Chez Louise

5K Baby!!

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Sun, 6 Jul 2008 19:15:20 -0400

It's been a month since I started jogging, and today, I actually ran 5K continuously, i.e., with no walking breaks. It took 39 minutes, which is geriatrically slow, but that's 39 minutes of continuous running! Actually that in itself is another first. I don't think I've ever run for 39 minutes straight before in my entire life. I actually felt surprisingly good for most of it. I had a giant stitch in my side for the last 10 minutes or so of that, but I'm quite proud of myself for pushing through it and making it to the 5k mark.

I can hardly believe it, actually! I can now lay to rest the notion I developed as an 11-year-old that 3K was the max I could do, and that it takes half an hour and a lot of pain to go that distance. And to think that a month ago, it was all I could do to run a whole minute before I would need to stop and take a 2-minute walking break.

So 2 birds with one stone today. My first 5k, and my longest-ever continuous run, at 39 minutes. Yay!!!

I thought it was going to take two months to get to this point, but it only took one. This PR should also be quite easy to beat with a bit more practice. (Can you believe that the really good runners can do a 5K twice as fast?) Anyway, now it's time to set a new goal. I think a far-off goal would be to complete the Torshavn Marathon in 2009 (don't ask why Torshavn, of all places, bit of a long story), but I'm pretty sure I need an in-between goal, so I'll have to think about that for a bit. Off the top of my head, I would like to run a sub-30 minute 5K, and I would also like to start thinking about a 10K somehow, but I'm not sure about the timeframe.

In the meantime, I'm going to spend the day being proud of myself for getting my sedentary, allergic-to-running self this far, and for proving to myself that I can overcome limits I put on myself if I just get myself into a new "I can do it" frame of mind.

Woohoo! Time to take on the world!

Top 100 Books

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 19:40:00 -0400

So I got this from my friend's blog...

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

[Louise: I had to add another category, i.e., books I have partially read, but have not finished or have only read in parts; I've put these in square brackets.]

Wait, added another markup: (M) if I've seen a movie adaptation. I also didn't bother to mark books I hadn't heard of with "??", since there would be a lot of them!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (M)
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien] (M)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (M)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (M)
6 [The Bible]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Golden Compass
Subtle Knife
Amber Spyglass

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (M)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (M)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (M)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um, doesn't #36 belong within #33??)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (M)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (M)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 [Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas]

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (M)

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (M)

So, I'm doing slightly better than average; 8 books! There are a lot of interesting books in this list, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to make it through them all. Not that I'd really want to, anyway. There are some I have no intention of ever reading.

It was fun to go through this list though!

Day 1 of Running

noreply@blogspirit.com (Louise) — Sat, 7 Jun 2008 12:46:55 -0400

Well, I bit the bullet and decided to try to get into the habit of running. I've tried this before and failed, so I don't know if this will work better, but we'll see!

Running has never actually been a forte of mine at any point in my life. In grades 5 and 6 I went to an elementary school where gym class was actually a mass 3k run every other day. I used to really hate these runs, and regardless of whether it was September after a summer off, or June after a whole year of doing these runs, I never seemed to feel a difference. I was always dragging my sorry butt along the course, gasping for air, wishing I could just walk it, and wishing I could be anywhere else but there.

Then came high school where things didn't improve. I have memories of being so exhausted my bones felt hollow, never quite being able to keep up with even the non-varsity kids, always dreading gym class. I was soooooo happy when I got old enough that gym class wasn't mandatory anymore. It took a long time to reverse the "thank God I don't ever have to do another exercise again" mentality!

Now I dance, and I like Irish dance, but it really drains me and I wish I had the endurance for it. I always come out of there thinking, wow, I need to get in better shape. Sometimes, when training for a competition, I'd be in 2 dance classes a week, and even then, I could feel a difference in fitness level. However, dance class is an expensive way to get exercise, so I don't want to load up too much on that. Also, I have a bad habit of taking up activities which require a lot of specialized practice (i.e., learning routines/steps/music/etc).

Enter running. All I really need to do is force myself to put one foot in front of the other on a regular basis. No need for intense brainpower, memorization, or expensive classes. And since it's cardio which is basically killing me in dance class at the moment, it seemed like a good solution.

Except, of course, for the fact that I don't really like real-life running! In dreams sometimes I dream that I can run and not feel tired, and it feels great. I wish that's what happened when I got out and ran today, but it was quite a different story. I decided to do a run/walk type of thing to work up to running continuously, and while a lot of people claim that you get into a running zone and time flies by, I found that the half hour I was out there felt like an eternity. It was also really hard, and my technique is probably really crappy because I feel almost immediately that I'm about to get shin splints. I also don't have proper running shoes, which I need to get ASAP if I'm to avoid incapacitating myself within a week.

I think about how much I struggled just to walk & run for half an hour this morning, and yet there are people who complete marathons, which is totally unfathomable to me at this point. On the other hand, it means there's a whole lot of room for improvement and for things to get better, so maybe (just maybe) it's possible I'll clear this "running really sucks" zone and get into the "feel good" zone people keep talking about, and actually accomplish something like hitting a particular milestone. I don't think I've ever run 5k in my whole life, so I'll make that my first goal (after being able to run 30 min in a row!)

So at the moment, I feel really worn out physically, probably am a bit dehydrated (got to learn to manage that better in the future), but mentally I'm really psyched that I actually managed to get my butt out of bed and go for a run. Now all I have do is do it more than once! :-)