More summer pledges: the sub-20:00 5K

Summer is a good time to plan to accomplish things when you are in school. Sure, you may have a summer job, but it’s not like working at the cinema or the ice cream stand is so taxing on your youthful self that it prevents you from getting a lot done during the three months of the season. However, once you are done with school, summer is a terrible time to try to get things done. Your weekends are often spoilt by friends having barbecues or getting married, and you are still working at your regular job during the week.

Old habits die hard, which is why I have my summer reading list (I haven’t started yet, unless you count the preface to The Historian) and is why I am making a new summer goal of running a sub-20 minute 5K. I resolved this last night during one of my typical runs, when I realized that I like to run fast. I don’t often run fast, but I like it when I do. I also realized that I’m getting sick of the runs I go on all the time, and so is my body, which is very bad. I’m too used to doing the same old thing, which means that I’m not really getting any better at running or even getting in much better shape.

I’ve run several 5K races, and they are a great deal of fun: quick and intense. Back when I was younger, I even ran one at close to a sub-20:00 pace. I chose this particular time for my summer goal because it’s what I consider fast, but is not so brutal as to be impossible to attain for a casual runner. For reference, expert runners have around 15:00 or 16:00 5K times. A 20:00 5K is a 6:26 mile pace, which is fast, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not super-fast, and I need only maintain it for just over 3 miles.

This will be very hard, but I need some different training and a new goal to shake me out of my running doldrums. I’m going to find an Internet log to use to keep track of training times and distances, which I’ll link to shortly and which I hope to feed into Twitter (follow me at http://www.twitter.com/khren). The plan I’m using is Hal Higdon’s 5K Intermediate training plan. Anyone who feels like joining in, drop a comment and we’ll kill ourselves together.

EDIT: I found a good running log called Log Your Run that should do everything I want.  I’ll be setting it up with my plan this week.

The DM always wins

I love the Penny Arcade comics about Dungeons and Dragons, such as today’s. Here is another. I enjoy Penny Arcade generally, but I find the D&D comics particularly amusing. Tycho and I were trained in the same school of dungeon mastering that taught us that the game should be played as the DM against the players. Story-telling be damned! If I was going to be up all night preparing a hideous dungeon full of elaborate traps and individually-created monster NPCs, I wasn’t about to have the PCs simply tear through my beautiful creations.

Here are some highlights from old D&D games I ran:

• One character was thrown into the middle of a war of succession between several brothers. One of them was a vampire. The only magic item this character had was a box that could turn into a tower upon command. He had a NPC that helped him, but I killed her off.
• I charged a level one kobold fighter with rounding up all the local kobolds tribes under his banner to fight oppressive human overlords. He had some magical javelins, but I never told him they were magical or how they worked. I also don’t believe I ever let him get higher than level three.
• One of my brother’s characters died. There was no one around to raise him, so he was resurrected instead. In the old days, the latter spell brought the character back to life, but potentially as a different creature. He got returned as a deer. He played as a deer (no battle powers, no spells, etc.) for the next few months before the party found somebody to revert him to human form.

These are just a few examples from the top of my head. My traumatized players (my brother and best friend from childhood) could most likely give you many more. Needless to say, my PCs were always frustrated, low-level, fighting impossible odds, and never in possession of the magical item necessary to hit the monsters I sent against them. I figured this made their adventures epic, because who ever had an easy epic struggle? They figured I hated them. In truth, it was probably both.

My summer reading list

I decide to create a summer reading list for myself for a number of reasons. My first impetus was this post from The Bygone Bureau, even though I don’t think that I will read any of the books on their list, with the possible exception of The Demolished Man (I am always looking for good sci-fi books to read). The post got me thinking about summer reading when I was in high school, and what a chore it seemed back then. Today, I wish someone would hand me lists of great books to read during the summer. So I became determined to create such a list for myself, based on other public lists and the large stack of unread books sitting in my basement. The result is below. It is not particularly ambitious, but this is a good thing. I have uses besides reading for my free time, but I also often fall victim to overly ambitious lists. I spend hours listing what it is I want to do or accomplish and then spend little time actually doing anything because I am so overwhelmed by the length of the list.

1. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I am slowly re-reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (publishing the journal entries and letters on the date they were written in the story is simply creative and brilliant), and from what I have heard The Historian is similarly-themed. I believe the books will complement each other nicely. I’ve also gathered that, as alluded to by the title, it reads like a history. Considering how much I enjoyed the last piece of heavily-footnoted fictional history I read (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), I am excited about this book.
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is my favorite book. It has been years since I last read it, a shame only redeemed by the fact that I have read it five times already. I have been avoiding re-reading it because I get very wrapped up in the story. While this is certainly not bad (it is a compliment to the author and is evidence of how much I enjoy the story), it does cut deeply into my time. This results in a dramatic reduction in how much I sleep, and I already do not sleep enough. However, it has been too long since I last saw Middle-Earth, so I plan on taking the plunge this summer and break in my faux-leather-bound collectors’ edition.
3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. This is yet another great novel that has been collecting dust on my bookshelf for far too long. I’ve heard that reading it will make my own family seem less crazy, which alone is a good reason to read it.
4. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. This received a good review from my father-in-law, and I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I have a quick story regarding the latter. I tried to convince my wife to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and the pitch went like this: “It’s a really good book. It’s about a Jewish boy and his Czech cousin living in New York City during World War II (wife appears interested) writing comic books (wife rolls eyes and returns book to shelf).
5. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I have not read this book and I have no excuse why not. It is a classic of science fiction literature (come on, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards) so I should ^[1] read it, and the themes seem like things I will really enjoy.
6. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins. I am not and have never been a huge fan of comic books. However, this is another influential classic that I should read, and will most likely enjoy reading. As I said, I am not a huge fan of comic books, but I do like them.

That’s it. It is not groundbreaking and serves no one’s purpose but my own. However, I like it. It contains a good combination of heavier reads (I do not expect to fly through The Historian and I like to savor The Lord of the Rings) and lighter, covering multiple genres but focusing on the ones I like. There are a lot of books that I want to read, so I will add to this list if I manage to get through a couple of these.

[1] I hate hearing about books I “should” read in some sort of global, literary sense. In my mind, there is no such thing. I use the phrase here on a personal level. I am telling myself I should read it because I think that it will be beneficial to me.

Back, but don’t ask from what

Once again, it’s been a long time. A lot has changed (I briefly updated my “About” page to reflect several new statuses), but I’m not going to make a long, lame post about any of it. I’m also not going to bitch about having been too busy over the last year to write, because I haven’t been that busy. In fact, I’ve had a lot of freackin’ time. In addition, I’m not going to beat up on myself for being a lousy blogger, because I don’t care about being a great, or even good, blogger and berating myself is counterproductive to my goal of writing more. I’d rather just get back into writing, which is pretty much the point of this blog, at least from my perspective.

So, that’s the only segue you’re going to get from my last post of well over a year ago to the next. Enjoy!