25 May 2011

Hiatus

Granted there's something odd about writing two posts the day you are mentioning that you're on blog hiatus.  Still, a bit of updating here in promise of things to come.

I haven't been napping the entire time that I've been silent here.  Quite the opposite, really.  One part being the running that I just posted.  Another, and more interesting to the usual content of this blog is that I've been doing some science at home.  Even some at work as well.  The thing is, it takes enough concentration and concerted effort to do something novel at home, after a full day at work, that I don't get over to the blog.

The good news is that, knock wood, I'll be submitting an interesting paper that I've been working on at home for professional publication shortly.  There are at least 3 stories involved in it.  Unlike most scientific work I've done or been involved with, this piece has a well-defined starting point and history.  The three will be the origin of the idea, carrying out the research at home, and what happened in/with the submission process.  Note that I'm talking about submitting the paper; whether it gets published there or elsewhere, and what happens afterwards, will be a different story still.

A couple of interesting-to-here notes are also getting started at work.  We'll see what happens with them.  In both cases, the 'what is climate?' question is major. 

Setting Goals in Running

One of the things I've been doing while on hiatus (which will, barring a couple of exceptions, continue for a while yet) is getting back to my running.  (Yes, yet again I am getting back to running.)

Now that, knock wood, I am in reasonable health, it's time to be improving on that by getting active.  Running is my prime way of getting active.  Even though there's no logical or physical requirement, if I'm not running some, I also don't do other good things like lift some weights, do some rehabilitation exercises, do some core strengthening, and so on.  So it's more important for me to run than if I were otherwise more virtuous.

At the end of April, my youngest son gave me an excuse that will help me with my goal setting process.  Some people do fine with 'just do it'.  Many people, and I'm one, do better with having a goal.  My major goal is to complete that half marathon race next year the same day as my son.  I'd say with him, but with little training he ran a time that I'll probably need a couple years of steady training to reach!  So that's a nice goal itself, but how to get from here -- almost no running or other aerobic exercise in the previous 6 months -- to there -- running 13.1 miles (21.1 km) straight through?