On The RUUUUNNNNNN! - 2/5/9

3.5 mi(ish) / 42 min(ish) / 12 mpm(ish)

That's the view of the parking lot where I have recently been parking before my run at O-Dark-Thirty. Heh, yeah. You noticed there aren't any other cars there too, huh?

A milestone of sorts has been reached. I am now running without walking breaks. Which is nice since now I don't have to keep resetting my stopwatch every 4 minutes.

Sunday was my first all-run day - 30 min straight (I always start with a 5 min warm-up walk and end the same way). On Monday, my legs felt tight for the first time - as if they had been through an actual workout.

So the first of my goals has been reached - run 30 min without walking and without ending up on the injured list. Next goal is to increase my total morning run to 60 min (I can't really justify spending more than 60 minutes a weekday on a run).

So my plan is to add one minute each run until we get to 60. Tuesday I ran for 41 min and on Wednesday my legs actually hurt a little for the first time.

This morning I ran 42 minutes and for the first time my legs sort of hurt while I was running. It seems like more of a muscle hurt than a bone / ligament hurt so I think I am okay . . . but with my history of injuries, it could be anything . . .

Today's podcast? This American Life.

The Prologue is pretty funny and worth a listen.

Teaser:

Dave Hill worked at a homeless shelter in New York. He liked the job—even the most menial parts. After about a year, he’s asked to become supervisor, which is exciting for him, because he’s never been in charge of anything before. But on his very first shift, something goes terribly wrong, without Dave even knowing about it. When he comes in the next day, a co-worker explains that the place isn’t quite what Dave thought it was. For one thing, most of his colleagues are crack addicts.

Act 1 is Sadly Fascinating and I have much to say about it - how most might look on this community as ignorant or worse but how we might do well to examine the underpinnings of our own beliefs and ask if they are any more defensible just because our beliefs are more widely held - all expressed in a constructive rather than deprecating way, of course . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah . . . but, meh.

It's worth half-a-listen.

Teaser:

An accountant, Bruce Wisan, is hired by the state of Utah to clean up a very complicated mess in a complicated place: Short Creek, home to hundreds of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—or FLDS, which practices polygamy. The community had been run by the notorious Warren Jeffs . . . Jeffs had been in charge of the FLDS church, and also of the giant trust which church members paid into all their lives. But when Jeffs became a fugitive, he began to mismanage the $112 million trust, and so the Utah attorney general stepped in, giving Wisan control. Wisan had plans: He was going to modernize the town utilities, improve the roads, and most important, give people titles to their homes, which under Jeffs were owned and controlled by the church trust. But Wisan quickly ran into an enormous problem: The majority of people in Short Creek would have nothing to do with him or his ideas.

Just in case you weren't sure that This American Life is totally in the tank for President McDreamy, check out Act 2.

The good stuff is in ACT 3 where they take a look at the economic philosophy driving the Obama Presidency.

Teaser:

Our crack economics duo, Producer Alex Blumberg and NPR International Economics Correspondent Adam Davidson, on how . . . John Maynard Keynes, is about to take over the American economy. President Obama's new stimulus plan relies on Keynes’ theory, which says that government can spend its way out of a downward economic spiral. Alex and Adam explain why this might actually be the first ever test of this very old idea.

=editorial note=

I started this post this morning about 6am but got interrupted. I am now finishing it up at 5pm and my legs are definitely sore . . . good sore . . . (I think)