Month: January 2019

Running For One Hour

In the summer of 2016 I didn’t think I’d ever be able to run for 15 minutes straight. Last fall I ran a half-marathon in two hours and 16 minutes. I’m not fast, but I’ve got stubborn legs.

After three weeks off in December (after an 800 mile year), I’m getting back into the swing of things with running. I’m taking it slow, as I don’t want to rush and hurt myself, but being able to hit one hour of running without stopping has been a major milestone for me. And I’ve done it twice in a week.

Running for that long is almost meditation. It means no social media, fretting over my to-do list, or checking emails. It’s an hour of not trying to figure things out, or get into several conversations.

One hour of running is wonderful.

Ditching Medium

Something always felt off about Medium. I’ve tried a few times to write there, but it never stuck for me. One of my favorite sites, Signal Vs. Noise, moved there a few years ago, and it just never felt the same. I know they had great success there, but I saw today they’re leaving.

Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

Signal v Noise exits Medium

Later.

Bleak Morning Runs

It was cold, wet, and dreary – perfect conditions for my second run of the year. Still being cautious, with plenty of stretching, and just taking it easy, but I made it to the top of this hill and another without stopping.

Not fast, but I didn’t stop.

I think that’s a wonderful thing about running, that you can always slow down. Like, you’re allowed to just jog, shuffle, trot along. It’s still moving, and really what counts is just being out there.

Of course I want to compare this run to another time I did this route. Am I faster, have I lost my fitness after just three weeks of rest? Will I ever hit my goal of 1000 miles in 2019?!

There were a thousand photos I wanted to take on this run. Surrounded by empty corn field, crows on power lines overhead, houses sitting silent on top of a hill, fog rolling through the valley.

If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me 
What’s the point of doing anything?

from St. Vincent’s ‘Digital Witness’

So I just remember that if I only took one photo from each run in 2018, that’d be 167 photos. At the end of this year, this month, this week, I should have enough photos from my adventures.

MUSIC MONDAY: Deerful

Sweet melodies and lo-fi beeps and boops get me every time, so I’m stoked I came across Emma Winston via the Uses This website.

If you’ve been keeping up lately, you know I’m getting back into music writing a bit, so of course I’ve been trying to learn how other people are making music.

 I write about 90% of my music on a Teenage Engineering OP-1, which is a kind of synthesiser/sampler/sequencer/miniature-four-track-workstation hybrid with its own teeny-tiny elf-sized speaker and a 16-hour battery life. It’s made by some awesome nerds in Sweden, and I lived on baked beans for a month so I could buy it and I don’t regret having done so for even one second. It’s amazing, and addictive, and limited, and powerful, and inspiring, and it goes everywhere with me.

Enna Winston at Uses This

I Stopped Looking

Sometimes the best ideas come about when you’re not looking for the best ideas.

Sonic Cathedral, meanwhile, came about by accident after a couple of pints. Nat Cramp had been running a club night of the same name – jokingly billed as “the night that celebrates itself” – for about 18 months when he got chatting to Mark Gardener, frontman of veteran British shoegaze band Ride. “One night, after a show at the Bodega in Nottingham, I spontaneously asked if he’d let me release a 7-inch single for him and he said yes,” Cramp remembers. “I had no idea how to make that happen and I don’t remember having any particular ambitions to run a record label either. I’d just had a couple pints and thought I’d chance my arm!” Almost 15 years later, the label is still going strong.

From NME’s ‘How to run a small independent record label‘

I love this so much, especially these two parts:

“Came about by accident.”

“Nat Cramp had been running a club night of the same name – jokingly billed as “the night that celebrates itself” – for about 18 months.”

That “by accident” is the sort of thing we don’t hear enough. Instead it’s “I FIGURED THIS OUT” or “I FOUND A WAY.” And the fact that Cramp was doing a club night “for about 18 months.” Yeah, that’s a year and a half. Of “just” doing something.

For a long time I struggled with what I should do, or what was next? I kept strangling the universe for the answer, when actually letting go provided the answer.

And then, by chance, this video hit me square in the face tonight. Before, when asked the “so what do you do” question, I would spew a bunch of internet jargon and editorial speak, and zzzzzzz….

If I would have paid attention to work I was already doing “on the side,” and seeing that it scaled, was sustainable, and profitable, I could have started Close Mondays years ago.

For me, it just took the exhaustion of running the 10 mile Broad Street Run in May 2018 . I was fried physically, and mentally I wasn’t far behind. I had to put Skull Toaster (my baby at the time) on hold, and that’s when it hit me.

When I was a bit broken.

It didn’t come from meetings, cursing the heavens, playing around with some numbers on a note pad… it took being completely exhausted for the message to get through.

Like Cramp above, “just” doing a club night for a year and a half led to the next thing. Developing a running “practice” got me here. Because when running, I can’t scroll through social media for the answers. There’s no time for pity parties when running. There’s focus, and distraction, both at the same time.

I could focus on the running when running, and thinking about running, and planning for races. And running was also a distraction, something that pulled me away from the idea that if I just looked hard enough the answer would come.

First Run of 2019

It was about 50F on New Years Day, so I set off for the Paulinskill Valley Trail in Blairstown, NJ, a 25+ mile trail that was perfect for my first run since resting most of December (after hitting 801 miles for all of 2018).

I was up until 4am the night before, ringing in the new year with some lovely friends in NJ, and I fueled for this run with a few adult beverages, donuts, and nacho cheese deep. Perfect.

The trail was flat as a pancake, and just as spongy since it had been raining. My shoes got muddy, and my bones creaked a little, but overall this was a comfortable, easy run, just getting the body used to running again.

It was just about 30 or 40 minutes, nice and easy, out and back. Once I hit the waterfall at Paulina Lake (above), I ran back on Rt 94. I bore easily covering the same ground, and I really wanted to get a feel for running on the road again, and it felt great.

The best part was just being outside, able to trot along, and feel the legs moving again. This was certainly a nice setting to get back to that.