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So Friday was a little bit insane.  Because it’s kind of a crazy time at work I’ve had to sort of condense the first two weeks of my half marathon training plan, which meant that on Friday afternoon I had to pick between speed work & another 3 miler.  Given the difficulties of dealing with speed work on a sparsely marked course, I went for the 3 miler.  Being a bit crunched for time & knowing that I tend to run the 1st split slower than the 2nd pretty universally, though (or maybe for some other ridiculous reason that I can’t remember now), I decided to try to run the 1st split fast enough to make them even.  Somehow that resulted in me setting my second PR in 2 weeks (22:30, which beat the previous PR of 24:45 from last Tuesday, which beat the previous previous PR of 25:26 from 1/20).

Heh.  At some point I guess I’ll have to give up these little sprints & actually start putting up some miles again.  Which I suppose will get more practical when work ends (or gets significantly lighter, at least) a couple of weeks from now.

  
And now, I stop procrastinating & go do some work.

So, on July 13th, I’m running my 1st half marathon, the Los Gatos Jungle Run.  (For y’all non-running types, that’s 13.1 miles.)  It will be the longest distance I’ve ever raced.  Given that fact, I figured it might behoove me to do a little *actual* training between now & then.  Today was day 1 of 56, a quick 3 mile jaunt.

I admit that in the last couple of weeks I’ve been slacking a bit, but before then I was doing 6-8 mile runs at least a couple of times a week; even after taking some time off, it seems to have made a real difference.  “Weeeeee!!” said my cardiovascular system, “3 miles is eeeeeeeaasy!”  In the end, I ran it faster than my last 5k race time, and I wasn’t even really trying.  This bodes well, methinks…

I’m on the verge of adding this book to my favorites of all time (ie from about the 9th grade on), which includes Exodus by Leon Uris, The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, and Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy. I really can’t explain why, but I loved this book.

What’s it about? Well, that’s sort of the trouble. It’s hard to explain in words what it’s about. And as strange as it may sound, I don’t think “what it’s about” really has a lot to do with why I like it so much. I think it’s more the style of writing, which is a little dream-like and existential. But, in order to satisfy your curiosity, I’ll tell you that it takes place in 1980s Tokyo and centers around a 30 year old Japanese man whose marriage is beginning to disintegrate. Suddenly mildly strange events begin to befall him. There are vague, troubling, and often surreal connections between these things, sometimes bordering on the supernatural. As one reviewer put it, “Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution.”

In spite of the fact that it’s one of my all-time favorites, I don’t think it’s a book I would go around recommending to everyone, either. I have a hunch that the bits that make it absolutely delectable to me are something of an acquired taste, and likely to be off-putting to a lot of other people. What can I say? I don’t like bland books. This is anything but bland.

So yeah. If you’re in the mood for something a little twisted and existential, give it a shot. In the next few months, I’m also planning on reading some of his others, including A Wild Sheep Chase, After Dark, and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the Word.

Sometimes being a geometry teacher is awesome.

(I made this, btw.)

…Do not attempt to use the credit/debit card swiper thing TOGETHER! Only weeping can result. Instead, get a tandem bicycle or something.