Running to Live Longer, Not Necessarily Faster

The primary reason I run is because I enjoy the challenge (pushing to go farther and/or faster), and I find it's relaxing and enjoyable. But a big secondary reason I run is because it makes me feel better and because as I get older, I want to be healthier.

When I was young, like many of us, I didn't really have to do much to stay trim and feeling good. That's the blessing of youth. The curse is of course not being self-aware enough to truly enjoy it! But now, about a decade out from college, my metabolism has slowed ever so slightly and I can't eat ramen and pizza 7 days a week and not have it show up in my cholesterol and blood pressure numbers.

In fact, a slowly growing waist size was my impetus for starting to run back in 2007, although I luckily found that I really liked running, even though it hurt and is tough going. And gaining like 15 pounds last year gave me the kick in the pants I needed to get back to running in 2016, which has helped me rediscover why I really loved the sport to begin with.

So in the shorter term, my health goals for running are more weight based.But longer term, staying active and establishing lifelong habits like running I think will help me, quite honestly, keep ticking along for a longer time. Studies, like a comprehensive one done in Denmark (link to NYT Well blog posting about this, which contains a link to the actual study) and the results of which were published last year, bear that out. That study found that people who jogged at a moderate or slow pace for 1 to ~2.5 hours per week tended to have

Men's Olympic Marathon Reminder

Almost forgot! Tomorrow morning at 11 AM in London (6 AM here on the East Coast, 12 AM Sunday morning if you're reading this from Tokyo), the men's Olympic marathon gets underway.

I'll be rooting for Ryan Hall, as he has the best chance of the American delegation. However, his best time of 2:06:17 is still the 69th fastest in the world. As this post from Runner's World's Amby Burfoot points out, the top 33 times in the world this year are owned by Kenyans or Ethiopians. So it'll be an uphill battle for Ryan and everyone else in the field tomorrow.

Nonetheless, I'll be TiVO-ing it to watch after I get back from the gym in the morning.

Impromptu Tempo Run and Friday Misc.

My battle with myself over sleep schedules continued this week and impacted my running. I did well with getting enough sleep early in the week, but faltered on Wednesday night, going to bed after 11 PM with the intention of waking up at 6 for a run Thursday morning. Needless to say, it didn't happen. So, I needed to wake up this morning to make up for it.

Unfortunately, I awoke to a sky that was as dark as night...I got dressed and walked outside to see dark clouds rolling in overhead. I looked on the radar back inside and sure enough, a mass of heavy rain was moving in at 6:15 in the morning. I don't mind running in bad weather, so long as I don't start my run in bad weather. For instance, beginning a run with cloudiness that turns into rain a few miles in is no big deal. But it's demoralizing to begin a run when it's raining. By the time I did all that, it was nearly 6:30, so I decided t bag the outdoor run and hit the gym for a short tempo run. My 2 mile run got me finished about 7. Just in time to head back in pouring rain. Hooray! So, my tempo run was a little longer, as I ran home, getting soaked along the way.

An interesting side story: there were two people (one man, one woman) working out with a trainer while I was there. They were downstairs at first, but then ran up the stairs and did a jogging circuit around the gym. Then they came upstairs to the treadmills. At one point, they got on the treadmill and proceeded to run way faster than they were capable of running. The woman was beside me and I could tell she was going faster than her legs could carry her because her feet were pounding on the treadmill as the mill took her feet out from under her. Luckily, the trainer was there and slowed it down for her. Otherwise...well, you've seen the YouTube videos of people getting swept off treadmills.

This sort of thing continued for about 10 minutes and the woman would speed back up, only to start grunting, gasping, crying out and wailing until the trainer slowed it back down. Then she'd keep saying, "It's too hard! I can't do this!" and so forth as she walked to catch her breath. Then they chatted about preseason football and the Real Housewives show on Bravo. Then he'd speed her back up and the weird cycle would begin again. I kept thinking the woman would realize how much energy and breath she was wasting with the melodrama and chatting, but it never happened. Eventually, the shenanigans ended and they moved on to some other part of the gym.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

In other news, tomorrow is my bi-weekly comics run, and I'm looking forward to picking up this month's Batman issue, which has gotten strong reviews all around. I found the first trade paperback combining the first seven issues of the comic (this month is issue #12) at the local library, so I now only need to read issues #8 and #9 to be fully caught up. All the issues are strong, but I think issue #5 is perhaps one of my favorite comics ever. Full stop.

This weekend is Wizard's World in Chicago, which is their comic-con. Here is an interview with Greg Capullo (lead artist of Batman) from the Chicago Sun Times.

I'm also picking up The Massive #3. The jury is still out on this book, and the third issue will be pivotal in determining whether I continue to read the book or not. It got a good review on Comic Book Resources, but I feel they engage in grade inflation to maintain access to creators and artists, so I will see for myself.

Saturday Reminder

What? A post mid-weekend when we're all out and about? That's right. But I forgot to add a few things to my Friday post. Two reminders, really.

First: the women's Olympic marathon is on tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM Eastern time. Yeah, it's crazy early, but that's an 11:00 AM start time in London, so it could be worse. Imagine if they decided to start at 8:00 AM GMT. As it stands, I'm going to set the TiVO to record the whole thing so I can watch it later in the day. I'll be up, but out running myself when they cross the finish line.

The Americans in the field are Desi Davila, Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan. Here's an article from Runners World laying out the odds for the Americans in the super stacked Olympic field. Kenyans Mary Keitany and Edna Kiplagat, along with Russia's Liliya Shobukhova Nonetheless, I'm rooting for them and hope at least one of them gets on the podium tomorrow.

Secondly, and not running related, early Monday morning NASA's Curiosity rover vehicle will approach and then land on Mars. The mission kicked off last November with the launch of Curiosity into space for the ~150 million mile journey from Earth to Mars. At around 1:00 AM EST on Monday morning, the craft will begin its descent into the Martian atmosphere. If the landing is successful (fingers crossed!), the 2K pound rover will explore an area of Mars thought to have a good chance of once supporting water, and thus possibly life. The rover will operate for several years, although the small nuclear reactor onboard (!) can power the craft for up to 14 years. The descent will take seven minutes, but it takes communication 14 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, so NASA will receive confirmation that the craft has started its descent seven minutes AFTER it's already landed. Crazy!

Anyway, here's a story from NPR about the anxieties and challenges of taking a huge multi-billion dollar spacecraft, shooting it into space at another planet and landing it safely on said planet. Amazing stuff.

And with that, I bid you a fond weekend until Monday. Details on Operation Cannoli then as well. Maybe also some running stuff.

Weekend Training Schedule & Friday Links

Just a quick end of week post this time around, as the week was mostly a loss to work time demands and other things that made for a lackluster training week. This weekend we won't be going anywhere, so I'll be able to get in a decent run tomorrow morning and then a proper longer run Sunday morning. My mother-in-law is coming to visit this weekend and to see A in her performance as part of the Capital Fringe Festival down in DC. But, I get along very well with my in-laws, and we haven't seen any of them since the holidays, so I can honestly say it'll be nice to see her this weekend.

I'm also hopeful I'll have some time to work on a cross training regimen that will complement my running. I need to get beyond just running and into exercising on my rest days as well...so that's a project for this weekend.

And now, a few links for this Friday.

With the Olympics beginning this evening in London, I'm including some links to running-related Olympics sites. See? Running. Olympics. Theme. Nice.

Sir Roger Bannister is rumored to be the person who will light the Olympic Torch tonight. That would be awesome.

Here's a preview and predictions for every Track & Field event, courtesy of Runner's World. Includes the marathon, decathlon and everyone's favorite event, steeplechase.

So how do you warm up for running in the freaking Olympics? Now you know. From Runner's World.

Apparently, NBC will produce more than 5500 hours of programming over the next 17 days. That's insane. More insane is that you can see just about all of it through some medium (TV, computer, mobile, psychic link with the Hive Mind, etc). So, here's a TV viewing guide from Sports Illustrated.

And finally, the Hive Mind itself: NBC's Olympics homepage. You can plug in directly and become one with the Olympics. Plus watch events online and do 1.4 million other things that will sap your productivity at work.

I'll be heading to Alliance Comics for my bi-weekly comics run tomorrow. I've got Justice League #11 and Manhattan Projects #5 to pick up.

However, as I've said before, I've never really gotten into any Marvel books. I'm not sure why. I guess it was hard to drop into a book like "Avengers vs. X-Men" or "Invincible Iron Man" after years or sometimes decades of issues. Not being familiar with past crossovers or plots means I'm spending most of my time playing catch up, or just missing things, which is no fun. And really, beyond the headliner series like Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, etc, I've never really been enthused about the rest of the Marvel line up. For example, "Avengers Academy" holds no appeal for me.

All this explains, in a way, why I'm looking forward to the relaunching of several key Marvel titles in December and early 2013. Marvel is rebooting "Avengers" and "Uncanny Avengers" (I think that's the title...please correct me if I get these wrong). I believe they're also going to reboot Thor and Iron Man, as Marvel announced earlier that those books would be coming to an end in the Fall. I'm most interested in checking out the new Avengers book, which will be written by Jonathan Hickman. At the very least, it'll provide a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor of potentially interesting Marvel titles.

Which brings me to my final link. Brian Hibbs, staff writer at CBR and comic book store owner, has a new column out wherein he talks about the economics of the Marvel NOW! reboot, and why it isn't all rainbows and butterflies for store owners. Very interesting meshing of my day job and hobby. Check it out.

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.