Quick Hits

A couple of quick things:

We Met Our Goal!

Bark for Life is Saturday, and our team (Viva La Duck) reached our goal! We set what I thought was a pretty lofty goal of raising $1,000, and through the donations of SO many generous people we surpassed the goal.

Thank you so much to everyone who donated in honor of Erik! Now just come out on Saturday and walk with us! Dogs not necessary! Come walk!

Positive Thinking

I've always been a bit of an optimist (with the exception of sports for the past few years). I generally believe things will work out, and, for the most part, things usually DO work out for me. I've been accused of just having incredibly good luck, and maybe that's true.

But maybe good things happen because I expect them to happen. If you're waiting for bad shit to happen, bad shit will happen. Guaranteed. It's just the way things work.

So I've really tried to focus on thinking positively about as much as I can. Don't get me wrong -- sometimes shit just happens. But for the most part, for the past couple weeks anyway, I've felt better about myself, about life in general. I try not to dwell on negative things because, really, when has that ever helped?

I resolved to think positively when I was laid off back in April, and I had a very relaxing month at home with my dog, living off my severance pay. And then the first job I really applied to came through and has been an unbelievable opportunity and experience.

There really is something to this positive thinking thing. I've specifically been applying it to the Yankees recently (so sue me), and it's been working remarkably. As you may remember, it's been a pretty dark five years in Yankeeland. I spent much of that time just waiting for the next thing to go wrong, and it never missed a beat. Something always went wrong.

This time, I decided that was unproductive. And look where that's got me? I'm going to go home tonight and watch Game 1 of the 2009 World Series!

LET'S GO!

That's all I've got for now.
-BG

He's racing and pacing and plotting the course

So here's the deal:

I ran 10 miles yesterday. My knees feel like they now lack cartilage, ligaments and tendons, and, instead, are filled with jelly. Don't be alarmed. The same thing happened last week after I ran nine miles. Things returned to normal with a day or two, and I was fine.

The half-marathon is now less than a week away. Incredible. I started training in the beginning of August, and I remember struggling to get through that first three-mile run. Well, not really struggling -- I could definitely complete it. But I walked more than I wanted to, and I took longer that I hoped.

And yesterday I finished 10 miles in 115 minutes. I'm slower than a 10-minute mile pace, but I don't feel too badly about that because on the usual three-mile trails I run, at least a mile of it is straight up hill -- steep hills, too -- which means probably close to 3.5 miles of the 10 I ran on Sunday was all up hill.

So I feel good heading into the race on Sunday. It's my first (and doesn't saying "my first" clearly imply the presence of a "second"? I'm not sure I'm ready to think about this yet, *sigh), and I've read it's not a good idea to set up a strict time goal for your first. With that said, I really want to finish in 2.5 hours. Obviously, I'd love to be faster than that, but let's be realistic. Before this training, the most I'd ever run with any regularity was between two and three miles.

I'm excited though. The past few weeks of long runs really showed me I could actually do it, so that was nice.

This week though, rest. I don't care if the training calls for four-mile, three-mile and two-mile runs this week. NOT GONNA DO IT. Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

I'd rather my legs and knees be fresh for Sunday, so I will be doing my usual twice- to three-times-a-week strength training and plenty of stretching and icing -- just in case.

Less than a week to go, and I'm pumped! LET'S GO!

The World

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

~Carl Sagan