Friday Link(s) and Weekend Training Schedule: July 14 & 15, 2012

Another work week comes to a close and another too-short weekend dawns on the horizon. Here in Baltimore, the kiln-like 100s of last week have been replaced by more seasonal low 90s. So, at least I should be able to get up at a reasonable hour to get my run done.

This week, I am planning on doing just one run of somewhere between four and five miles. My strained tendon or whatever it might be on the outside of my foot, feels better and I am lucky that at no time was it painful to walk. So, I think it's just a mild over-use injury. Nonetheless, after yesterday's run, I thought it prudent to take today and tomorrow off from running.

So, my "long" run will be Sunday morning. If my foot feels better, I'll try 4.5 miles; if not, I'll keep it to 4 for another week and see how it feels. Tomorrow morning I'm getting a haircut...so no running. But I may go to the gym and log some time on the bike or some other cross training. I really do need to figure out a cross training regimine for my "rest days" so this might be a good opportunity to do that.

And now, a little piece of the Interwebs that I came across and thought worth highlighting. No religion, politics or anything heavy. Just interesting (to me, at least). Maybe thought-provoking. Maybe not. Although cat videos can make you think, right? Sure they can!

I'm a big fan of the site Brain Pickings. It's essentially a smorgisbord of ideas, books, excerpts and hyperlinks compiled by Maria Popova, who writes for Wired UK magazine and The Atlantic. Here's a description from the site itself:

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

If that sounds cool, it is. To wit: A post from Wednesday discussing Carl Sagan's reading list. The idea of having a broad understanding of topics and fields ancillary to your own, while also seeking a deep understanding of your "home" field, is one I very much like.

Don't know who Carl Sagan was? No problem; here's a link to his Wikipedia page to get a quick download.

Still interested? Check out this three minute video from YouTube called Pale Blue Dot. It's Sagan narrating and is a great way to place everything, literally everything, in perspective.

So, this is actually a series of interesting links, but the one that caused me to think about everything else was the one for Sagan's reading list. So, check it out and enjoy.