Running, Part 1

One of the things that they tell you is good for exercise motivation is to find a buddy to exercise with, rather than trying to go it alone. Well, that’s all well and good if you happen to know a lot of people, because you’ll need to find someone who has a work schedule that is similar to yours so you can team up. And you need to find someone local enough that neither you nor your buddy need to drive far in order to meet up. A neighbor would be best, but not all of us have neighbors we want to spend time with. And if you’re a loner or new in town, you may just be out of luck.

So last year I decided that my personal efforts to get away from my computer and TV were not working. There is simply too much work to be done at the computer, especially when I am taking classes, and the sofa has a gravity well so intense that NASA would be interested in studying it. I wanted to find some fitness classes or something else that could keep my interest and get me out of the house. The formality of a class or program is often helpful to me in setting my personal goals.

Initially, I thought karate or some other martial arts class would be a good choice. A coworker had once told me that karate was a great exercise. Yeah, I could afford to lose a few pounds. I also thought it would be good for my self-esteem and bad for potential muggers. So I looked for classes in my area, but most only offered after-school programs for children. Being beaten up by an eight-year-old is not okay, so I kept looking.

Another martial arts school offered so much I wasn’t sure they knew what they wanted to teach, and on top of it, their web site gave me the creeps. I can’t explain it; but I felt weird looking at their site. I figured if a page on the computer screen made me that uncomfortable, then I certainly would be no better off if I showed up at the school.

A couple of other schools sounded good (and didn’t creep me out), but they would be at least a half-hour or 45-minute drive from home, one-way. Open-ended commitments to driving long distances are not my forte. I’ll gladly drive across country but I hate commuting. I’ve given up on a lot of different things because I eventually just got tired of the traffic: horseback riding and yoga are just two of the casualties of the bumper wars.

I did quite a bit of reading on one karate school’s web site, and tangentally I found a running group that had a beginner’s program. This sounded good — it was something I could do, and it was quite affordable and had no long-term commitments. Unfortunately, I would have to do some serious driving to get to the track where the beginner’s program was being held, but I thought I could probably deal with that for a couple of months for the duration of the program. Then I could run somewhere else.

As with any new pursuit, I’m always anxious to get started, so I sent an e-mail to the director of the program and asked a few basic questions.

January Musings

After two months of being buried in paperwork for an undergraduate anthropology class and being buried in piles of lumber and buckets of paint for house renovation projects, I am finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. I think it’s one of those new LED flashlights: it’s too small for a train and besides, I don’t hear any horns. I can finally get back into writing for Focal Plane and get on track with an exercise program (ambitious, yes?).

In the meantime, I am working towards a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Maryland University College. That’s the adult education, by the way. I originally had selected natural sciences as my minor, but the science classes have been steadily disappearing and there are only a couple of upper-level classes that I could take to finish out the minor: a biology class and a global warming class. I took a 300-level microbiology class last summer and my neurons are still recovering from it. I don’t think I can do more biology, which is mostly aimed at health workers anyways. What else is left? Nothing.

I agonized about this a full semester, because I wanted to finish out the minor but could not get the classes I wanted. I hoped they would be offered in the fall, but no such luck. I guess everyone is afraid of science, so I decided to switch my minor to history. At least here I have some very nice choices of what I want to study.

While UMUC doesn’t require that students take a minor, I want to have that focus. Communications is great, but you still have to be communicating about something. I may yet take the two remaining lower-level science classes that I haven’t taken: astronomy and meteorology. There used to be chemistry and physics courses, but they have long since disappeared: presumably they were sucked down a black hole and emerged in another galaxy (or at least another campus).

I took one history class a year-and-a-half ago and really enjoyed it, so I am looking forward to taking more history classes. The way I think about it, science and history aren’t really opposite subjects and there’s plenty of “history of science” that I can write about. The more I think about how this has worked out for me, the more convinced I am that these two subjects will play off one another very well. I’ve been searching for some direction to my studies and I think I’ve found it. The next semester starts in three weeks. I’m taking a a History Writing class, a mass communications class, and a forensic anthropology class (well, that is a science and a history, isn’t it?).

In the meantime, I’ve had a request to do more writing about bloggers through history. I did one article about Benjamin Franklin that was well received and was fun to write. Since I’ve decided to do some history writing, I might as well get started here. I’m thinking of it as a warmup for my class. So, bookmark Focal Plane and be on the lookout for the Blogs through History category. The next installment will be Alexander the Great.

Is there someone you’d think would be a great blogger from history? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.