Saturday, 02 August 2003

I've been spending my time doing Esperanto stuff.

I wrote a draft of an article talking about how the internet is changing the nature of the national Esperanto organization. National organizations were invented to make it possible for people who have just discovered Esperanto to find resources for learning the language and to find other speakers. But those things, which used to be hard, have gotten relatively easy--just type "learn esperanto" into Google. My article tries to look at which of the purposes of national organizations are not being supplanted by ad-hoc groups aided by the internet and suggests that national groups should focus on those activities.

I also set up an Esperanto-language blog. (Feel free to take a look. But, you know, it's in Esperanto.)

So that's what I've been doing when I should have been writing.

Last week's long run got cut short because I ran too late in the day when it was too hot. Today I avoided that problem and got my run in. It was even easy. I've held my long run at 5 miles (more or less) for three weeks now, giving my body a chance to adapt before I push the distance up, but it's getting harder to wait. My plan had been to hold it at this distance (or, at least, hold at a one-hour duration for my long runs) through the summer and fall to build a good base for possible longer runs next year.

In fact, I had pretty much ruled out the idea of longer runs. People would talk about marathons, and I just wasn't interested. Maybe, if I could run really fast, I could imagine running for a couple of hours. The people who win marathons run them in just ten or twenty minutes over two hours. But they're running twice as fast as I do. Even if I trained pretty seriously for months, it would take me well in excess of four hours to finish 26.2 miles. So I was ready to just say no to marathons. But now that running for an hour is becoming routine, I can see the lure of longer and longer distances. Who knows what I might do?