Working Out at Home Watching YouTube NYC Half-Marathon

My morning workout today consisted of me running around through the house...trying in the process to avoid tripping over our puppy dog Daisy...while watching a YouTube video of a New York City half-marathon, recorded by the same Chinese-speaking dude who recorded the full NYC Marathon back in 2019.  I went to the computer to see the race's course map, and quickly noted that it didn't conform at all to what I was watching.  The map had it starting in Manhattan and going to Brooklyn while "my" race had a reverse course...they're now toward the end, running right down Broadway past Times Square where Melissa, Rebecca and I visited (and stayed at the Marriott Marquis) back in 2010.  And then I discovered that within New York City and the nearby area there are several marathons/half-marathons each year.  Awesome, if you're a resident you can sign up for the ones you like and the subway system and shuttles can circumvent any transportation issues.  But, of course, if you're like me and live more than a thousand miles away, then it gets quite a bit trickier.  I wonder how many of those running in "today's" race flew or drove in from more distant locales and how many were already planted in the immediate region.  Sometime in the future I'd like to have a go at a New York City race...but the external issues of getting there and getting a place to stay while fitting it all on my calendar seem to be, at least at this stage of time, pretty daunting.  And I already know that, for some of the races, they're booked up many months in advance.  Until I figure it all out, though, I'll keep watching videos like this one, thanks to the thoughtful people who make them...

Weekly Short Stories: 1990 Science Fiction, Part 4

Here are my reactions to four more tales from 1990, presented in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection and edited by the late Gardner Dozois. In the summer of that year, Gainesville and the University of Florida in particular were excited about the arrival of Steve Spurrier as their new head football coach...and then tragedy struck with the five murders of young people in their apartments...panic struck the city and area until the culprit was caught...a loser ex-con from Louisiana...but not before the police chief had practically convicted in the media a different, completely innocent and mentally ill young man: shame, shame, shame.  And now, about those four stories...

THE CAIRENE PURSE by Michael Moorcock

An interesting mood piece set in the Aswan High Dam region of Egypt in the near future as the dam's negative effect on the environment is evident and an Englishman searches the area for his missing archaeologist sister, who he discovers has picked up a reputation as a healer, a dabbler in witchcraft...and what is it about that strange spacecraft? 

THE COON ROLLED DOWN AND RUPTURED HIS LARINKS, A SQUEEZED NOVEL BY MR. SKUNK by Dafydd ab Hugh

A plague of sorts in the future has leveled the intelligence of infected animal life and humans, lowering that of the latter while increasing the former's to the point where dogs, cats, skunks and other critters can freely converse and hang out...when they're not eating one another, that is.  A group, let by the skunk narrator, is on a mission to "liberate" the remaining "normal" humans hidden by an insulated dome protecting them from the virus.  I liked how the story was presented from the skunk's viewpoint...ha-ha...

TOWER OF BABYLON by Ted Chiang

The Biblical tower of babel from Genesis is the model for this tale of humanity painstakingly...for generations...building a tower tall enough to literally pass the sun, stars, reaching the dome of the sky that borders heaven.  Told in a narrative that conforms to ancient beliefs about the state of the universe, I enjoyed the story's ending...I wonder if Stephen King picked up on it for his Dark Tower series (read the final book)...

THE DEATH ARTIST by Alexander Jablokov

It's hard to find a likeable character in this future world of people that keep their real physical bodies protected while able to project their essence into clones that they use for diversion and adventure, with dying in them no cause for alarm as they always wake up in their original form.  Death for oneself...and others as well, becomes a numbing, repeated experience in this decadent world...

Next week: more about short science fiction from 1990...

Running Races Being Pushed Off the Streets and Onto Remote Trails

I'm noticing a trend in public running races here in northern central Florida...and judging by the race calendar elsewhere in the state, it isn't just happening here.  It used to be that we'd have races in a more urban setting, races that were more or less looped courses that afforded the participants a variety of the experiences and sights belonging to the city in question...that to me was always one of the big appeals of racing.  We had the annual Five Points marathon/half-marathon that ran right through the heart of Gainesville in such a looping course, even passing through the University of Florida's football stadium at one point.  Ocala also had its annual racing event, another loop (at least for the half-marathon event) although its course covered the more rural horse farms south of the city.  Both of these events are gone now, leaving runners who want to experience marathons or half-marathons races in this area to do so on the Hawthorne Trail, either from Boulware Springs Park in southeastern Gainesville or from the Eastern Trailhead in the town of Hawthorne.  Ocala is holding no marathons or half-marathons anymore, not even on some remote rails-to-trails course.  Gainesville still holds these two distances in races, but they're now confined to that one trail way off in the boondocks far from civilization...a nice surface but pretty much boring scenery: just trees and more trees.  Plus, the races are all there-and-back, and two of the three offered additionally required repeated laps...ouch!  It's as if society has said that we runners aren't welcome among them anymore and we need to go hide somewhere off in the woods to do our "thing" from now on.  Nowadays if I want to remain in north central Florida and experience marathons or half-marathons, I'm left to either retreating to the Hawthorne Trail or to watching videos others have made of marathons elsewhere...which is what I've been doing lately.  Interesting races, like the Toronto Half-Marathon, New York City Marathon, Walt Disney World Marathon and the Boston Marathon, all provide a visual backdrop of the always changing surroundings, with the sense of a Tolkienesque quest as the runners plod onward to the finish line...and I'm right there (in my living room) with them.  None of those courses are looped either, meaning that real-life participants in those places have to figure out their transportation strategies beforehand...no jumping out of the car before the race and jumping back into it afterwards.  On the other hand, at home I can just flick "pause" to take a bathroom break (or leave it running). Back in the late 1940s science fiction writer Clifford Simak...one of the best in my opinion...wrote a series of tales in which our society in the future would evolve to where people lived lives of rural seclusion, hardly ever directly interacting with one another and depending on robots to serve them and vicarious entertainment to fulfill themselves.  Move over future, here we are now...at least in my "section of the woods"...

A Little Gripe about a Local Non-Profit

It's been my experience that it's a losing proposition to criticize non-profit organizations, especially the ones that are directly connected to physically improving...even to the point of saving...people's lives.  Still, I feel the need to call out Life South, a locally based blood bank that has sponsored and organized Gainesville's wonderful Five Points of Life dual marathon/half-marathon races annually during the month of February.  From 2010 through 2022 I ran in six of the half-marathons: great, memorable experiences and each of which I wrote about on this blog.  According to Life South's own website a few years ago (but removed since), one afternoon back around 2005 a couple of Life South employees took a break from work and jogged the few blocks down Newberry Road to the nearby Starbucks (now a Relish restaurant), where Marty Bower worked as store manager.  The three got to talking and Marty suggested that their employer hold a marathon to raise interest in their cause...and reportedly that moment set off the chain of events leading to the annual tradition.  The racecourse stayed the same up until 2020 when they moved both the marathon and half-marathon to southwest of Gainesville, starting and ending at the newly built Celebration Point.  In '21 everything was cancelled due to Covid, but in 2022 they resumed it, going back to the center of Gainesville while altering the course and eliminating the full marathon as an option.  I also ran that event and thought the new course was fine although I was saddened by the end of the 26.2-mile race.  But they decided for this year to hold only a short 5K race and don't seem interested in longer distances anymore.  I think that's sad and disagree with their decision, but they have a right to do so.  What I do have a problem with is the half-assed way they went about not openly informing the general public that those longer races would be no more...and worse, they seem to have erased their online history of past race results, as if they are somehow ashamed of it all.  Yes, I have a BIG problem with that.  It made me wonder whether there was a change in leadership at Life South, and the new persons in charge were negative about running and wanted to take them into a different direction.  And apparently that new direction involves pestering me with annoying, guilt-riding e-mails about the perpetual catastrophic shortage of a certain blood type.  You see, I have donated blood to Life South before...I'd like to again (after first receiving clearance from my doctor), but right now I have a very serious transparency issue with that organization, which at least as I see it has gotten to be pretty arrogant about itself.  It's not just a reaction to them cancelling those races, either.  After all, I've always felt that our fair city...in conjunction with the University of Florida...should instead be the driving forces behind an annual local marathon/half-marathon event, especially considering Gainesville's important historic place as a center for running and local past standouts like Marty Liquori and Frank Shorter...no need to put all the pressure on one non-profit organization.  Still, although I appreciate Life South's involvement with local long-distance running races over the past several years, they could have been more candid about their recent decision to shut them down...

Podcaster Discusses Anxiety Attacks and How to Deal with Them

Podcaster Rob Dial, who as a personal development coach has his show Mindset Mentor, on a recent episode discussed ways to alleviate anxiety.  He started with the comment that anxiety is a natural mechanism we have to defend ourselves against outside attacks...but in our more civilized, modern existence it can be counterproductive and even harmful.  He listed three approaches to deal with an onset of anxiety.  First...he says...breathe deeply through the nose for a few seconds, working the diaphragm to accomplish this, and then take twice as long to slowly exhale through the mouth.  Dial recommends repeating this a number of times, and claims that it has helped him.  Second, he says to challenge the anxious feeling, determining its source and replacing it with an alternate, truer reality as to what is most likely to happen instead of the fears underlying that anxiety.  And finally, Rob Dial suggests that familiarizing oneself...in a "safe" way...with the object of the anxiety can take the edge off the fear causing the trouble.  I'm good with all three suggestions, but also recognize that when the emotions take charge, it can be a while before the body responds well to methods to counteract anxiety or panic attacks.  For me, if feasible I take a brief "mindfulness" break and do a modification of Dial's breathing exercises while simply focusing my attention to the immediate physical environment in front of me and away from the anxiety-producing situation.  Seems to work...how do you deal with this sort of thing?

Missed Out on This Morning's Half Marathon: Better Luck Next Time

Through a comedy of (my) errors, I missed out on this morning's "Run Your Buns Off" half-marathon race, held on the (awesome) Hawthorne Trail starting and ending at the little town of Hawthorne a few miles southeast of Gainesville.  In retrospect...and I don't think it's just sour grapes...the fact that I drove all the way out there forgetting to take along my bib with the embedded timing chip was probably for the better.  I had squeezed out a small parking spot near the starting line and got out to pay a quick pre-race visit to the porta-potty when I noticed what seemed to be an endless line in front of the (only) two provided...this all happening only 15 minutes before race time.  But it was then that I noticed the bibs on the runners mulling around and realized that it was "game over" since my own was lying on my desk some 15 miles away.  I walked directly back to my car, scooted out of there and, a few minutes later, did my own mulling over coffee at a Gainesville Dunkin' Donuts.  The race's starting temperature was around 70 degrees with a horrible humidity exceeding 90%...I experienced something similar last October in another half-marathon that was thoroughly miserable.  I also felt sleepy this morning...if I want to participate in these races, I need to get into the habit of sleeping earlier and waking up earlier.  As it was, I went home after Dunkin' and slept for a couple more hours.  I should have known up front that this race wasn't going to turn out as planned...although I had set my alarm for 5:30 to give me plenty of time to get ready, somewhere along the line...in my sleep, apparently...I had turned it off and only woke up, thanks to Melissa, at 6.  So, what did I learn? One, shift my waking and sleeping times to accommodate activities earlier in the morning.  Two, be more selective with these races and who conducts them.  And three: oh hell, I think two lessons are enough...

Quote of the Week...from Dean Karnazes

Struggling and suffering are the essence of a life worth living.  If you're not pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone, if you're not demanding more from yourself...expanding and learning as you go...you're choosing a numb existence.  You're denying yourself an extraordinary trip.           ---Dean Karnazes

I've read criticisms about ultra-distance runner Dean Karnazes such as he's not even one of the Top Ten ultramarathon racers and he's just good at marketing himself.  To me that's like saying that the Beatles, none of whom had formal musical training or could read music, were "just good at marketing".  While I always defer to the elite in any sport, including distance running, it was Dean Karnazes with his book Ultramarathon Man who renewed my interest in this activity, not the fast finishers...and Karnazes has repeatedly emphasized that he's not among those elite.  But he is an elite at popularizing the sport and encouraging others, although I have to admit that I don't exactly appreciate someone standing there on the sidelines near the finish of a long race yelling at me to "Push it!"...there's such a thing as too much encouragement, too!  Regarding the above quote, which I believe is an excerpt from that first book of his, I wholeheartedly agree with it...although I don't think it necessarily means that all of us are suited for ultra-distance running...or running at all for that matter.  I knew a kid in high school who was like Karnazes in that he was always taking the "extreme effort" and "no gain without pain" position about running, often yelling at others to try harder...I liked his enthusiasm, but I think he crossed the line at the same time with his sometimes-unsolicited exhortations.  It's also possible to take one single endeavor and make it into a kind of idol while neglecting other important areas of one's life...Dean's quote has its greatest use when applied across the board to all areas of our lives, not just one.  And one other thing: I don't think it's profitable to seek out struggling and suffering for their own sake...but if you're engaged in something worthwhile and those feelings arise, then the above quote makes a lot of sense...

Misleading MSN Newsfeed Story Typical of Media Manipulation in Our Times

This morning as I started up my computer the MSN newsfeed flashed up on the screen with its picks for "news" stories.  One of them carried the provocative title "Iowa Head Coach snubs Jill Biden invite with brutal message for First Lady and President".  It comes at the heels of Iowa's NCAA women's championship game loss to LSU, which the Bidens supposedly watched.  Mrs. Biden liked how Iowa played and actually did invite the Hawkeyes coach and team to the traditional White House visit usually reserved to the champion...LSU was naturally congratulated and invited as well.  I wanted to find out the "brutal message" about the "snub", so I read further and discovered that Iowa coach Lisa Bluder graciously thanked Jill Biden, but said that Iowa would stick with tradition and allow the champions to go visit the President and his wife in Washington.  Nothing mean or controversial or personal or political, no "brutal message" or "snub".  Just a classy example of good sportsmanship and deference to the actual team that won it all.  This is just one example of how the way news is presented can created division and rancor among the population.  If you're someone who just goes by headlines on newsfeeds or lead-in comments on news shows to get your information, you're liable to find yourself seriously misinformed at the end of the day.  These news "sources" depend upon viewer and reader interest, and so they cynically devise misleading (or, in this case false) headlines to tease you into committing to the general article or story.  The network news shows pull this stunt as well by hinting at a tantalizing story later on in the show to keep you watching...when it does come up it usually is hardly discussed and isn't anything like how it was promoted earlier.  Nowadays I think the big news story is the news story itself, and how American public opinion is being manipulated by hucksters to become overemotional and more and more dependent on them to get that "high", a feeling that has absolutely nothing to do with learning what's really going on in the world around them...

Weekly Short Stories: 1990 Science Fiction, Part 3

It's Wednesday, and so once again here I am discussing short science fiction from 1990 as it appeared in Gardner Dozois' excellent anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection.  In the summer of that year, nothing in the international news seemed to indicate trouble...in fact, the Soviets had withdrawn from its invasion of Afghanistan and there was a blooming of freedom, democracy and independence in a number of Eastern European countries.  Then, it seemed suddenly, Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein instigated a conflict with oil-rich neighboring Kuwait and invaded it, setting off a chain reaction of alliances, culminating in the United States and several allies, with at least the tacit support of usual adversaries Iran and Syria, amassing troops in Saudi Arabia near occupied Kuwait's border in Operation Desert Shield...to be changed the following January to Desert Storm when the fighting began. There had been a lot of debate in Congress as to whether to authorize action, but the measures to support President Bush (the original one) eventually passed.  Well, back to these own tense times of ours today and my reactions to three more stories...  

THE ALL-CONSUMING by Robert Frazier 

In a rural Central America of the near future, where the economy sucks and the nearby jungle is a morass of pollution and extremely dangerous, toxic and utterly gross mutated life forms, a man arrives with a lot of money to lure a local man, whose outlook on life has turned cynical because of his past unjust treatment, to provide him with the jungle to eat...and he will eat anything!  The vivid imagery in this story is brilliant and completely disturbing...not for the queasy or weak at heart.  Yet can I say that it resolves itself equally brilliantly? Totally impossible, but fun to speculate about...

PERSONAL SILENCE by Molly Gloss

In a nightmare future of perpetual world war...and I mean covering the whole planet...a pacifist journalist literally mutilated from his travel experiences writes about his one-man planet-crossing from different locales, to be serialized in an overseas paper.  He is now in Miffle, Washington...a nondescript little town on the tip of the state's northwest peninsula...as he decides to build a boat to take him to Vancouver a few miles north.  The man letting him camp on his property has a daughter, and she carries with her a disturbing prophecy about herself and the war.  This is more than about plot or characters, rather instead a mood piece about how it might all go down if the fools at the top aren't careful with their lethal toys and egos: in that sense it's scary seeing some of them doing essentially the same kinds of things today...

INVADERS by John Kessel

This satirical tale jumps between three areas: Pizzaro's Spanish invasion of the Incan Empire in 1532, a "soft" invasion of cocaine-dependent aliens in the near-future bringing with them all sorts of panaceas for humanity's problems...and the author essaying out his thoughts on the fictional genre of science fiction.  A light-hearted story about how time travel into the past might be possible...but I saw the Christopher Pine Star Trek movie a few years ago and already know about it...

Next week I continue with reviews of sci-fi tales from 1990...

Paul McCartney's Final Three Wings Albums

From 1976 to 1979 former Beatle Paul McCartney made and released his final three albums with himself, wife Linda and their band Wings: Wings at the Speed of Sound (1976), London Town (1978) and Back to the Egg (1979).  Since I don't actually own these albums, I checked them out on YouTube...which in itself was a bit confusing, since later CD editions of them tended to be enhanced with all sorts of extra tracks not on the original vinyl albums.  So, I went back to Wikipedia and determined the basic songs to listen to.  Of course, I was already familiar with singles hits from the three LPS like Let 'Em In, Silly Love Songs and With a Little Luck.  I listened to all three albums and came away from the experience slightly pleased, but at the same time disappointed...with one very notable exception.  I appreciated that McCartney had the good sense to mix his ballads, rockers, and "middling" tracks to sustain listener interest, and the music was for the most part fun, light stuff...nothing to write home about, though, and just occasionally there would be a stinker like Old Siam, Sir (off Back to the Egg).  My immediate impressions were that I liked Beware My Love and San Ferry Anne from Wings at the Speed of Sound, Backwards Traveller and I've Had Enough from London Town, and Getting Closer, We're Open Tonight, Spin It On and Baby's Request on Back to the Egg...that last mentioned track reminded me a bit of Paul's Honey Pie on the Beatles' White Album.  But the greatest song by far from these three albums...and one that I've not been able to stop playing in my head, was his Speed of Sound love ballad Warm and Beautiful.  To me, it's the best thing I've heard Paul McCartney do since the Beatles and would have been a dominant track on any of their albums had it appeared on them.  After Back to the Egg, McCartney disbanded Wings and went back to "solo" work...but I think that in my next article about his post-Beatles musical career I'll discuss the non-album singles he recorded over the span of the 1970s...

Action Before Self-Belief is a Recurring Podcaster's Theme

Rob Dial is a 36-year old podcaster who specializes in personal development coaching, residing in my sister's home town of Austin, Texas.  Sometimes he gets a little...no, a lot...more materialistic than me about his presentation, showing off the millions he's made and the numerous places to which he's travelled.  Yet he also recognizes that each of us are constituted differently with our own values and sense of what direction we want our lives to go.  So that makes him something more than a multilevel marketing huckster trying to shame me into leaving my steady employment to make it on my own like him, and I respect him for that.  I also appreciate his different approaches to self-improvement, which he cycles back through over the course of weeks, reinforcing a few basic principles.  One of these, from a recent show, is that you don't start anything challenging by having to first believe in yourself...but if you already have that self-confidence that's cool, too.  No, instead, you figure out what you want in as much detail as possible, plan it out in likewise fashion, and then take action...even if you fear failure.  You most like will fail some, and then learn from your mistakes and get better.  And then as you get better, you will begin to believe in yourself.  Determining what you want, how you will get it, acting on it...and finally, the feelings...are the order that Dial presents for getting stuff done...sounds reasonable to me.  I just have to figure out what I want to do...

Just Finished Reading I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

A couple of weeks ago while in Lexington, Kentucky we paid a visit to their Peddler's Market, a regional chain of flea markets presented on a higher, more customer-friendly level.  I found there an old paperback book, I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier, read the back accolade (School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, 1977) and picked it up, having just finished reading it.  It belongs to the "young adult" genre of fiction, and vividly reminded me of what was in vogue in film during that era.  We're talking about films and books full of devious government "deep state" secret and ruthless organizations preying upon innocent Americans, depriving them of their civil rights and even killing them should a decision come down from the top...The Parallax View, Marathon Man and Three Days of the Condor immediately come to my mind.  In I Am the Cheese, a teenage boy, Adam Farmer, finds himself desperately riding his bicycle down treacherous roads in rural Massachusetts to find his father, who he thinks is confined somewhere in southern Vermont.  Interspersed with the narrative of his adventures are sessions of him as a sort of patient/inmate being interviewed by a man calling himself Brint and being fed drugs whenever he gets too anxious as he describes his life, families, friends, enemies, and the special circumstances that had resulted in him being here.  The author presents it all as a mystery...one which is resolved at the book's end.  The question is whether an ordinary citizen can live a life of integrity and decency and, when presented with a tough decision, be able to rely on his government to back him up.  The answer in this story by Cormier, known to have written some pretty depressing books, is a resounding NO...which shouldn't surprise anyone recalling the culture of suspicion and conspiracies popularized in the kinds of movies I mentioned earlier. Somebody I know talked to me about this book many, many years ago but I forgot who...I just know that it came out after I finished high school.  But it's clearly the kind of reading I suspect many, many school kids from that time were assigned in English classes.  I'm not knocking the story per se, but the narrative here...along with the stuff coming out from other sources...fed into what I think eventually caused a groundswell of popular cynicism about government and its intentions: demagogic political outsiders, I believe, like Ross Perot and Donald Trump, would later manipulate that negative feeling to their advantage...

My March 2023 Running and Walking Report

In March I ran enough, about 310 miles, although less than the previous few months because of the week's vacation that saw me traveling through Georgia, Tennesse and Kentucky.  I ran in two of Gainesville's local Depot Parkrun 5K's, on the 11th and 25th, doing these public races more or less for the sake of consistency.  I successfully tried wider, more thickly padded running shoes to protect my toes, but now I have another, better pair that I began wearing yesterday.  As for walking, I didn't do anything extra besides my regular daily routine, which piles up mileage at my warehouse-size facility over the course of my workday. If you've read some of my running posts on this blog, you may already know of marathoner and running popularizer Jeff Galloway, who devised a clever "walk-run" strategy to get people through long-distance races like half-marathons and marathons: alternate "x" minutes of running with "y' minutes of walking...back in 2010 I made a lot of progress training on long outings with a 6:1 running-to-walking ratio.  But now I'm thinking of turning Galloway's strategy on its head and alternating a lot of (fast-paced) walking with short running spikes thrown in. I especially think that this would suit the upcoming (very) hot summer season here in northern Florida...should be interesting to see how it works.  In April, on Saturday the 8th, a race is taking place in Hawthorne at the very place I ran a half-marathon back in January.  I had even considered entering their marathon distance race but have retreated to the half-marathon as my distance, should I choose to run in it...I'm going to check the weather forecast for Saturday before deciding.  On the same morning the Florida Track Club is holding a 5K race, originally slated to be at a park near my home but just recently moved way the hell over to the other side of town.  Well, if I have to go that far then I might as well just keep on driving all the way to Hawthorne for the other race. A couple of days ago I wrote about how three full videos of the New York City Marathon from the perspectives of fast, medium and slow finishers were posted on YouTube...I suggest you watch them, clicking on my links within that article to the three videos.  I'm thinking that with long-distance races my future rests in that third, slowest, video and the strategies I saw in it, especially concerning those walking breaks interspersed throughout the run...   

Quote of the Week...from Clint Eastwood

Baxters over there, Rojos there...me right smack in the middle.  

                                                      ---Clint Eastwood, from the movie A Fistful of Dollars

Akira Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese movie Yojimbo, where a roaming samurai serves as the nameless character Clint Eastwood portrays and the plots of both movies tend to intertwine, culminated in a successful lawsuit by the Japanese filmmaker...but 1964's A Fistful of Dollars is much more widely known and launched Eastwood into superstardom.  Eastwood's unnamed character, a roamer as well, rides into a small western border area town bedeviled by two rival crime families: the liquor traders Rojos and the gun merchants Baxters.  Standing between the two families' houses, out on the balcony with the local bar owner Silvanito (played by José Calvo), Eastwood makes the above remark gesturing first toward the left and then to the right, anticipating what he will do to take advantage of the conflict between the two gangs as he manipulates them to violence against each other.  As for me, I'm not bent on messing with anyone...much less organized criminals...but sometimes I, too, feel as if I am "right smack in the middle" between two polarized groups of people.  Take running, for example.  Ever since I could run as a little kid, I discovered that I could usually do it faster than almost anyone else...for short sprints. I really wanted to be able to sustain that speed in longer runs, but as I went through high school, I discovered that my abilities in that department plateaued at a relatively uncompetitive level on varsity teams.  But distance running as an open social activity began to explode in popularity during the 1970s...still, from 1976 up to 2008 I avoided racing.  Since then, I've participated in about 100 events ranging from 5K (3.1) miles to marathon (26.2 miles) and usually in a pretty decent shape of training and fitness, putting me "right smack in the middle" as good ol' Clint would say, gesturing toward the left at the elite athletes and toward the right at the bottom-finishers (instead of the cinematic Baxters and Rojos). I can further extend this "right smack in the middle" notion to interaction with a number of families either obviously wealthier than me or much poorer. I don't know whether it is me or them with our respective attitudes, but although I am pretty much in the middle, average as far as my material wealth is concerned, I'm either perceived as being poor or rich to these others...with a resulting slant in how I'm seen and judged: but I'm just me, the same person!   I'm a materialist, too, but beyond a certain point with it I've grown to see that ostentatiously flaunting "stuff" and wealth...or, on the other extreme, deploring the material state I'm in and getting defiant and bitter about it...as exercises in futility.  Fortunately, I also know some people, with whom I've had the pleasure to spend time with recently, who either have substantially more material wealth than I or substantially less, and they...God bless them...don't make an issue of the disparity as if I've done anything wrong.  I don't tie my sense of self-worth in with my economic status (and I lived a spartan, monk-like existence for a number of years in my young adult life) and don't appreciate others trying to impose their judgements on me. But maybe that's just me setting my own identity as well "in the middle": move over, Clint...

Three NYC Marathon Full Videos on YouTube

I noticed that YouTube has full-length marathon runs, taken from a runner's vantage point.  I focused on the New York City Marathon and three videos from it, based on three widely different finishing times. (click on each of the following to watch them...I don't know how long they'll be up): (1) 3 hours 13 minutes, (2) 4 hours 46 minutes, and (3) 6 hours 6 minutes  The New York City Marathon is on the first Sunday in November and takes entrants through all five boroughs, starting with Staten Island and passing through Brooklyn (for a long time), Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and then Manhattan again before ending in the southwestern corner of Central Park.  The first (and fastest) video was taken in 2019 by a Chinese-speaking runner with plenty of friends to chat with along the course of the race...that was pretty cool.  In this video most everyone (but not all) were relatively young and clearly in good shape with similar strides and running styles.  The second and third videos were from this past November's race and, to me are the most interesting because they represent approximations of where I was twelve years ago...let me explain.  By the time 2011 rolled around, I was 54 and seriously training for an attempt at a marathon, for the first time in my life.  A couple of times in the previous weeks I had surmounted 20 miles in neighborhood training runs but soon thereafter would hit that fabled "runner's wall" when the energy level would suddenly plummet.  Then, on January 15, 2011, I pulled it off: a 26.6 mile run in 4 hours 23 minutes.  I thought then that I was more than ready for a go at the Ocala Marathon scheduled for Sunday the 23rd...but I developed an IT-band injury near my knee that manifested in the form of pain after about ten miles of running.  I rested myself to get better before the actual race and was fine for the first ten miles again...and then the pain began to reappear and intensify to the point where, until reaching Mile 19, I alternated brief painful runs with walks, which were painless as long as I didn't run.  But for the last 7 miles of the race I had to walk...and slowly at that.  It was a big blow to me because not only would my finishing time be lousy, but I would have to spend weeks healing, meaning that I wouldn't be able to run in Gainesville's Five Points of Life Marathon the following month.  I hobbled over the finishing line at 6 hours 4 minutes...with hardly a soul there to greet me...and after being unceremoniously instructed to get on the sidewalk because traffic was being opened up again.  This experience was totally different in the NYC marathon where boisterous crowds shouted encouragement and congratulations to even the slowest of runners as they approached the end. I enjoyed how the three videos kept showing, naturally, the same landmarks that the runners (and walkers) passed by...kind of reminded me of the movie Groundhog Day as "I" kept running past the 7/11 on 4th and 89th in Brooklyn, down the pretty stretch on Lafayette Avenue with all its trees and crossing the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge from Queens to Manhattan.  If you sometimes run in your own home as I do, watching marathon videos like this is a fun way to at least pretend you're part of the action...but I hear it can be pretty hard getting into some of the more popular marathons since so many apply for them...  

Weekly Short Stories: 1990 Science Fiction, Part 2

Once again here we are, looking at short science fiction from the year 1990 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eighth Annual Collection.  For me, 1990 was very special as it was the year that our son Will was born...I'll never forget him looking up at me as I held him right after birth and he nonchalantly yawned as if it were all just one more day at the office...ho-hum. Melissa had a string of medical issues that year as well, thankfully recovering well from all of them...the hospital was definitely a recurring setting that year.  But back to those stories...

A BRAVER THING by Charles Sheffield

One of the snags about making a significant scientific discovery or invention is the potential harm that people could use it for.  And the one making that discovery must draw upon his or her own sense of morality, which is...as this story reveals...quite subjective and different from person to person.  The protagonist is a young man in England who in boyhood befriends a nearby wealthy family with another boy, a brilliant loner.  It traces their parallel educational paths and diverging friendship to a climactic point that eventually has Nobel Prize implications.  This story has a lot to say and left me thinking about it long afterwards, especially the meaning of its title...

WE SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY by Bruce Sterling

In a tale set around our current time but written in a year that saw the First Persian Gulf War, a young Muslim man from the newly created Arab Caliphate spanning the Middle West flies in to a morally and financially bankrupt America to interview its leading and dangerously charismatic rock star, Tom Boston.  Written from Sayyid's perspective, he intersperses his ongoing narrative with his justifications for his own faith and his fears of charismatic figures (he points out Khomeini, Hitler and Stalin) steering entire populations toward destruction and calamity.  I might have dug this story more had I not lived through the years of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda with its 9/11 attack and the subsequent formation of ISIS with its own charismatic leaders and calls for such a caliphate.  Still an intriguing story...

AND THE ANGELS SING by Kate Wilhelm

A misunderstood but ultimately kindhearted newspaper editor in a northern city encounters a figure lying by the road on a cold rainy night.  Taking it home...the body is unconscious but shivering...he first thinks it is a girl or young woman but then discovers the bizarre nature of her/its body.  Bringing in a woman reporter/photographer coworker to document his discovery, the story progresses to her assessment of him and his life, which turns out to be "spot on" when he makes an important decision at the end...

PAST MAGIC by Ian R. MacLeod

Set in a future Britain where society has broken down to criminal gangs and the ultra-wealthy live sheltered lives in luxury, a man with a declining writing career returns to his old home on the Isle of man where his wealthy former wife introduces him to "their" little daughter...only that child had died ten years earlier in a tragic accident.  The man knows who she really is, though...what he doesn't know is his ex's intentions toward him. With a surprise ending, this story shows the lengths some people will go to enforce their will on others...and God help them if they have the money to do it...

BEARS DISCOVER FIRE by Terry Bisson

A remarkable, sweet and sad tale with an absurd premise embedded within its title.  So, bears discover fire, and you can see the flames as they camp out at night on bushy interstate highway medians where the peculiar berries that they like to eat grow the most.  A man lives bordering a stretch of the interstate and sees them firsthand...but the story is really what happens when his ailing old mother, unhappy in her nursing home, makes an escape.  The imagery presented at the end here is special and unforgettable...

Next week: more about sci-fi short stories from 1990...

Just Finished Reading The Secret, Book and Scone Society by Ellery Adams

Ellery Adams is the pen name of Jennifer Stanley, a prolific writer of mystery novels in the "cozy" subgenre.  I'd already read three of her books, which she tends to divide into ongoing series, and decided to try out a new series: The Secret, Book and Scone Society with Book #1 bearing the same title.  Nora Pennington has very visible burn scars on her face and body from a past traumatic accident that thoroughly traumatized her.  She lives in the small western North Carolina town of Miracle Springs and loves books to the point that she opened her own bookstore there.  Along with other women in town they form a tight circle of self-support as they reveal the secrets of their personal pains to one another.  This ties into the book's title, for Nora and her friend who runs a nearby bakery respectively offer people a book and a scone to draw them in to help alleviate and resolve their personal pains.  But an Ellery Adams novel would not be so without a murder, and a realtor approaches Nora for help.  Before they can meet, though, he dies in an apparent accident...or is it an accident?  Events and clues begin to tie together and soon a real estate company engaged in developing a new subdivision in the area comes under the women's suspicion...and so progresses the story.  I like this series of Adams...at least this first volume of it...better than the previous ones, as well as its very likeable and admirable lead character of Nora.  I should have known that, sooner or later, I would find the right Ellery Adams cozy mystery series for me.  Now on to the next book, although I plan to first make a couple of detours with other books...

About Paul McCartney (and Wings) and His Three Albums from '73-'75

Last week I discussed my impressions of Paul McCartney's first three solo albums after leaving the Beatles in 1970.  I had heard his first two back in that general era, but once he began with his group Wings I lost interest.  My loss, for Wild Life is pretty good in spite of the know-it-all critics running it down...come to think of it, they panned his first two works McCartney and Ram as well, and I especially liked the latter.  It's now so many decades later and I'm just getting around to listening to this extraordinary musical artist's catalog of albums, in their chronological order of release.  This week I listened to Red Rose Speedway (1973), Band on the Run (1974) and Venus and Mars (1975), all recorded under the moniker Wings, but in fact dominated by the former Beatle with the major other contributors being Paul's wife Linda and former Moody Blues front man Denny Laine.  The first of these features his singles hit My Love, which I thoroughly hated them but at least benignly tolerate now. Other than the lively opening track Big Barn Bed, which includes a line from McCartney's Ram (Reprise) track two years earlier, the rest of the tunes on the album are light ballads...even the closing eleven-minute medley.  Now I'm not against ballads, but I don't have to be George Martin to know that you mix the fast and slow tempos on LPs in order to sustain the listener's interest...this always had worked for the Beatles.  The next album, Band on the Run, spotlights the title track as well as Jet (about Paul and Linda's pet dog), both favorite singles releases of mine.  This time he puts in more lively music...I particularly like Side One's Mrs. Vanderbilt and the closing track Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.  As for Venus and Mars, I was more or less blown away by its high quality and energy...plus that almost mystical sense of something special taking place.  I felt this the strongest with the opening tracks for both sides: the Venus and Mars theme song.  It's a shame McCartney didn't expand it into a longer piece, for it has that special kind of old-time Beatles mood that I had been expecting from its members after their disbanding.  I was also taken by the songs Rock Star and Magneto and Titanium Man, both rousing and funny pieces sounding like a tribute to David Bowie's then-ongoing Ziggy Stardust glam rock alter ego.  The slower Love in Song would have fit in quite well on Rubber Soul...in fact, I feel that it is better than several of the songs on that remarkable Beatles album. And then there is Listen to What the Man Says, the album's big single that I enjoyed way back when I lived through '75.  Although I thought that Red Rose Speedway is good, I thought that Venus and Mars' songs are all better.  And Band in the Run is excellent as well.  Next week I'll take a listen to the final three studio albums Paul McCartney recorded with his group Wings...

NCCA Men's March Madness Hoops Now Down to Final Four

With the completion of today's two games, the NCAA men's basketball championship "March Madness" tournament has now come down to the vaunted Final Four, a great milestone in itself for many schools.  Among them are the Florida Atlantic University Owls, based in south Florida in Boca Raton where my beloved father spent his last days in 2013.  This was their last year in Conference USA...they're jumping later this year to the American Athletic Conference.  Neither conference gets much national attention or respect, so it surprised many to see this team, seeded only #9 in their region, win it to advance to next Saturday's semifinal round with a very close and exciting game against Kansas State, 79-76.  Although I was rooting for the Owls, I don't understand why the Wildcats, down by only three points in the game's closing seconds, had two different possessions but didn't shoot for a three-pointer...that must have really frustrated their fans.  Along with FAU, Connecticut advanced to the final showdown with a complete thrashing of Gonzaga, 82-54...their pinpoint passing and positioning on offense is amazing to behold.  The Huskies to me are the strongest team in this year's tournament although they were only seeded #5 in their region...not remotely even one close game so far in the six they've won to get to this point.  Those were Saturday's games.  Today's contests pitted San Diego State against Creighton and Miami against Texas.  By the way, you might take note that all of the top seeds were eliminated in earlier rounds and Texas was the only #2 seed left with this weekend's games...none of the brackets filled out at the tournament's start came close to predicting this scenario!  In today's games San Diego State somehow managed to outlast Creighton 57-56 although neither seemed to shoot very well. In the other "my" Miami Hurricanes were 13 points well into the second half and didn't seem to have an answer to the Longhorns' offense, but they managed to storm back and win it 88-81.  So half the Final Four is from South Florida.  Florida Atlantic plays San Diego State in one game and it's Miami vs. Connecticut in the other.  Whoever wins that latter contest should be the favorite to win the championship game. I'm looking forward to following the two semifinal games next Saturday, but I'll be at work when the championship game takes place Monday evening.  At this juncture, to me Connecticut should be the strong favorite to win it all, but my heart lies with the Florida teams.  CBS is covering the games on TV...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Having inculcated the "atomic" habit of getting up earlier in the morning, I decided to use it today to run the Depot Parkrun 5K.  This Gainesville running event takes place every Saturday morning at 7:30 at the city's Depot Park, just south of downtown.  It's free...you only need to register at their site online and they will give you some barcodes to print out.  Take one of them to the race for them to scan along with the plastic token they hand you right when you finish, and they will scan both to record and later post your times.  I signed up early in 2019 and have now run twelve races there...my times, though, have never approached my best 5K finishes in other races from earlier years: hey, I'm getting older, for crying out loud!  You know you're getting along in years when you look at the race results and try to figure out how far you are from being the oldest finisher. Today I knew it was going to be a bit challenging since I was wearing my heavier (but more thickly padded) Air Monarch shoes while the combination of 69 degrees and 94% humidity mimicked the awful conditions last October when I struggled through the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon then.  I decided to try a faster pace than the previous Parkrun earlier this month but wasn't interested in setting any personal records...just maintain some continuity to keep in touch with public racing.  The going was rough, but as in most of my other races I ended up running negative splits, gradually picking up my pace while at the same time I was gradually feeling crappier under the conditions.  I finished with a time of 33:19, far from my best but quite satisfactory and 43 seconds faster than two weeks ago here.  On Saturday, April 8 there are two different races being held in the area: a 5K close to my neighborhood and a half-marathon starting and ending in Hawthorne.  I'll either run one, the other, or neither...no clue yet as to which one of these options I'll take.  Click HERE for today's Depot Parkrun 5K results,,.