A couple of updates

I'm deep into the marathon training calendar. I'm wrapping up week 4 (I think). THe plan is more of a suggestion at this point than a plan that I'm actually following. The dual derailers of a hamstring injury and getting sick (probably COVID but I never bothered to test) put me way behind on the fitness needed to do the 10+ mile runs in this early phase of the training plan. I basically do my standard 4 mile weekday run (which I can finally do without a walking break (again, I had just gotten back to this point post injury before I got sick)) and then do a long run on Saturday. I had to balance distance with getting home to get ready for a trip to WDW on my long run this week. I was planning on going 10, but cut it back to 7 when I could tell my wife wanted to do something other than sit around the house this Saturday. I felt good on the run, did the entire distance with only stopping to cross streets and to wait for a guy to use the improvised footbridge over a muddy hole down by the Pinellas Trail. I was doing longer distances at this point last year, but I have a pattern of sticking to the plan in the first few weeks of a training cycle only to see my weekly mileage fade considerably in the weeks leading up to the run. 

I'm not worrying too much about my plan adherence this year. I'm doing a half marathon with my wife the first weekend of November. My goal is to train up to that distance (even though we'll be walking most of the race) and build from there. My longest runs have been in November for a January race the last few cycles. I should be in pretty good shape for the marathon if I can push a couple of 18-22 mile runs into December. Those later runs are much more important than a 10-12 mile run in October. At least that's what I'm telling myself. I've been remiss in not doing ab work or watching my diet to lose a few pounds. Both of those things would go a long way in minimizing my pain in the last 10 miles or so of the marathon. The longer I can keep pushing a running pace, the less time I will spend out there. I'm not looking for a marathon PR, but I wouldn't mind a course PR. 

There is no way I'm making my reading goal for the year. I was going for 40 books. I'm still in the teens. I'm close to finishing book 15 for the year. At this point, I'll be happy to get to 20 books. I've been buying kind of freely, partly to speak with my wallet about men reading novels, so there will be no reduction in my to-read list. The reasons for my reading drought are numerous, but the most recent thing to cut into my reading time is my participation in The Catherine Project. I mistakenly picked the discussion of Lucretis's On the Nature of Things. That was not a good choice. I just can't get into thinking too hard about what some Roman dude wrote about how atoms work. If I had more context I may find the book more interesting, but I don't know what intellectual currents were flowing in Rome. I skipped last week's discussion. I just didn't have the mental energy after dealing with a hurricane the week before on top of work and other life events. There are only 2 weeks left in the session so I will login for those last two. I may give the Project another try, but I will do a bit more research into the books to make my choice rather than just pick something that fits my calendar. 

Some plans are changing

So after I convinced myself that sticking to the course with my fitness approach is the right choice, at least for right now, I did make a pretty big change to a near term fitness plan. I made a big revision to my marathon training plan. Last year I used the training plan from the FIRST plan. The plan is based on 3 runs a week, my schedule, so I thought it would be a good fit for my schedule. It may be, but I am not in good enough shape to start this plan in a couple of weeks. The first long run is 13 miles. I just did 7 miles on Saturday. I can try to push it but I will either hurt myself or constantly be short on my distance goals. I took a look at the long runs for the training plan I used prior to trying the FIRST approach and decided those distances were a better fit for my current fitness level. The first long run is 10 miles. I can manage that in a few weeks. 

The FIRST training plan is based on a high mileage volume. I kept the other training runs the same so I guess I'm using a hybrid approach. No matter what plan I use, it's just really important that I get in all the miles on the long runs. I must go longer than 15 miles in early November as the longest run in my training cycle. The plan doesn't matter if you don't actually do the plan. 

Should I change my fitness plan as I get older?

I was already planning on using this space to reflect on whether I should revisit my standard goals and approach in the context of my advancing age. Then I wandered into seldom visited Facebook and saw pictures from the 30 year reunion of the high school I attended in New Mexico. Seeing some of these people in the context of our old high school, I only recognized a few of them, accentuated that they are almost 50. I certainly feel the shortening of my time. There are plenty of goals I will never achieve. My life may begin to shift and alter as I adjust myself to changing physical circumstances or I lose interest in things I used to enjoy, but I really want to avoid a situation where I'm skipping activities because I don't want to deal with some minor discomfort. 

Staying physically and mentally vital requires many of the lifestyle choices that were part of my Naked Sexy narrative. Sure I've been chasing the same handful of physical goals for years and years. I'm not really sure what staying physically active would look like if I tried to mix up my goals. I have a good core of activities that I enjoy enough that I'm happy to keep doing them for as long as I can stay healthy. I watched a few miles of a live stream from the half marathon at DIsneyland this morning. I have no desire to run a race out there, but I'm very engaged with the East Coast version of runDisney. I visualized myself out on the marathon course pushing through the late miles while I was out for my long run this weekend. I've been too quick to avoid the hard parts of my runs the last few years. I stop when it gets hard rather than being stronger than the moment and pushing through. I've built a physical and mental base that too many people my age are missing. They don't have anything that gets them out running 7 miles in Florida heat and humidity. 

So I guess I don't need to adjust my general approach to working out, at least not my activities. I could always have a better approach to my workouts. I could do more when I'm lifting, but I did get to the gym to lift three times this week. I need to get on the rowing machine more often, but I've been using that more this year than I have in ages. I walk plenty. I need to do more ab work and get in more rolling sessions to keep things limber and loose. I have said these things over and over again. I just need to do them. I guess that's what I need to change if I really need to revolutionize something about my fitness and wellness strategy. 

Rhythm of War complete; books left to be read? Who knows

I finished Rhythm of War last night. The surprises and reveals that made the first couple books in the series so remarkable are not really a big part of this book. It's the fourth book. We're transitioning into the conclusion of the series. Characters are being put into position. THey're building up experience points and figuring out the next quest in their journey. The pleasure is in spending time with familiar characters in a world that we know as well as the characters. We learn with them rather than learning from them. Rhythm is a step down from the first couple books, but it was a 1200 page book that never felt boring or dull. I enjoyed being in the world. I was kind of sad that it ended. I have been listening to a chapter or two on my way home. That was a nice way to wrap up my day. I would have liked to keep that flow going. I guess I get to wait until book 5 comes out in a few months to get back into that reassuring pattern. 

These fat fantasy books always have these grand battles between good and evil. The characters are concerned with Big Problems. They're not worried about the little details of their life. They're worried about saving the world from Evil. They're working on saving lives by thwarting the schemes of Gods and Demons. Participating in that struggle is why we read these books. Sure the stories are suspenseful and we want to see what happens next, but we're participating in the struggle. We're not just passive observers. We're emotionally invested. We expand our life by witnessing the battle, recognizing the sacrifice and pain endured by our hero. Engaging with these themes makes our life bigger. These characters give their entire being to a movement. Their identity melds into their mission and purpose. The scope and grandeur of the struggle Sanderson's characters engage in are a big part of what makes his novels so compelling. It's hard to feel like you're wandering and aimless when you're engaging in an interplanetary conflict. 

Doing science made (maybe makes, not really sure of the tense to use here) me feel like part of something bigger. I was participating in this effort to understand how our reality works. My piece of the effort may be small, but a contribution makes me part of the big effort to figure the world out. It sounds paradoxica, but the more I realized how little we really know the more meaning I found in doing science. You would expect that insight to make the entire effort feel meaningless, but getting a glimpse of what is under the surface of our daily physical reality made the effort worthwhile. This wasn't looking at the cold void and feeling alone and vulnerable. This was looking out and seeing the grandeur of what makes us who we are as both conscious individuals striving to live a life and physical beings bound and limited by how we're physically constructed. We're not isolated specks of dust floating in empiness. We're small parts of everything. 

Jung looked at individuals and extrapolated from the few to the many to all of humanity stretching over time. There's a consistency to our experience that stretches across time and place. He's. reaching out to me from death and across seas through his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I've been reading a few pages here and there while working through Rhythm of War. I picked it up after reading about a paper where mice learned to avoid eating cherries from the experience of their grandparents. This learning through the generations (they posited that changes in gene expression was the origin of this generational learning, but it's very much part of that broad scope of what we don't know about the world) was suggested as proof of Jung's collective unconscious. I read about this in a different book by Jung, Man and His Symbols (this was the last book I read before I started college, I don't have it marked as read in Goodreads, I don't remember much of it, but I know I read the whole damn thing). I had this other Jung book on my shelf so that became the book that I picked up to start reading. I feel like I'm on the edge of understanding something pretty important and this book has been part of giving me a peek into something that feels important. 

Maybe the point of all of this is to understand our place in the grand tapestry of existence (the wording could use some work). The meaning of life isn't that it has no meaning. Meaning emerges from living. The meaning is in appreciating our contribution, no matter how small, to the constantly unfolding processes of reality. Sounds a little woo woo but that captures things well enough for me to get back to it after I have had some time to realize just how banal the thought really is. 

The spreadsheet says I'm at 179. Is the exact number really all that critical when I'm this far from zero?

Making the choice to finish a book tonight

The picture is actually worse than the 181 that I admitted to in my last post. I have 3 more books coming from Thriftbooks and another one on order from a different website. If I'm all about getting back to reading, what will I be reading to regain some momentum towards BSZ?

I have 4 books in some state of progress. I will finish The Metal Master, a Doc Savage book that I bought when I picked up the embossed copy of To the Sea and Beyond, tonight. I kind of feel like counting this as a finished book is cheating, it's only 130 pages, but it's a stand alone novel so it gets counted as a book. (My curiosity about Doc Savage is sated, I don't see any more of these in my future reading plans.) I'm making steady progress on Rhythm of War doing the audio/ebook combo. I'm about 50% of the way through it. It's a solid book with a fun world, rich characters, and an engaging story. I will keep making steady progress on that while I work on other reading projects at the same time. I will definitely finish those two, but I'm not so certain that I will see the other two books that I have going to the end. One is an ebook, I'm not going to read that in lieu of Rhythm of War, and the other is a book that I haven't picked up in months (I just can't get through Jeffereson's time in France). I guess that means I get to pick out something new to read after I finish The Metal Master tonight.

What I read isn't as important as long as I actually pick up the book and read it. My focus right now is choosing to do the thing I tell myself I want to do rather than just doing the easy thing. I thought I would read more these last few days that my wife has been out of town, but I've mostly just sat on the couch looking at a screen. I did manage to write a couple of blog posts (assuming I actually finish this one, which if you're reading it means that I did get to some point that I considered the end) but accomplished very little reading. I thought I would finish The Metal Master on Wednesday night after reading about 75% of it on the plane ride back from Virginia. That didn't happen. I'm too busy monitoring bets or watching YouTube videos. That tendency to do things that are easy is the habit I'm trying to break. Taking strong actions toward long standing goals has been a big challenge the last few years. I'm back sliding on BSZ, have basically had the same half-assed training for all my Disney Marathons, and have managed to lose pretty much no weight (at least I haven't really gained weight either). Yes my job is demanding and I'm pretty beat by the end of the day. That doesn't mean that I can't make better choices when I'm not at work.

Let's make a better choice now. It's getting late, and I very much want to finish this book tonight. With that in mind, time to wrap up this post and finish The Metal Master.

I choose to read

I just tallied up some of the choices that I've made over the last six months. After neglecting to update my bought but not read list for pretty much the entire year, I just found out that my path to Book Shelf Zero stands at 181 books. That's not really the point of the project. The point is to read all the books I own before I die. How will I ever find out what kind of transformation is waiting for me on the other side of all these books if I fail to read them? Of course I've never consciously think about the latent transformation potential of my unread books, but waiting for these books to change me in a way that makes me more of who I think I should be consistently emerges as the best explanation for continuously returning to this goal despite getting no closer to its completion. I'm not sure goal is even the right word. Compulsion. Habit. Distraction. Probably all of the above.

Completing the goal was never really the point of the activity in the first place. I was never going to stop buying books. The point was to read them at a pace faster than I was buying so I would eventually get to reading all of my books. The aspirational books are the most likely titles to elude a quick read. The fun ones get read. The ones that could actually change me in some way just sit on the shelves. They are fun little reminders that there are things I will never get to in my life, no matter how valuable the experience could prove. Book Shelf Zero is my fear of death project. Reading all of my books is a way to deny my mortality. I don't have an infinite number of somedays, but who cares about that when I have all of these books that I will eventually get around to reading. 

I recently bought a book because it reminded me of why I started this project (well, explicitly stated that I wanted to read my books, there was also an implicit assumption that I was buying these books to read them). My copy of The March to the Sea and Beyond once belonged to Philip Crosby. I know this because he used his embosser to mark the book, twice, and signed it the day he bought the book. I assume that Phil's family sold the books after he died. This item that he valued enough to mark it indelibly as his came into my possession when I bought it from a used book store in St Petersburg, Florida. My books will likely meet a similar fate. I feel like I've built myself with books. It's probably not accurate, I'm much more than the books I've read, but reading and books have always been a part of me. 

Book Shelf Zero is about reconnecting with books and reading (before it's too late!). The goal is a reminder to pick up and read what I own rather than hunting for the next book to buy. As buying books and reading them are two distinct but connected activities, BSZ was my way of shifting the arrow of that equilibrium towards reading. My failure to read more of what I bought is just me choosing to do other things than read. I've had plenty of excuses to not read over the last few years. If I am sincere about wanting to read more, and I really think I am, I need to make the choice to read. Directing my will towards reading and its transformative capacity will be my subversive act against the assault on our time, attention, and thoughts from all kinds of governmental and commercial cartels. My mind is my own. My choices are my own. I become the choices I make. I choose to read.

1 month into 2024 update

I finished reading Goshawk Squadron last night. That's 3 books for 2024. Both of the books that I've read in full this year were part of my end of the year Thristbooks order. That's me following up on my plan to read books that I feel like reading rather than committing to some plan that I will struggle to actually follow. I scanned my shelves for what I thought would be a fun, easy read. I picked up The Furies of Calderon after some consideration. I bought that book before moving down here, but I've been skipping it when looking for my next book. It's kind of a thick book, and I wasn't sure I was ready to commit to something that long (and it's the first book in a series). The difference this time was my having listened to the first and most of the second books in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files. Those are crisp, clever, and well-written books. If this one is anywhere near that league, I figured it would be a fun read that wouldn't take long despite the book's heft. 

Well, I'm almost 70 pages in after starting it this morning. It's pretty much what I expected. It's been a long time since I've read a book that I want to get back to. The Furies of Calderon fits that category. The other books I've read this year, Goshawk Squadron and 10:04, were not exactly duds, they were both excellent books that went quickly (they're also both pretty short), but The Furies of Calderon is a different kind of engrossing. It's a fast paced, action packed thriller. There is no point other than a fun read. Those have been missing from my reading life for the last couple of years. I need to keep reminding myself that I read for fun. I don't need to prove something with my reading.