#29

Today, in a way, was a semi-arid day. By the time I'd got home and finished my odd jobs, it was already dark, I was hungry from not having eaten properly, and I was tired from teaching. With regards to the latter, Tuesday is a notoriously slow day - partly because a fair bit of my time is spent teasing out of kids the answer to "What's the letter between C and E?" And even when you press these notes down on the keyboard, a few struggle to realise that D is actually that white ridge between your two fingers. Now, we're not talking about kids with special needs here - these are 8-year-old kids that have normal abilities, but don't use their reasoning powers. They wait to be told the answer, or try to give you the answer you want - either by sussing it out from your tone of voice, or by process of elimination("A!" "No." "B!" "No." "C!" "Don't guess. Use logic to work out the answer." "Then it must be D! It must be!"). They don't want to think; they just want to give you the answers and get it over with, because it is the quickest way, the shortcut.

Sometimes the requests are unbelievable. "Can you use your pen and point out the notes to me?" The student, rather than wanting to follow the music, work out what the notes are, where they are on the keyboard, and then play them, simply wants to reduce music-learning to a process of following a guiding pen and pressing notes down, oblivious to what they are. Does it matter? It's the fastest shortcut to get some semblance of a tune, but kittens tracking a beam of light along a ceiling use more brainpower.

I'm running out of rant tokens, so I'll move on.

Weather - mid 40s, grab the thermals. 2 loops in 11:37 and 12:20. The thing that I didn't like, though, was having to dodge people. Especially (this is very un-PC now) stupid ones. You would think that if people were moving in different directions on a sidewalk, whether they were running, walking, pushing a pram, or otherwise, it would be common nature for each group to at least try to move to one side, so that both groups could move in their respective directions at the same time. (If you were the one running, slowing down as you pass people in whatever direction would be common courtesy, obviously expected.) Somehow the unwritten law of showing some inclination to give way seems to elude some people in these parts. Pretending to be too engrossed in your friend's conversation to say "thank you" when people stop so you can stroll over doesn't really cut it, either. The Red Sea doesn't part for you, Sir and Madam. Go drown in it.

I eventually finished 3.5 miles in 25:40, which I'm satisfied with. I've thought about what I hope to achieve at the end of the 50 runs - do a half-marathon, perhaps? Over the past few days, blinded by the exploits of others, my goals have been lofty and flitting. It's easy to be blinded by the euphoria of distance (10K! 21K! 20 miles!), but all I want is to run a fairly reasonably long distance fast. I want to eventually run 10 miles consistently under 1:15 and hope to get a half-marathon time of under 1:40. I might not get there at #50. But I'm slowly going to claw my way there, doing the short fast runs to get to that distance instead of running long all the time, and have the patience to believe and trust that what I'm doing works. I want to build a stalactite drop by drop, instead of merely dumping a bucketload of water on the ground and hoping it will develop into that shape.

I've probably said more than I should have, so I'm back to rolling in the mud. Over and Oink!