Texas and Last Meals for Murderers

I have to make a startling admission: I listen to NPR on the way to and from work and occasionally other times when I'm in the car.  I'm not proud of it but it is one of the few sources of interesting news stories on the radio.  I like to have my mind stimulated and am more than happy to draw different conclusions from the facts than the commentators, but that's the topic for another post...

... what really caught my attention today was a story about Texas and the death penalty.  The story was about the practice of giving inmates on the way to execution a chance to request food for their last meal.  Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist sentenced to death for a hate killing, requested a preposterous final meal.  Now the state of Texas wants to stop the tradition of a final meal request.  A cook who had been preparing the final meals had offered to continue the practice, even to the point of offering to pay for them himself and the state of Texas refused, saying that it wasn't about the money, they just wanted to stop doing it. The cook even pointed out that the inmates on death-row rarely get anything resembling the food they requested, as the food has to already be available to the prison.

This got me thinking about whether I think that this practice should continue.  One argument against the final meal request is that the criminals had no such consideration for their victims but like the cook, I dismiss this by pointing out that society shouldn't take the position of treating murderers like their victims: we're better than that.  I would also point out that as a society we have gone to great pains to make execution as painless as possible which I would point out is an effort that most murderers don't make.

Instead, the cook says that society should continue to show compassion as a "civilized society and Christian nation".  Although I don't think it will probably make much of an impression on the majority of the killers who have committed crimes heinous enough to warrant the death penalty, I so think that it is the right thing to do to show kindness to ones enemies, even in this relatively small way.  Nietzsche wrote, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you" and the best way to avoid becoming like those on death-row is to remind ourselves of our humanity by showing compassion.


-Lane

In Like a Lion, Out Like... Well, You Know

Running: I ran 7.33 miles this week in 53:46 (7:21/mile).  It wasn't hard because I only ran one day (Sunday).  I decided to take it (very) easy this week because I was sick on Monday and Tuesday and wanted to make sure that I was feeling good enough before I started running again so that I didn't reset my recovery.

Writing: Didn't write another word.  I should have written more, I just have some sort of block about writing more in the month of September.  I am accepting failure on the 50,000 words in one month challenge, but I am going to keep the beginning of the story around in the hopes that I'll pick it up again and write some more.  I don't think that it was a complete failure because I think that I learned a bit about writing and I'm impressed with the amount that I did write.

So what's next?  I am going to break my 5k PR on November 19th.  It will be very difficult.  Everyone I've mentioned it to has said so.  I ran my current personal best (16:23.79) on a track while I was in probably the best shape I've ever been in.  I have sketched out an ambitious plan for the next 9-10 weeks and am determined to put the work in and take a shot at running under 16 minutes.  Then, depending on the results, I'll be running either a 5k or 10k on Thanksgiving.  And then?  I don't know.  I'll probably start trying to get into longer races.  Until then, I'm taking things one step at a time (no pun intended).  Only 491.3 miles until glory.

-Lane

Training, Week of 6/18 and Novel In a Month Update

Another dual-purpose post.  Hopefully I'll stop taking the easy way out pretty soon.  As far as running goes, this week was another low-ish week, mileage wise.  I ran 32.9 miles in 3:58:37 (7:16/mile average) which doesn't really tell the whole story.  As usual I started the week off well, on pace to run about 50 miles and even had a decent race on Wednesday (the local race for the United Way, I won in 16:59 and set a new course record).  When the weekend rolled around, social commitments made it very easy not to run.  I did get in a 3-miler with Dan and Alex which was awesome.  I miss having anyone to run with and I miss running with them especially.

As far as the novel, progress has stalled.  I didn't write a single word this week.  I will be attempting to restart both my running and my writing starting tomorrow (Monday) in an effort to have a strong finish to the month of September.

Training, Week of 9/11; Novel in a Month Update Super-post

Running this week:  I started off strong, but fell apart over the weekend, taking Friday and Sunday off.  I ended the week with 37.7 miles in 4:36:35 (7:21/mile average).  Not exactly a dumpster week but not great.  Brianna and I headed to Worcester for a medieval fair and didn't get much sleep over the weekend so although I have time to run on Sunday, I decided not to push myself too hard while I'm tired.  I've been invited to run with some of the engineers who run at work, so I'll probably start joining them at lunch, which will take some logistical thought in order to get my work done and run and not be at work all day.  Should be a nice change and will hopefully serve as extra motivation to get out and put the miles in.

The next corporate 5k is on Wednesday.  I should place highly and will need to run pretty quickly to help my team in its rivalry against the local shoe store.  I'm looking forwards to it.

Novel in a Month:  I'm behind.  I skipped a couple days and I need to be at 18,333 words to be on pace at the end of the night; at this point, I only have 10,707.  This means that if I don't get any writing done today (it's not looking promising...) then I will have to increase my average to 2069 words/day.  I don't know if I can do that, but I'm going to keep trying and we'll see how many words I can get in before the end of the month.  I have also decided that if I finish the story before the end of the month, then I'll stop writing.  I am 20% of the way through and I haven't finished setting the story up, so I don't know if I'll finish early after all.

-Lane

Whew, What a Week.

The last week was positively crazy... It all started because I went home to Vermont last weekend. I decided to try flying instead of driving since it would get rid of 600 miles and 9 hours of time in the car. The plan was to leave directly from work to the airport on Friday night and fly home, spend the whole long weekend at home, fly back to NYC on Tuesday morning, and go straight to work.

The plan worked fine right up to the "go straight to work" part. I landed at the airport at 7:30, and intended to take a bus service that runs straight from JFK airport to Grand Central Station in Manhattan (3 blocks from where I work). I went out to get the bus and it wasn't scheduled to leave until 8:00. I didn't consider this too much of a problem, given my estimate of about a 1 hour ride, I'd still get to work at about 9. Later than I wanted, but by no means late. What I didn't know was that before we actually left JFK, we had to go to every other terminal at the airport to pick people up. So, by the time we actually left the airport, it was 8:30. Additionally, the ride was expected to take about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Add the 10 minute walk to my office, and it was going to be 10:00 by the time I got to work.

From there, everything went as planned and I did arrive at work at 10:00, but I felt absolutely dead. It was only 10am, but I already felt like going to bed. So, the first take away for me from this was: I AM NEVER DOING THAT AGAIN! By the time I got to work, I had been up since 4:00am, flown on a plane, sat on a bus for 2 hours, and ended up 2 hours late for work. I figure that if I drive home I can roll into my apartment at 11pm on a Monday night and be in bed by midnight. I would then wake up at my normal time and get 6 hours of sleep (the same I got before flying), get to work on time, and feel much better through the day.

Anyway, that trip set my week up for a long one. Before arriving for work the first day of the week, I was already exhausted. To add to it, my parents had some business that they needed to deal with in NYC on Thursday, so they came down Wednesday night and crashed at my apartment. This again decreased my sleep and threw off my getting ready for work routine. So, by the time Friday rolled around I was completely wiped and ready to crash. And crash I did. My sleep total for the weekend is 22 hours. I feel much better though.

Here's hoping that this week is a little calmer.

~Alex

Training, Week of 9/4

This was a fairly good week in terms of training.  I had hoped to run all seven days, but didn't get out for a run on Wednesday because I procrastinated while allowing excuses to pile up until I finally decided to bag the idea of a run.  I'm a little disappointed, but in spite of that, I still managed to run 50.3 miles in 6:03:07 (7:14/mile average).

The Thursday Night Track work-out was a good one for me, a 25-minute tempo run.  I have always liked tempo runs on the track because they allow me the opportunity to know exactly how quickly I am moving and to break the effort up into pieces that are trivially easy to complete by themselves so I don't ever think of the effort in its entirety.  I planned on running a little faster than 6:00/mile pace which I translated into running 200m sections in just under 45 seconds.  In this way, I only thought about running for 45 seconds at a time.  Using this strategy, I averaged 5:48/mile for a total of 7k in 25:11.  There were a couple other factors that helped me to have such a great workout:

• The other people participating in the workout helped a lot.  Though there weren't any that could keep up with me, it eased the toughness of the workout to be able to pass people almost continuously through the workout.  I lapped the entire field at least twice, with only a single exception (he was lapped once).  As the group that attends the workouts are diverse in age, ability, and training goals, there were options to finish the workout at 15 and 20 minutes, and once those people had finished their encouragement also helped me to continue.
• My pacing was extremely conducive to having a good workout.  Although I had a couple quick laps at the beginning of the workout due to general excitement, I settled into a pace which gradually accelerated throughout the whole workout.  It is counter-intuitive, but accelerating when my legs are very tired helps me to continue at a quick pace.

Cooling-down from a tempo run that has gone well is difficult because I usually feel so good I still want to run really quickly, though I was able to hold myself back and only run 7:01/mile pace!

I had Friday off from work this week, which I decided to use for my long run.  Though I was a little apprehensive about running the tempo and long run back-to-back, I decided that Friday was my best bet and planned out a run that was 17.7 miles long.  Unfortunately the weather was quite a bit warmer than I expected and my stomach was upset so I cut the run short to "only" 15 miles.  It still served the purpose that I intended so I was happy.

I did leave my nice, cushy Nike LunarGlide 2's in Vermont so I have been doing all of my running in the New Balance Minimuses.  I think this has resulted in some extra soreness so I'm looking forwards to being able to add the Nike's back into the shoe rotation.  All in all, a good week and I'm looking forward to maintaining the momentum into the next week!

The Challenge Continues (Part 1)

I began the challenge of writing an entire 50,000 word work of fiction on the beginning of the month, intending to finish by the end of September (giving me 30 days).  You can read more about that here.  I have done pretty well so far, reaching 5,029 words in 3 days (I have not begun for today, I suppose this is a form of procrastination).  Some things I have noticed:

• My writing style leaves much to be desired.  I write in the same style that I speak and I don't think that I'm very good at communicating ideas clearly all the time.  It is definitely not the same as the books that I have read and it's not different in a good way.
• Writing 1667 words per day is a lot harder and more time consuming than I expected.  I was surprised when it took me two and a half hours the first night.  I thought that I had this great story all thought out but I've decided to let it flow and that's been taking more time than I anticipated.
• As with time, I also find that there are more words than I expect the longer I wait in between checking the word count.  Perhaps having it so available at the bottom of the screen is not a great benefit.
• Getting ahead is not going as well as I expected.  I find that while I'm in the exposition phase of the story, I'm not super excited to decide what happens next and so I'm quite ready to be done when the daily milestone rolls around.  Hopefully when I get to the action the writing as well as the story pick up.

I have changed the paper to be 8.5x5" so that I don't have to look at quite so much blank space when I begin each page and it seems to make the writing go a little faster.  I tried to explain why I'm doing this but I couldn't really come up with a good reason.  I'm not trying to make a quality story, just a quick one and I guess it's just for fun.  Maybe I'll learn something from it?

-Lane

The Challenge Begins

A little while back, I issued a challenge to my best friend and associate blogger, Alex.  He politely declined, despite my best efforts to goad him into accepting.  Nevertheless, I have decided to forge on ahead and undertake this task of Herculean proportions:  I will write a 50,000 word work of fiction starting today and ending on or before September 30^th, 2011.  Furthermore, I will (as stated in the original challenge) start the work off with the sentence “He could not grow a very good beard”.  I will be focusing on quantity of words over quality of story (as you might imagine, 50,000 words is a lot to try to create in only 30 days).  I will be trying to create an interesting story, though I have not decided how and if I will distribute said story.

I have been thinking a lot about how to accomplish such a momentous task.  My strategy is thus: I will attempt to write between 2000 and 1700 words per day.  The minimum average daily word count is 1,667 and so if I can stay at the top of that range (close to 2000) I will be able to accrue a cushion so that I can take days off from writing if need be.  This will be something that I will be trying to avoid but sometimes life gets in the way of hobbies (just look at my ability to run with anything resembling consistency.

I have also done some thinking and outlining of the story, though the proof is obviously in the pudding.  I could start and decide to take the story in an entirely different direction as I originally thought as the characters begin to develop (and hopefully, take on a life of their own).  At least for now, I know where I am standing and in which direction I am facing.  I don’t want to give anything away, but I will be writing a science fiction piece.  Writing entertaining stories has never been my strong suit but this is mostly for my own enjoyment so the story will be what it is, however good that might be.

Wish me luck!


-Lane


Edit: Day 1 is finished.  I started around 9:00pm after procrastinating.  It took me quite a bit longer than I expected but I wrote 1,729 words in about 2.5 hours.  Hopefully when the story gets rolling it will be quicker!  I have also learned the cost of procrastinating and will work harder to avoid it in the future.