Obsession shift in progress...

I have discovered the vast amount of Walt Disney World related content on the internet. I knew of a few planning sites from my last couple of trips, but there is oh so much more out there. Multiple blogs are dedicated to planning the trip (just planning, not actually saying anything about the parks or resorts, that's a whole other subset of blogs), and there are several podcasts as well. I'm sure there are numerous YouTube channels. I have discovered these rich veins of WDW topics and nuance in my effort to prepare myself for next year's half marathon. You could really feed an obsession with this kind of material. It's so plentiful that it can never be completely depleted. Just the runDisney tag on Instagram alone gets dozens of posts a day. That traffic will spike with this weekend's Princess Half Marathon weekend.

I'll be watching all of these posts unfold. My someday I'll do a runDisney race becoming I'm doing that in less than a year has become this year's obsession du jour. Last year I was all about my reading. It was about this time last year that I upped my reading goal to 52 books and decided to pursue Book Shelf Zero (I'm down to 176 after finishing Boy's Life Friday night). My runDisney experience is building to that same level of preoccupation. Our trip to WDW in January went about as ideally as possible. The positive vibes of that trip continue to persist a month after we got home. We did so much, but there were still things we weren't able to experience. And that's how they suck you in. You go down there once without any idea what you're doing. It's fun, but you're really only experiencing the parks and resorts at about 60% of maximum fun. So you go back and delve a little deeper into the nuances of everything. You find a great resort that allows you to walk to two parks with easy access to two other resorts. Options for what to do and where to eat abound. You try this and that, luck into a great evening after coming outside to eat, and see other places you want to visit and things you want to try. (And discover that some things people get all geeked about, like Dole Whips, really don't live up to the hype. I would take one of those Mickey ice cream bars over the Dole Whip every time.)

So you decide that you'll go back. You didn't get to eat in Mexico (the circumstances surrounding that failure stands out as the only really dark spot in our entire trip) so you want to check that off the next time you're down there. There are more rides to be experienced, more restaurants to check out, and more places to visit. Then you start reading these blogs and listening to these podcasts and discover a whole new level of park experience. The runDisney thing is just that kind of experience. The races are a different way to experience Disney magic while finding a whole new genre of merchandise to spend money on. This could be my only runDisney race, I have to get a jacket! Then they change the park, adding more attractions and tweaking what is already there. It's an endless cycle that draws you in deeper and deeper with every new post and update.(The Disney Parks Blog is particularly prodigious. There are several posts a day. And I suspect this is the slow season.)

Small victories

Things are really starting to move. 

I finished The Handmaid's Tale. Fantastic book. That gets me down to 177 books to be read. I'm rapidly approaching the end of Boy's Life. There is too much going on in that book, but I've gotten to a point where the story is finally starting to move a bit. The lack of competing reading demands has also made it easy to commit to that book rather than jumping back to Jonathan Strange. Now that I think about it, the massive gravity of Jonathan Strange was probably my biggest challenge with Boy's Life.

I read a few pages of To the Lighthouse on Monday. I read a column on Medium about a DIY MFA and To the Lighthouse was mentioned in the context of reading hard books. I wanted to gauge that difficulty for myself. I actually like the writing style and didn't find the first 10 pages overly ponderous. The perspective shifts from one character to the next with no warning, but I'm kind of nonlinear in my thinking style so that discontinuity makes sense to me. I'm due to read another Modern Library 100 book so that might be the next book that I focus on after I finish Boy's Life later this week.

My weight is finally going down. I spent a bunch of time at work last week reading a short stack of papers about energy expenditure. Those papers suggested that diet was much more critical to weight control than exercise. My discovery of these papers neatly coincided with the release of a book about the role of the brain in eating and obesity. I used an Audible credit to get it the day it came out (Hamilton can wait until next month). The book, it's called The Hungry Brain, is engrossing, informative, and simply astounding. It's gets pretty technical in places concerning neuroanatomy and chemical pathways, but as a scientist I very much appreciate this aspect of the book. 

The Hungry Brain just reinforced everything I learned from reading the energy expenditure papers. I will never lose weight until I eat right. My workouts burn calories, but any deficit those workouts create is usually nullified by excessive eating. A few snacks here, a couple of treats there, throw in a few beers, and I've basically given back all the calories I burned working out. I avoided those behaviors last week and dropped a couple of pounds. We'll see if this trend continues. Sticking to my workout routine is hopefully contributing as well. I've managed to maintain the Wednesday rowing session and Friday morning short run. My body felt pretty tired while I was rowing this morning and during my lifting workout over lunch, but I can't tell if that's workout fatigue of lack of sleep. Getting more sleep is another piece of this weight control puzzle. That's definitely the hardest behavior for me to modify.

I successfully registered my wife and I for the Disney World Half Marathon yesterday. I jumped on the site minutes after registration opened to ensure that we could do the race. This is my best chance to do one of these races for the next couple of years. I don't want to miss it. I am more excited for this race than any race that I've run since I started running races consistently. I don't have to worry about training for this as I will be a couple of months past my full marathon and we're not running it for time. This is about the experience. I can't wait. Only 321 days to go!

My running plan for 2017 (and a few days into 2018)

I've been slowly working on a post about the races I'm planning on running this year. I have a nice progression from 10K in April to a half marathon in August to a full marathon in November. There will be some other races thrown in there as well, but the 10K, half, full will be the main focuses of my training for most of this year. They won't be the main focus of my running energy though. I'm poised to realize a running goal that I've had for two years. I am planning on running the half marathon at Disney World in January.

The excitement that I get just writing that sentence is unreasonably intense. I have no idea why I find the idea of this half so exciting, but I've been stoked from the moment my wife said we should do the half. I've been wanting to run a runDisney event since I was reading about the Dopey Challenge while we were in Disney World two years ago. I find the Dopey Challenge totally crazy and really have no desire to try that (just the entry fee alone is totally insane), but I'm very happy to be doing the half-marathon. A half feels like an event but it's not so long that I'll be totally fried for the rest of the weekend. The half is also on Saturday so we can spend Sunday doing the parks before heading home on Monday.

I've already booked our room for the weekend, and have started looking at flights. There is a flight that leaves nice and early, 5:30 am, and gets to Orlando at 12:30. We need to get there early enough that we can make it to the expo to get our numbers and still have some time to check out at least one park. The races start ridiculously early so we'll have two very early wake up calls back to back, but that's a small price to pay for getting to do the race and having some kid free time at Disney World. (Yet another reason not to do the Dopey Challenge, four days in a row of ridiculously early wake up calls.)

My first marathon will be a huge focus of my running effort this year, but the Disney Half is the race that I am most looking forward to over the next year. I'm preparing myself to see my Monument Avenue 10K time slip from what I did last year (I was running so much faster on my weekly runs this time last year, I just don't see how I'm running at that level by April 1), and I'm uneasy about what I can do in the Patrick Henry Half after how much I struggled with my training last year (and had no chance to actually see how I could run after messing up my knee a few weeks before the race). I may run a few smaller races throughout the year. There's a 12K that I've run the last couple of years on Memorial Day (although I think we may be in DC for a baseball game this year), and we always do the cul-de-sac 5Ks in July. I would really like to run one of those all out this year. I like to run a 10K on Thanksgiving morning (I really want to run a course PR this year, I should be in pretty good shape coming off of the marathon a few weeks prior), and the Surf and Santa 5 miler has emerged as an annual must run event for the entire family (well, we walk it anyway). All of those races are much lower priorities than the Monument Avenue 10K, the Patrick Henry Half Marathon, and the Richmond Marathon. And those are not nearly as exciting as the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend Half Marathon.

2 down, Book Shelf Zero is 178 books away

One book closer to Bookshelf Zero. My long slog with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been completed. I complained about the pace of this book when I was mired in its early sections. The pace of the book picked up tremendously as the story progressed. It was a very good book, but there is something about it that just doesn't sit right with me. I appreciate its originality and well crafted narrative, but it lacks some vital spark that I just can't quite express. It left me wanting, but what I'm left wanting isn't clear. Regardless of my reservations about where this book fits in my personal liking scale, it's been read. Two books down, 178 remain. 

I'm tearing through The Handmaid's Tale. Whatever Jonathan Strange lacked, this book overflows with it. Atwood's novel is emotionally intense, but I feel compelled to just keep reading. I think about how I would feel to be forcefully separated from my wife and kids. That's emotional devastation on an epic scale. But amid all this horror and tragedy, Atwood weaves in these poetic and beautiful images. The irony that a woman is writing this book about a culture in which women are not allowed to read or write has its own poetic irony. I'm curious if I would have responded so strongly to this novel if I had read it a few years ago. I've read a few books over the last few years that have catalyzed some changes I was struggling to make in my personal life. This book marks another step in that process. I read to experience books like this.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell took me a month (to the day). The Handmaid's Tale will take me less than a week. I haven't touched Boy's Life since I was in Disney World. I've promised my son that I will read a book from a series that he enjoys next. The first one was not the most exciting read but it wasn't terrible either. It will not demand my attention like The Handmaid's Tale so I will likely slip back over to Boy's Life now and then just to mix things up a bit to keep chipping away at a book that I never should have bought in the first place. Sure, Boy's Life was on a dollar, but it's taking a long time to read. It's not so bad that I want to abandon it. I just want to read something else. 

Reading/Audible update

We're into February and I only have one book in my books read list for 2017. This is why I never get around to reading big fat books like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It just takes so long! JS & Mr. N is even longer than its 850 pages suggests. The book is full of footnotes that use a much smaller font than the main text. If all of these were expanded to the main text font, they would probably take up another 50 or so pages. And it's not like they can be skipped. Key descriptions and details about the story are in the notes. I've read 80% of the book, footnotes and all. I will likely finish it next week. Then it will be on to the Handmaiden's Tale. That book looks so small and insignificant next to Jonathan Strange. Hopefully that one won't take me a month to read.

I am very, very close to finishing my current audiobook. Originals. I read one of Adam Grant's other books, Give and Take, a few years ago and found it suitably useful and interesting to give Originals a chance. I've grown tired of the business book sub-genre that cobbles together stories of successful (and usually famous) people with findings from various academic research papers to tell a story of why certain behaviors win in the marketplace. Maybe I've just never tried to fully internalize and apply the lessons from those books, but I've found that I get much more from reading literature. Originals is a strong offering in this sub-genre. Grant's academic background gives him much more authority when discussing academic research papers than a journalist or some other productivity or entrepreneurship writer. The book still feels kind of worthless in the end. I'm happy to have it nearly complete. I'm ready to get back to the fun of sci fi and fantasy books. I will also be able to add another book to my Goodreads list. I don't include audiobooks in my annual list, but it will contribute to my read list (542 and counting).

The desire to buy books is very low at the moment.  The audiobook escape valve is definitely helpful in keeping my acquisitiveness under control. I have an Audible credit waiting to be used. I want to finish Originals before I use it for the lame reason that my unread audiobook tally will remain constant rather than going up when I use the credit. I'm planning to use it on Chernow's Hamilton bio. I've been tempted to get that book in the past, and listening to the Hamilton cast album has pushed that book into the I want to read it pile (as opposed to the that might be kind of interesting pile). The audiobook is over 30 hours. I've been listening at the 1.25 playback speed so it will be more like 25 hours assuming I keep it at that speed. A big unknown with audiobooks is the quality of the narration. I have listened to Hamilton's narrator before so I know that the narration will be solid. 

I could make a big dent in whatever audiobook I choose to listen to next while I'm driving around tomorrow. (Even if I use my credit on Hamilton right now, I'm not going to listen to that one next. Originals was a recent purchase. It's time to go back and listen to something I've had for awhile.) My wife is running an ultra tomorrow. I will be spending tons of time in the car as I get her to the race, pick up my kids, drive back home to drop one of my kids off for a birthday party, and head back up to the race (which is about an hour from my house) to cheer her on as she finishes her run. Well, assuming my daughter stays with my mom while I'm dropping off her brother. I could have a couple hours of solo driving time. I'm thinking of going with Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson as my next audiobook. I've had it for awhile and it feels like the right time for another Sanderson book. I absolutely love his Stormlight Archives books. I have listened to the first two volumes. I'm considered going back through them in preparation for the release of book 3 later this year. That is a very substantial time commitment as each book is something like 40 hours long. I don't expect Warbreaker to come close to either of those books, nothing I've read by Sanderson has come close to the Stormlight Archives, but his books are reliably entertaining. Now if I could bring myself to read the third book of the Mistborn trilogy.

The Dip

I'm in the middle of a very dreary dip. Work has become a treadmill. I go in, do my thing, and nothing really seems to happen. Organizational upheaval has prevented some changes that may have given my relationship with my job a jolt, but it's hard to say how long that shock would have kept me engaged with the work. It will be nice to get my bonus, but I'm just not excited about my work these days. I'm bored. I'm tired of dealing with the same old things over and over again. I went for change last year and was jilted in both of my attempts. I can keep treading water for a little while longer, but it's getting harder and harder to show up and appear engaged. 

My reading life is in a dip too. I am persevering with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'm not quite two thirds of the way through the book. It's not boring and hard to get through anymore, but it's not a particularly fast read. I made bad decision when I went with Boy's Life on my phone. I wisely paired long physical books with short ebooks last year. That successful strategy left me with few easy read ebooks remaining in my library (which was why I was hoping to see the Bond books go on sale towards the end of last year). Boy's Life is a mediocre read. I'm very close to giving up on it. I just can't get all that excited about reading it. I'm only about a third of the way through it. Maybe I will make more progress on it once I'm finished with the massive JS & Mr N. Starting a new book with that one unfinished just doesn't sound appealing. I'll probably keep at it. I have to read it eventually anyway. 

Aside from missing my step target yesterday, I achieved every one of my weekly fitness goals last week. Three trips to the gym to lift, two rowing sessions (Wednesday morning and Sunday), three runs (I cut my Saturday run short to save my body, I don't want to ramp up my mileage too fast), ab work five days of the week, and at least 10,000 daily steps. My success in this area is impacting my reading pace. The additional Tuesday and Friday workouts take a big bite out of my reading time. I was expecting this, but it's still kind of hard for me to see that reading time slip by. I will see my reading time shrink again if I can get myself to bed earlier. That's the last piece of getting my fitness plan fully activated. I'm not getting to bed early enough. I'm also not sleeping well. I wake up and have trouble getting back to sleep. This is a new problem for me. I think I know what may be causing it and how I can make it better. We'll see if anything changes once I start addressing the possible origin of my disturbed sleep cycle. 

I've decided to weigh myself on Tuesdays. I was 224.4 last Tuesday. We'll see what the increased workouts did to my weight tomorrow morning. My appetite was crazy last week. I managed to control myself pretty well during the week, but may have been a little too free during the weekend. The scale will tell the tale soon enough. (Why Tuesday? It's my off day.)