Resolution reset (or not so much?)

Tis the season to once again set up a stack of goals and ambitions that I will in all likelihood fail to accomplish. I've been doing this long enough that I have fully adopted the idea that setting up these goals gives me direction and intention that I lack without them. I would definitely like to accomplish more of my goals, but I am fine with making progress without necessarily achieving the goal. 

But what would it take to achieve the goal? I was thinking about the organizational axis of my life when I was in high school/college. I could have been focused on making money or getting women or being really good at football. I was focused on academic achievement as a validation seeking behavior. My life long habit of doing enough to be well above average but not the very top performer was set during this time. I became very proficient at finding the low risk route that would yield comfortable results with significant but not all encompassing effort. That's kind of how these resolutions work. I set a goal, make some progress, but never really sell out to do really well on at least one of my resolutions. Had I organized my life around making money I would have found ways to take bigger risks. Lower risk paths can get you to comfortable security, but really outsized results require taking more chances. (Just to be clear, I'm not regretful about the choices of my younger self, I'm just trying to think about what a different approach would have looked like.) Taking risks doesn't mean guessing that something will work and going all in on that path. It just means identifying and pursuing opportunities. 

It also means taking a different approach. That's what I should be more open to as I pursue different outcomes to rephrased but essentially the same resolutions that I've been pursuing for years. Taking a different approach to reading would be embracing the idea of reading what sounds interesting when it's time to pick a new book. I haven't finished a book in weeks. That's mostly because the books that I've been trying to read, volume 2 or the Malone's Jefferson bio and Oliver Twist, are not books that I crave reading. I faced this problem last year and I just slogged through long books that were just boring. Maybe next year it's more about progress than depth, significance, or validation seeking. (I did start reading the memoirs of a professional gambler on my phone. In two days I've made more progress in that book than Oliver Twist.) 

I was also reflecting on the role that running played in my life when I was training for my first marathon. Running provided a challenge. I get plenty of challenge from my job these days. Running is just as much emotional and mental as physical. Overcoming emotional and mental fatigue has been my biggest obstacle since moving to Florida. I run out of habit more than anything else. My big distance goals and training for the marathon have kept me running consistently. I'm pretty sure I would have all but abandoned the habit if not for those challenges to keep me moving. The beginning of my run this morning was challenging. I've had my mom at my house for five days and spent all day yesterday driving her to Daytona (and then driving back home). I'm still recovering from months of work challenges. My emotional energy tanks are drained. I just didn't have much to pull from to keep myself out there in the cold and rain. I took a walking break after 3 miles. After I recognized that my emotional energy was low my run suddenly improved. I stopped fighting to keep running and just ran. I also throttled back a bit on my pace which probably helped a bit. I need to just run and not get wrapped up in all the drama of my life. I may not want to run, but that doesn't mean my body isn't capable of running.

So I will try to read more books next year (while buying fewer). I will try to drop a few pounds while sticking with the running habit. I will work on getting back into the gym regularly and put in meters on the rowing machine. 

Heading to Richmond, what to do?

I get to spend a little over 24 hours in my old community this weekend. The question is how to best spend that time. I expect that I will be largely on my own with no obligations or commitments until right before we leave. I don't want to waste the day just hanging out in the hotel, but I also don't want to just go the entire time. There are restaurants where I would like to eat and an ice cream place that I will visit at some point during the day. Let's break down the day and see what kind of plan I can put together (because if I play it by ear I will just drive around and not really do anything). 

We arrive around 8:30. By the time we get off the plane and pick up the car it will be 9. It will take a half hour or so to get to where I will be dropping off my son so he can hang out with his friends (the purpose of the trip). Let's just say I start being on my own at 10. I plan on picking up breakfast while driving so that won't take any additional time. I don't expect that I will be able to check into our hotel until after noon. That leaves me with two hours to fill. 

I stumbled on a live stream from a railroad crossing in a small town about 20 minutes north of Richmond. I thought it would be funny to drive up there and wave to the camera so my wife can see me during the trip. I think I head that way as soon as my drop off is complete. I won't have any place to hang out other than the rental car so taking a half hour to drive up there will give me something to do. Parking, finding the camera, and putting on my little show will take 15-20 minutes. It's getting close to 11 at this point. Assuming I can get a day pass to my old gym, I think I would like to get in a workout. By the time I drive down there, get changed, workout, and get back into my regular clothes, it's a little after 12. First big decision time. Where do I get lunch? There is a fun place to get Asian/Mexican fusion dishes on the way to the hotel. A quick take out order from there would be a good choice. I could get unique food and head over to the hotel. Baseball games will be starting at 1 so I can eat while checking out some games on which I have placed a few dollars in wagers. After lunch, I will be taking a nap. No doubt about that.

Let's say I'm awake from my nap and ready to do something around 3. I want to spend some time reading. I'm not sure for how long I want to read, but let's see what the rest of my day looks like if I read for an hour. It's now 4ish. I will likely eat dinner at 6 so I have a couple of hours. The only things I really miss about Richmond are being able to bet and the beer. I will already be betting so maybe this is the time to get some beer. The closest brewery to the hotel is Hardywood. Not my favorite but they have plenty of good options. They also usually have some bottles that I would be able to drink in a single night. Other breweries have better beer, but they are a good 30-40 minute drive from the hotel. I could go get a 4 pack from The Veil or The Answer, but I wouldn't be able to finish all 4 of them. Let's say I decide to do this. A trip to The Veil would be long enough that I would likely just go get dinner right after. Dinner is an easy choice. Rico's. We'll say I finish dinner around 6:30. I'm planning on taking a walk in my old neighborhood that evening. I will leave my car at a park and walk the loop that was our staple route for years. That will take about an hour. After my walk, I'm getting ice cream at Gelati Celesti. Two scoops of something delicious. Or I get a pint and have some for breakfast the next day? Maybe. Either way, I'm getting ice cream. 

The first big decision may not be where to get lunch, but whether to hit a brewery right after the gym or to head to the hotel and come back later. The clock will likely be the deciding factor here. If I'm finished working out before 12:15, I could head to The Answer or Veil and still eat lunch around 1. As a bonus, I could have one beer while I was eating lunch and another while I was reading. I wouldn't get drunk if I did it that way. That also assumes I can get into my room soon after 1 pm. Maybe I should try that online check in option. The later I get into my room, the less likely I am to get a good nap. If I'm a nomad all day, I can't exactly pass out somewhere. That would be the least favorable outcome. I've caught an early flight to Richmond before. I felt fine until late morning. Once I hit the wall around 11, I wasn't doing much without a nap. I will be struggling if I can't get into my room until the afternoon.

I have no plans for the evening. I expect to just hang out in the room. I would like to say that I will spend that time reading, but it's more likely that I will be watching TV or messing around on my phone. I could hit the mall or walk around B&N. There's a used bookstore that has a really nice selection that could be fun to visit, but I would almost certainly buy something. I'm trying very hard not to buy books at the moment so that would probably be a bad choice. Those would also be things to do if I hit Veil before I have lunch. We'll see how the day unfolds!

Is Fear the Master?

Do I expect perfection? I know that I acknowledge the unattainability of perfection, but I seem to have a way of chiding myself for not doing things that I should have done but maybe just did not realize that I should have done. I don't envision failure. Is this a lack of imagination or the refusal to acknowledge that failure is a possibility. Is looking for ways that things might go wrong (and acting to prevent them) a refusal on my part to acknowledge the possibility of failure. I have lamented my fundamental passivity numerous times in these electronic pages, but is my passivity a desire to not act or a reluctance to confront and contend with failure? I tell myself I won't fail so I never really think about what could go wrong if things don't go just right. 

A whole series of professional failures have come from not seeing how things could turn out badly and take action to prevent that bad outcome. I have to kind of wonder if my entire mindset and orientation towards life isn't a reflection of my fear. Some people are angry. I'm just afraid. Fear of ridicule. Fear of failure. Fear of being exposed as something less than I've always thought of myself. Bad things happen at work and I get scared of what could happen next. I'm not mad that it happened. I'm not working through a way to recover from the situation. I'm scared of what could happen next. I avoid situations that might make me feel uncomfortable because I'm scared. 

Is that the summation of all the things I've written here (and all the other things that I've written but never published, all the notebooks that I filled when paper was the main way to do these kinds of things). I'm scared. Fear is the unmanliest of emotions. Fear is weakness. Well, the refusal to act when you're scared (or to acknowledge and confront the things that scare you). Is the undercurrent of uncertainty and anxiety that I"ve been feeling for the last three years unacknowledged fear? 

I started this by wondering if I expect perfection. I had to stop reading Tom Clancy books because I was getting annoyed by the excessive competency of the characters. They always know the right thing. They fully assess the situation and see exactly what is happening. Navigating ambiguity and uncertainty is a cinch. Hard decisions are made easy and every sign of something that isn't quite right is easily recognized. LIfe isn't that easy. I guess it can be pleasant to envelope yourself in that fantasy. Read the book and participate in that masterful execution of an impossible plan. It feels good to be the winner. 

This is probably all bullshit. I just have bad mindset habits. I fall into easy and familiar ways of handling problems. Those patterns could have been set by my desire to avoid fearful situations (and a strong reluctance to push beyond that fear to engage in activities that make me uncomfortable). Part of why I write things like this is an effort to figure out why I'm not more like the vision of myself that I have in my head. That vision is not afraid. That vision does what makes him uncomfortable rather than taking the easy way out and avoiding the situation. It's not a fear of my physical safety. It's emotional and identity threats that I fear. 

This is a theme to explore, but I really need to get some sleep. 

Marathon #4


I could pretty much cut and paste what I wrote after last year's WDW Marathon and have that be this post. Undertrained, not prepared, didn't put in the miles needed for the distance. All those points are still true. I'm not trying to run 1000 miles this year though. That could be a real difference maker. Let's explore.

I started 2022 focusing on distance. Miles were my primary target. Nothing about pace, form, effort level came with that goal. Just run 5 miles on Tuesday, 5 miles on Thursday, and 10 miles on Saturday and I will achieve that goal. I followed that pattern the third week of January. I had the marathon the first week and was recovering from the marathon effort the second week. I was in Richmond the fourth week of the month so no long run on Saturday. I managed one week with that pattern in February. Another Richmond trip and I started to cut the runs shorter. I got up too late one Tuesday which forced me to go longer on Thursday. I got up too late on Saturday so it was too hot for 10 miles by the time I got out the door. I was tired. Who knows why I started cutting the runs short. I just did.

This plan to get back to running faster (as laid out in my Marathon #3 post) overlooked a couple of very important factors. I essentially extended marathon training. I gave myself 1 week to recover physically, but I never really put down that obligation to go out and get in a bunch of miles. I had already felt like I failed in sticking to my marathon plan. Now I was pretty much failing on a new plan right from the outset. If I had just stopped to take a look at what I was going to be doing over the next several months, I would have seen that long weekend runs, the linchpin of this whole distance plan, weren't going to happen at least one weekend a month. The plan failed for oversight of some pretty obvious facts.

So the 1000 miles in a year plan failed because I put pressure on myself for volume and failed to plan for important life events. If I wanted to get faster, why didn't I plan for some short runs that would allow me to work on speed? My previous marathon training cycle started with prepping for a 10K in the spring. I shifted away from long runs to shorter, faster runs. That set my level for easy runs at a faster pace when I started marathon training. Instead I just found ways to keep myself slow (relative to previous running paces). I always felt pressure to get in the miles.

Until looking just now, I did not realize how little I ran after April. I basically didn't run at all from May to August. It wasn't until I started ramping up my Saturday runs to 10 miles that I was regularly running on the weekend. Wow. I made the joke that I was finally in shape to do my marathon plan about three quarters of the way through it. That was the truth!

Moral of the story. Give myself the space to do shorter, faster runs early in the year. Stay consistent through the year, and actually be ready for marathon training in mid-September.

Complicated and Complex

The existential problem of Book Shelf Zero is that I think I'm setting up a series of wins, but all I'm really doing is frustrating myself by constantly failing to achieve my longer goals. I'm not sure the outcome is worth the stress. I mostly feel bad about not reading the books I own while buying new books. I may get a few small bursts of glee when I finish a book, but those minor moments get washed out by the constant thrum of failure. Not achieving what I really want is a big problem when it takes me 3 months to read one book. I expect that for something like War and Peace or something similarly gargantuan, but this was The Once and Future King. That book was dense in just about every way possible. The content required effort, the margins were very small, and there were long descriptive passages with very little dialogue. It was a 600 page book that felt like 1000. Definitely worth reading, but it was such a chore. I'm not sure I want to repeat this cycle 170 (at current count) more times.

It wasn't all the book's fault though. The reading timing was bad. I should have had a single New Year's Resolution, get the family settled in Florida. That's what really matters right now. The Once and Future King took 3 months to read because I started reading it right before the push to get my family down here. Weekend trips to Richmond, getting my daughter settled, having my family with me in the house again, these are all things that were far more important than reading. My reading/fitness system works best when my life is calm and predictable. I haven't had a calm and predictable life for two years. I'm gradually getting back to that space. I have to make an effort to get back into regular reading and working out. Sliding into passive living is so tempting. A few videos is so much easier than a handful of pages of whatever book I'm reading at the moment. Well, that kind of depends on the book. I'm reading The Promise at the moment. It's part of my Booker Prize project. Excellent book. This one is complex without being complicated (The Once and Future King was complicated without being complex). I was just going to read a few pages of a new chapter last night. I ended up forcing myself to put the book away so I could get to bed. That reading is fun. That's why I read. Reading to cross a book off a list is a real drag (I guess it's like reading a book for school).

The existential problem is that I set up these goals that just stress me out rather than making my life better. It's the same with my fitness goals and career. It's about wanting to be someplace that I'm not and feeling stress that I'm not there. It just throws a blanket of stress over everything. I end up always feeling like a failure. There must be a better way to live. 

Reading hasn't been a top priority for a few months

I've been reading the same book for 3 months. 3 months! I'd like to finish it tomorrow but I doubt that will happen with the morning walk, watching stuff with Maggie, football, and other stuff around the house. It will be done in the next few days. The Once and Future King will be crossed off a couple of lists. No regrets reading it. I'm not sure if the long reading time is more about me or the book. I'm not particularly enamored with the book, but it's well written with a legendary story and characters. The fault must be mine. I'm going to pass that blame off to the circumstances of my life. I started reading this book right before the family joined me down here in Florida. I was unpacking boxes, getting the house ready, and carrying on everything else that I've had going on. We got back together in July. It's been all kinds of work. COVID took a couple of weeks away too. Yeah, reading hasn't been a top priority for a few months. 

Add running to that list. And eating well. And lifting weights. Rowing. My various side quests that are really my main quests have been sidelined by responsible adult stuff. Work isn't the warm peaceful water that I swam in 10 years ago. I don't have all this extra energy to channel into side projects. Important life things are much more demanding. That's not to say I will abandon or neglect these other things. No, those other things are a key element of my mental health. I need them to operate and maintain a sense of myself. I just need to get more creative with fitting them into the space allowed by a more challenging job and other elements of my Florida life. 

Getting out from under The Once and Future King will be a big step to reclaiming my reading life. I just don't relish picking up this book. It's not a book I crave getting back to once I'm done with my life stuff. The wife goes to sleep and I turn to my phone or the TV. I've been reading a few pages as much I can to just get through it. The next few books I read need to be books that I want to read. Nothing too heavy or demanding for the next few weeks. They don't have to be frivolous. They just have to be something that I want to read. My emotional and mental energy is too tapped in the evening to read something that takes effort. Short books won't hurt. Long books, no matter how pleasant, are their own challenge.

I've embraced walking during my marathon training runs. That's how I run a marathon anyway. I might as well train that way. Pounding away with my pulse up at 170 isn't going to get me ready for the long distances. Doing 10 miles of a 12 mile run isn't getting it done. Better to take small breaks and finish the entire distance than cut runs short. I will use my shorter runs to not walk. No issue including some walking periods while I'm out for 10 or 12 miles. The walk I added to the end of today's run is another nice touch. My heart rate was already elevated. Might as well take advantage of that work and stretch it out a bit. Extra time on my feet won't hurt either. 

Still impressive at 30 years?

Weird confluence of some random events put me in a very nostalgic frame of mind. I dug The Nineties out of my nightstand last night. I bought it back in March and kind of forgot about it. I started reading it last night. My entire high school and college experience are contained in The Nineties. Big things happened in that decade. My senior football season still resonates strongly almost 30 years later. One of my teammates posted an edited version of a playoff game against a rival to YouTube. I watched that tonight. We were good. I'm pretty sure that we would have won the region if the field hadn't been a muddy mess. Football highlights were a big part of the video yearbook that the same guy has on YouTube. I'm in that a couple of times. A random joke in a weight training class is the only time I show up without wearing football equipment. 

The game was played in November of 1993. I was 17. I turned 46 last week. I'm far enough away from that experience that I can appreciate how special those few months were without feeling too pathetic for harkening back to my high school glory days. The Washington Post story about that game notes that we were the only team to score against that other team. I had the chance to be part of something special. Plenty of people never have that chance. That season is certainly the highlight of my time in high school. I didn't have a girlfriend. All the excitement that comes from that experience came when I was in college. I had a mediocre social life. I was obsessed with getting to college. I wasn't very complex (not that many high schoolers are particularly complex). 

It's startling how quickly my mindset reverts when I reenter that time of my life. I wonder what all those people I went to school with would judge the life I've built. These are people that I brushed life with for a couple of years. I only went to that high school for two years. The opinion those people have of me have absolutely no bearing on my life, but I wonder how my achievements would stand up to the other people in my class. Wny is this where my thinking automatically goes when I mentally go back to that time of my life? We're all out here trying to do the best we can. I know the outcomes of a few people from that football team. One is a pilot for Southwest after being in the Navy. Another is a teacher and coach at a high school not far from my Virginia house. I was the right tackle. The left tackle passed away several years ago. The guy who played guard next to me recently retired from the Army. He was a green beret. Our quarterback was a coach for a while. I think he's an administrator now. He got divorced and has remarried. 

I guess that shift to the old comparison mindset is about the fantasies I had about my future back in those days. I just wanted to be impressive. I didn't think much of myself so I was looking to add ornaments to make myself look better. That's why I played football. Being on the football team carried a social load that I would have struggled with had I just been another face in the crowd. I was looking forward to other things that would have added to my prestige. I stepped out of the prestige game to live in a pleasant climate. That's assuming I was in the prestige game to begin with. The truth that a high school student fails to see is that most people don't give two shits about prestige games. Once you're out of the fish bowl of a 1990s era high school, prestigious accomplishments have limited meaning outside of a subset of people playing the same game. Tell another chemist that you have a paper is JACS, they may have an idea of what that means. Tell somebody about that at a high school reunion, you'll get a blank stare. 

So unless you're famous, most people won't be impressed by what you're doing unless they're in the same game. We don't have games under the lights on Friday nights where people can see you out there doing your thing. Even then they're probably just watching Damon Boone cut through the defense. Nobody gives a shit about what you're doing unless it helps them feel better about their life. Eventually it just becomes a question of who is still around to attend the reunion. Eventually, nobody can show up.