A friend of mine from Chicago visited me the other weekend. I made him run hills with me -there happens to be a good one about mile from where I live over on Putnam Road. Sprinting bottom to top, it takes over a minute… so it’s a decent workout. We had done this about four times through when a lady gardening outside a house starts talking to us:
“Let me know if you guys want water!”
“That’s four times already that you’ve done that. You sure you guys don’t want some water?”
As we are running back home my friend says: “I love Wisconsin”
I was talking to someone the other day about plans after work. I mentioned that I needed to get a run in before they’d pick me up to go out. I explained that I have a marathon coming up at the end of may and need to run as much as possible when I’m home to balance that with my travel schedule for work.
The comment made went something like this: No offense, but you really don’t have the build for Marathons, you’re a bigger guy (I’m 6′, weigh about 185lbs, and consider myself in good shape, exercising 5-6 days a week). Have you ever seen how skinny and small marathoners are?
I did take a bit of offense. My response to this is, yes the people that win marathons generally aren’t that tall and are extremely skinny. This is the body type that will help you win a marathon; however, marathon competitors have all sorts of body types (and sometimes even ridiculous costumes).
I’m not trying to win the race. I just want to run the 26.2 miles and do well. My ideal goal would be to qualify for the Boston Marathon (which would require pacing a 7:15ish mile), but that might not be possible with the amount of travel that I have to do for work. I’ll be okay with finishing within a decent time – I can pace an 8 minute mile in my sleep.
What I’m trying to do requires discipline and the right state of mind, not worrying about whether I have the correct body type.
I think the philosophy of this extends to life in general: yes, there will be limitations to what you can do, but how do you deal with them or overcome them?
I went back to Milwaukee for the weekend. It snowed, though, in the past couple years it has done so into April. My family grilled on Saturday, I grilled with my housemates on Sunday. We’re not going to let winter stick around. I get to go to Greenville, SC this week. It’s a beautiful, small southern town. The main street is packed with incredible southern bistros.
Filed under: Running, life, madison, myself | Tags: cycling, grilling, madison, Wisconsin
I managed to do only a couple things, but I was very content with this past weekend.
I did get some grilling in now that the weather is getting nicer. I made chicken/veggie skewers with a honey marinade and ate it with a spinach, walnut, onion, and blue cheese salad. It went pretty well with a Pinot Grigio. The coals were still hot, so I grilled the rest of the chicken and vegetables that I had stocked away in the freezer. It makes a good quick dinner after work and my long runs.
On that note, I’m slowly trying to increase my distance even more. I’m doing multiple days of 12+ miles, interspersed with days of water polo, and shorter, faster runs. Sunday, it was too nice and my housemate had just purchased a bike, which inspired me to clean, oil, and prep my bike. I took it out for a two hour ride which was really lovely, it’s refreshing to A. have bike trails that take you through places you’ve never been before and B. see people out and about. It was a bit chilly when I rode by Lake Mendota -it still has a thin layer of ice, but at least no one still trying to ice fish.
My housemate is keenly aware of the number of bananas that I eat in a given week (usually 1/day); however, sometimes it’s just too difficult to carry them places or they just spoil when I go on trips for work.
To remedy this, he picked me up a Japanese Banana Keeper from SF when he was there visiting friends. Its long, curved tube allows for the storing of various banana shapes. The heart-shaped holes allow your banana to breathe freely. My life continues, changed.
I needed a quick lunch so I grabbed some Odawalla bars and a coffee from Peets Coffee in the Cincinnati Airport. It was buy one bar, get one free.
Mistake.
They seem healthy, but the they taste pretty foul. I’ll stick with Clif bars.
I’m pretty sure that this formula is correct:
people + glass of red wine + fireplace + coffee house = exaggerated gestures and dramatic laughing
Not saying it’s a bad thing 
, just holds true.
I recently purchased Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf from a library book sale. The book seemed a bit older. As it turns out, it probably hasn’t been opened since the mid to late sixties.
As I was paging through it before packing the book for a trip, two pieces of paper fell out. One was a tag for “M. Lowenstein” fabrics. The other was a set of labels for attaching to bundles of letters. You would bundle the local mail and the out of town mail separately and then use these labels to distinguish the two. The date on these is 1965.
Do these have any real value? No, but it’s cool to hold random pieces of life from 40 years ago that probably haven’t been touched since then.
IMG00081 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00082 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00083 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
A couple years ago I ordered the english-language version of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions used from the Amazon Marketplace. I found this when I got to the “Garden of Forking Paths” (which is one of my favorite Borges stories):
IMG00084 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
It was cool to have that commentary that was more than just notes, but directed to the reader. It adds dimension to the book besides the text on the pages.
Filed under: life, literature | Tags: gabriel garcia marquez, journals, one hundred years of solitude
A while ago, my brother gave me this small journal. It’s very simple with a nice recycled paper cover of sorts. I really didn’t appreciate it at first, but I started using it when I got to college. It’s been about two years since I wrote in it and, for whatever reason, I decided to pick it up and read through the other night. I wouldn’t mind sharing this one from a day in November, 2006.
This is why Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a genius:
One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything that he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
From: One Hundred Years of Solitude
That has to be one of my favorite passages in a book, ever. It’s those paragraphs of insight strewn throughout the book in the most beautiful language that also make it one of my favorites.
