 Oscar movie award take which is that while Anora was a fine movie that I liked okay and which I admired more after I learned a bit more about it after listening to the Unspooled episode about it I think that The Substance was a great movie that was a thousand times more interesting and that Demi Moore was robbed, she went full-ass body-horror crone(nbergian)-nightmare for it and it absolutely ruled, five stars.

Just a few things for you today.

• My day-job life involves a lot of code-related work and I’ve always felt a lot of imposter syndrome around it, for as much as I’ve worked at it and enjoy it there’s still that fear that anyone who knows more than me or has been around longer than me is going to see through it to the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. Now it just feels like anyone whose opinion I may have once valued has since gone on to just hand off whatever they’re doing to a literal impostor in the form of AI code generators. I am shaking my damn head!

• Saw the movie Sinners last night. Hey guess what, that movie that pretty much everybody is telling you rules? It rules. (When it did the one thing I think around the mid-point of the movie, I think, I think I was about ready to fall out of my seat. It was so good.)

• Then we came home and my wife started watching The Pitt and I made it about half an hour into the first episode before I started to feel like I was on the verge of having a minor panic attack and I bounced. Sorry, world! I will not be joining you in the Pitt!

• I’ve listened to a couple episodes of The Gastropod Podcast and it’s fun. I thought this episode about noise levels in restaurants was particularly interesting from a design-y or a user-experience-y perspective. I also liked the admission (spoiler alert) that it maybe doesn’t all matter that much because we’re all just going to go to restaurants or not go to restaurants regardless.

• I try not to post rage bait, I think, but, like, this makes me want to give up and die. What are we doing here, actually.

So, I had this post ready to go about two weeks ago:

—

I’m in week 10 of 12 of my current half-marathon training cycle. This is kind of the biggest week of training; it’s my highest mileage week this cycle, with the most pace-day miles in the mix.

I am feeling…a little creaky? But alright, overall.

The pace runs have made for an interesting experiment. Well, the whole training cycle has been an interesting experiment, actually. It’s a lot of transitions this time out: transitioning from four to five days a week running, from “I’m just training to reach the finish line” to “I’m training to reach the finish line…but faster?”, to generally higher mileage in a shorter stretch of time…

But yeah, the pace runs. I look forward to not doing them anymore while also thinking I’m going to actually miss them when I’m not doing them? I’ve been treating them as experiments in going faster, I’ve set ambitious but apparently reasonable goals for them, while trying to give myself some freedom to play with them a bit, to treat them as experiments in figuring out how to do them, really. I have surprised myself multiple times while also sliding slowly toward a “well I’m not exactly looking forward to those runs” mindset. It’s weird. And yet like last week my plan had none in it and by the end of the week my “relaxed’ pace was naturally going up (due at least in some part to some stress-addled runs, I’m sure, but). I guess it’s gains and also at the same time I’m sure summer weather is going to slide in here any day now and kick some of those seeming gains right back in the teeth.

There are pace runs included in the marathon plan I have slated for when this cycle is done but they won’t be like this. At least, I don’t think they’ll be like this. There’s only ever going to be one a week and I’m under no delusion that the pace I’m trying for for the half is reasonable for the full. So it’ll be interesting to see how those days shake out come the summer. Generally speaking though I think I look forward to both keeping on with the increased mileage and also easing up on what I expect to happen in some of those miles.

It’s also weird this cycle that the long runs have never quite felt long yet. Like it’s only now that I’m getting up to past ten miles on Saturdays that the long run actually feels longer than the longer mid-week run. Shifting the balance back around come summer will be interesting. And maybe make for a few slightly less tired days at the day job.

(I feel like I’m probably repeating things I’ve already said along the way here but that’s fine.)

—

So then the next day I went out and did a nine mile pace run and it felt great. I surprised myself. I was like, gee, I might not enjoy doing these, but I am doing these about as well as I could imagine myself doing them. I’m gonna race this race so hard (for me)!

And then the day after that I went out for my slow run and after about a mile it felt like someone was taking a baseball bat to the insides of my knees.

Whoops.

Now it’s race week and I think I’ve recovered…okay? I skipped my second pace run that week in favor of an extra rest day but then I did make it through my long run that week, and then last week I made it through all my slow paceless miles, and now this week I’ve got extra rest days before and after the mid-week miles before the race on Sunday. I never really thought of this last week or so as a “taper” since it’s still pretty high mileage for me but I think maybe not doing those pace runs is enough at this point to put me in a taper mindset? Like maybe I’m a little taper crazy. Maybe I felt a little crazy on rest day number two yesterday. I don’t know.

I don’t know. I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen when I get out there on Sunday. I feel okay but not perfect, there’s aches but nothing that should stop me from going out there, though they could stop me from going hard out there; still, I suspect I could surprise myself some, but not, like, completely. I can see the value in taking the race just a little more chill than I was maybe training for (with fall marathon training being just a quick turn-around away after this race). But also I don’t want to, like, pretend I didn’t train the way I did, completely. But also I don’t need to break myself over this.

So, who knows! We’ll see what happens. I’m scheduled for a little baby pace run tomorrow morning and we’ll see how I feel after that one I guess.

And of course if literally nothing else just getting to the finish line is still obviously cool as hell and the journey to this one has been an interesting one.

I’ve been … not much in a blogging mood, lately? Or I’ve just been distracted. Or something. I don’t know. But there’s things.

Like. I ran that half marathon a couple weeks ago. And…it went well. Really well. I set a new PR in the half marathon, crushing my old one by like 14 or 15 minutes; which, I mean, okay, my previous bests-of were of the “I am just trying to get to the finish line” variety, and this one was my first real “I want to get to the finish line, sure, but, like, can I do it maybe a little bit fast, for me?” race, and I trained that way for it, and so it wasn’t going to be much of a competition, all things going well, but, like, it still feels good to have basically done what I set out to do.

To go ahead and put some times on it, to put that “fast, for me” bit into context, lest anyone think I mean “fast, like actual fast,” my secret “everything, and I mean, everything goes perfectly” goal was 2:10, and I came in at 2:14:11, pretty squarely in the just-below-the-middle of the pack, I think. And I felt really good the whole time, and I felt like I was having fun the whole run, and I never ticked over into feeling like I couldn’t make it or like I was going to have to stop to walk or like I was actually dead and didn’t know it yet. It was pretty cool. (Understatement.)

Now honestly, and I don’t mean this is a real critical way, what’s funny is I think the one reason, or one of the reasons, I didn’t make 2:10 was just inexperience at trying to do something like that? I probably held back a little too much at the start, and didn’t kick it up until a little bit too late, at least out of some well-placed concern about whatever had happened to my knee two weeks earlier, but also just out of, like, well, just not quite closing that gap in my head yet between “this is what I think I can do” and “this is what I can do,” if that makes any sense. So like in retrospect I feel like I probably could have made that time but also I do not regret not making that time because I kind of know just why I didn’t and it’s fine.

Again, funny: putting things into context: I joke about running a half-marathon in the time in takes other folks to run full marathons, but this time, it actually literally happened that, the winner of the full marathon crossed his finish line less than a minute after I crossed my finish line. Mind-boggling.

The weather was wild. It was set to be cool and overcast for the entire run but race day came and it did stay cool, yes, but the sun came out for basically my entire race, which was really something. (Would have worn my sunglasses!) Then maybe five minutes after I finished the clouds rolled in thick and the wind kicked in up off the lake and I possibly froze to death in the beer area.

After my celebratory beverages (completely worth the freezing wind) I hung out at the finish line for a bit watching folks cross. That’s always fun. This was maybe the most at a race that I saw people coming in from the full around the three hour mark and hoo boy as much as I do genuinely love running and pushing myself and all that I will never be as serious about it as those folks; wowee.

Seeing a 77 year old man finishing a half-marathon was awesome. (At least I think it was the half.) I, uh, don’t need to be the folks finishing the marathon in three hours, to say the least—again, I’m serious but not that serious!—but I do absolutely genuinely want to be that guy when I grow up, fates and knees be willing.

And then I took the train home and I spent a couple days drinking more beers than I usually get to and watching a lot of Star Trek and I didn’t run for a week and it was great.

After a somewhat abbreviated recovery window, I’m starting training for the Ann Arbor Marathon in October. Marathon number two, here we go? All things going well? I’m hoping the quick turn-around time isn’t immediately going to bite me in the butt; I’m feeling a little banged up still but I’m hoping just dropping off the faster pace runs I was going after for the half will help continue to calm things down.

It took a little bit to land on this one. I’d thought about going after the Towpath Marathon, but that felt way too soon, and I’d thought about doing the Columbus Marathon again, which would be fun but I kind of don’t want to just repeat the same race and also I have a concert I’m very excited about two days after, and I’m not sure I’m going to want to be standing that long that soon after the finish line. The Ann Arbor race feels like the next best bet, so I’m going to give it a go.

I’m planning on using the Higdon Intermediate 1 plan this time, without worrying too much about those pace runs. Mostly I’ll run for mileage, and if I’m feeling okay I’ll try to open it up a bit on those days, but also I’m not going to sweat it too much, because I know I’m going to be sweating all of it too much, getting back into summer training mode. It’s been a shockingly mild spring into summer here but I’ve started to get some hints of the coming humidity over the last week, which I am both very much looking forward to more of and also know it greatly affects the runs in it.

My goal this time out is right now to just break five hours. I came in 5:18 last fall and I think just by focusing on endurance and being able to keep up a keepable pace for the duration of the race that should be the right stretch this time out.

And, uh, yeah! That’s the plan! Which is obviously as I well know by now all subject to change at a moment’s notice. But I’m looking forward to getting back out there after doing this really crazy thing for a second time…

I’ve abused the hell out of the points on my credit card over the last couple years and after finally cashing them all in I’ve got what amounts to a free Mac Mini sitting on the desk in front of me right now. It’s so cute. It’s so…tiny.

I’m spoiled by my job, where I’ve got a really very good MacBook Pro, on which I can accomplish pretty much anything I need to, but there’s always a few things you kind of just want on your own dedicated device? Namely, in my case, having a place to house my Lightroom catalog. Which, now, I do. Here’s to hopefully actually making more use of my camera knowing now I have a little box on my desk that I can just plug my cards into and actually upload pictures to, more often than once a year or so.

This is my first real personal computer in a while, which is funny to admit, having grown up with personal computers basically my entire life; there was always an upgrade waiting around the corner, always a moment when I was moving on to my next best machine ever. (More or less. Sort of.) And I know it’s not like there’s anything I couldn’t have been doing all along here but it is nice to have my own little box again that I can definitely absolutely no matter what do anything I want with.

I’m realizing it’s been too long since I’ve done as much for fun with a computer as I’d like to be doing; various reasons, time flies, distractions, so forth, so on. I also miss it and I’m hoping to get some new things going again. I’d like to be learning more than I feel like I have been lately. I dunno.

And, uh, like that, I’m into week four of my current marathon training cycle. Not a ton to say yet. It’s been pretty sticky out there so that’s fun to get used to again. I had my first “down” week last week and this week feels like my first real “up” week with two of my non-long runs going up from 5 to 6 miles each and my Saturday run going up to 11; I’ll hit 29 miles this week, 30 next week. I’m both questioning the decision to bump up the training this time and also relishing the chance to try to see it through. There’s been a lot to be anxious about lately and as much as I don’t want to get out of bed at 5 am some of these days I also don’t want to completely skip the one thing that’s relatively certain to help me tame my anxiety, so.

I’ve also, in an act of almost unprecedented foresight, officially booked my marathon entry and my hotel stay in Ann Arbor. Which means I managed to snag a room in the hotel that’s “steps away from” the start line. It might not seem like much but gosh I won’t mind being able to cross the finish line and then have the option of immediately collapsing onto the hotel room couch for the rest of the day. It’s like a little special gift to future, achy me…