I went for a run yesterday, challenging one for me, then didn’t sleep enough so woke up tired and a little sore.
I run about three miles and I’m so slow. I got to the three mile distance in a very short period of time and I think my pace probably reflects that. When I first started running I was around 30, and around then I also had gotten into yoga and rock climbing, and I walked more (I drive to work now, rather than bus commute, and I work from home more, all of which means less walking), so I’m in worse shape. I’m also fifteen years older. After a few years between work, kids, and moving for work I fell off of running, briefly got back into it but never fully, then fell off again. I started again back in, I don’t know, June? April? That’s been rewarding. The summer heat and humidity cramped my style, for sure. I suppose having type this out I realize I’m a lot closer to the start of the curve than I’d realized. Hmm.Anyway this was my second time trying to go faster, what I do is run at my usual slow comfortable pace but at each distance marker - there are markers every quarter mile on the trail - I run at a fast for me pace for a little bit, like to the next big tree after the marker or something. That’s challenging, I huff and puff after stopping the run, but I figure the recovery is good - I’m told intervals are good for you? - and there’s something rewarding about doing a hard thing. It’s also mind-clearing, shoves other thoughts out of my head. I need to find and update and populate my mp3 player (this is what grad school did to me, I say things like ‘populate my mp3 player’; I have a buddy who writes for TV and movies and to annoy him I like to play up my ignorance of any cultural objects produced outside UK TV and children’s TV after the year 2000, and it does annoy him and then he just goes ‘you call movies “cultural objects,” who cares what you think?’ and he wins; being a good friend involves setting your friends up to win so I pull some smugness out of the hat at the end) so I can listen to music on the runs. This was my second time doing this, I plan to keep at it. My run is 10% faster as a result and from how my body feels it’s clearly exertion, so that’s good.
It was in the sixties yesterday, which is such good weather for me, cools me off - I’m a big sweaty guy who overheats easily. Sweater weather with no sweater for the run, is what I’m saying. I spent a while this summer looking up islands in the North Atlantic, around Scotland and Iceland and whatnot, and reading their annual temperature averages (this is related to being the kind of person who calls movies “cultural objects” I assume), and fantasizing about living in one of those places - sweater 365, that’s the life for me!
The run was good and it’s good to get out onto the trail, the river’s pretty, the trees are pretty, there’s bird calls, people infrequently who I can exchange head nods with - mostly on bikes so they go away quick too (ultimately all people go away quick...! thank you for reading my blog of Goth Thoughts, you too will go away soon...!). No deer this time. Recently I had a couple times where I surprised a deer, which I felt a little bad about but which also was very funny to me as they’re supposed to be a wild in-tune-with-their-surroundings animal but instead they’re like ‘what the shit where did that big loud fat guy come from?!’ I guess they zone out while munching grass. I’m not into hunting but I’ve always had some level of grudging respect for it because I assumed it took some degree of skill but now I feel like it’s just picking on some zoned out dumbfucks, seems unsporting to me.
This has reminded me that when my ten year old was 1 we moved to Indiana for a temporary job and rented a house where deer would walk right up to the window of our house and eat birdseed out of our bird feeder. That was cool but also really annoying because we wanted to see birds. The then-1yo would call them sheep because she’d seen sheep at one of her grandma’s houses and overgenerally applied the word, that has a name but I forget what it is. It was super cute. “Sheep! sheep!” in her little voice. Now she’s ten and has a huge voice, she can yell so fierce when mad and does big voice singing sometimes too, which is especially cool because she’s on the small side physically.
I just looked and this is daily recollection number ten. I’m enjoying doing these so will plan to keep making the effort. I also find it challenging sometimes to recollect anything (‘I sat at a laptop and read emails for work, I thought about how I ought to be reading work stuff or writing work stuff or sending more emails and repeatedly found myself reading depressing world news’ - there, I’ve recollected most of most days! ‘I made notes for the agenda for class, taught a few hours, felt exhausted afterward for the rest of the evening and much of the next day’ - that’s the rest of it!). I find myself thinking about whether any of this is worth typing or if the writing is any good, I’m trying to sort of answer both with both no and yes - it’s about showing up and putting in the time, not the product - and I also wonder if some of my vague dissatisfaction is that I’d like (as always!) a clearer sense of trajectory, which would I think require some more deliberateness about my reading and trying out specific things in writing. I’ve previously gotten some mileage out of EB White’s nonfiction and trying to copy elements of that, I should go back to that, and see about making a plan to expand from that at a later date (like over the winter break from teaching - probly be good to have a plan in place by then so I can use the time well from the jump, and I think that kind of planning is still something I can do in short bursts as the semester gets heavier, which in turn might help me patient with the semester’s enheavying. [I made up that word, I’m basically Shakespeare.])
I went to post this and realized it's Friday the 13th in October, one of spooky season's spookier days, that's cool. Here's Bauhaus to celebrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a2hGhamVwA
