You Might Think You Can't Run But You Probably Can

Today I am going to take a departure from my usual ramblings about news items. The news has been a source of great sadness and ire for me in recent weeks. This, combined with a lack of sunshine outside of my window is a good recipe for crabbiness. Therefore, I am going to talk about something that makes me happy. It has the potential to make you happy too if you aren't already familiar with its many benefits.

About a year ago I decided to start running. I had no reason to think that this time would not be like all of the other times in my life I had tried jogging many times before. I would ambitiously commit to running first thing in the morning, psych myself up with all kinds of positive self-encouragement, and then just start running. The problem was that I would always end up getting completely tired after about sixty seconds of running. I would go through about one week of huffing and puffing before I would decide that I simply could not handle this type of exercise. I tried to do it off and on over the years, convinced that I would not get tired if I could only discover the right way to breathe.

Well, this time really was different. How? I finally scrapped all the advice about breathing techniques, stretching, running shoes, etc. Instead I concentrated on building up to running very slowly. I did this through a program my husband discovered a called Couch-to-5K. We even found a podcast that gives instructions as you run and sets the running to music. At first the program doesn't even involve a whole lot of walking. It encourages you to run for very short bursts interspersed with longer periods or walking. The program does push you. It is set up to have you running a 5K in 9 weeks, but if you aren't ready to move on after a particular week, you can always repeat that week.

The important thing that I discovered was that it was this gradual building-up of the cardiovascular system that was the key to being able to run a much longer distance. Of course I would get out of breath and feel like I was going to keel over because my heart, lungs, and muscles simply were not used to working that hard. As soon as I realized this, I was able to concentrate on conditioning my body slowly and setting goals that allowed me to succeed.

Thanks to this method, I am still running regularly after a year and am able to run 3.1 miles three days a week. The other two days I run part of the 3 miles and walk the rest while slowly building up to running the entire route 5 days. When I reach this goal, I plan to start working up to running a 10K. In addition to running around the creek down the street from my house, I have now run 3 5K races for various charities and am planning on entering more this year. Maybe someday in the not to distant future I will run a marathon.

So why is this so worth doing? Because running is one of the best exercises you can do to keep yourself in shape. There is nothing that gets your heart pumping and improves overall circulation like running. Nothing else strengthens your leg muscles so well. Nothing makes you fill more energized during the other parts of your day.

I fully believe in one's ability to vastly enhance quality of life into old age by running. There used to be a school of thought that running put excessive wear and tear on the joints and muscles. Now we know that it builds strength in your legs that can help to keep you going longer and with less pain. I have seen 80 year olds running in every race I have entered, and these people look great. These are people that are statistically nearing the end of their life cycles, yet they are slim, toned, and look like they would have no trouble hiking up a mountain.

Another wonderful thing about running is that it involves such little expense and preparation You don't need a gym membership or any kind of special outfit or tool. You just slip on some old clothes and go. All of those pricey running shoes you see in the store are complete hogwash. All you need is a cheap pair of running shoes (about $30 or $40) that feels right on your foot and stays on. Professional runners have even been talking lately about the benefits of running barefoot. Also, stretching exercises before running are way overrated. A few quick stretches do the trick, and too much stretching can cause pain during running.

Running is also a great way to get yourself outdoors for some amount of time everyday, especially if you find some scenic place to do it. Things I often see while running include beautiful skies, a lovely pond, dozens of bird species, rabbits, snakes, and beavers as well as plenty of cats and dogs. Running can be done even in inclement weather. I have run in heavy rain, hail, and heat. And when the weather gets too extreme, there is nothing wrong with running in place in front of the television.

Here is the best part of all. There is absolutely no stimulant that matches the runner's high. It makes even a particularly difficult run worth the effort. No matter how I feel during the run, I feel fabulous within minutes of stopping. It is not something you can fully understand until you feel it. I can only describe it as a great burst of energy, strength, and mental clarity that stays with you long after the run is completed. In some ways it is similar to the feeling you get after a great cup of coffee, except you feel a serene, sense of well-being instead of the jittery feeling caffeine can bring on.

Here is something I would like to impart to others. If you want this, you can have it. I am disinclined to believe the vast majority of people who say that they cannot run. Maybe you don't want to run. Maybe you prefer swimming, bicycling, or playing tennis. These are all great exercises. However, if you want to run, but don't because you think you can't, you are probably selling yourself short. Barring a serious injury or health problem that a trusted doctor has specifically said could make running dangerous, there is no reason that someone cannot run. I thought I would never be able to breathe well enough. Now I can. Do you think you cannot run because of Plantar Fasciitis, a painful foot condition? That is also something I have on occasion. My husband has a much more severe case, but he is able to run by regularly wearing inserts in his shoes. Humans are built to do this all day long. As children we run everywhere, and for some reason we stop doing this after puberty.

If you want to run, there are three very important things you can do to get yourself going. First and foremost is to start slowly. You don't have to do the same program that I did, but you are going to poop out fast if you try to do too much at once. Even if you are doing nothing but walking at first, you are already part way there.

Also, have realistic expectations. Just because running is healthy, fun, and makes you feel great does not mean that it is easy. Great cardiovascular exercise always involves some degree of effort and hard work for the big payoff at the end. It is one of those things that does get a little easier the more you do it, but there will be days ahead that seem harder than others. Don't let these days ruin your whole routine. Your inner voice will tell you you can't make it all the way. Fight with it as much as possible, but if it sometimes wins and you can't meet your goal for the day, don't feel like a failure because something is better than nothing.

Finally, find a time when running feels right. A lot of experts recommend running first thing in the morning, but you can run any time of day. I find that I do best between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sometimes I will run later in the summer to avoid the heat. Other people like to run at 5 a.m. Still others like to run at midnight. You might find that varying the time of day works for you. It doesn't really matter. Just get out there and do it!

Why Television Became Better (and Worse?) in the Last Decade

I am currently reading a book in which one of the main themes is opposites and the paradoxical nature of human beings. We may be the most compassionate of animals, and yet we are the most violent. We are both extremely creative and destructive. There are plenty more examples of this, but you get the picture. Anyway, while watching an episode of The Wire on DVD the other night I was reminded of how our tendency to contradict ourselves has played a role in television over the last decade.

The first thought that occurred to me was of the myriad of wonderful shows I have seen over the last ten years. I have invested far more time in television than ever before because there has just been so much to choose from. Then I remembered all of those times that I have turned away from the television with absolute revulsion , thinking that I never wanted to watch it again. How can this be? The twenty-oughts (or whatever you choose to call the first few years of the new millenium) have simultaneously given us the best and worst television ever produced. What is she blathering on about now, you ask? If you are still with me, I'll explain. In the interest of ending on a positive note, I'd like to first talk about how dreadful television has become in the last ten years.

2000-2010 was indisputably the decade of the reality show. Reality shows have been around since the inception of television, but it wasn't until the early 2000's that we were inundated with everything from snakes crawling over peoples faces to the everyday lives of wealthy, unintelligible former rock stars. Diversity is not a problem when it comes to reality shows, but there is one sure and simple thing that binds nearly every one them together. They are bad.

Have you ever thought about how utterly embarrassing it would be if an alien culture intercepted our television transmissions? I'm sure they would have serious reservations about any kind of first contact. Think about it. How awful would it be if the Real Housewives of Orange County constituted another advanced species' first glimpse into human society? Reality shows represent all of our worst attributes. Pettiness, greed, ostentatiousness, pretentiousness, and vulgarity are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind when I think of the vast majority of reality shows that have popped up over the decade. If the anti-gay marriage activists want to find things that are truly destructive to our culture, they should look to reality television.

Aside from presenting substandard content, the writing and production of most reality shows is pretty poor. It is difficult for me to understand why anyone would want to watch a group of people sitting around in their house talking about their petty differences and their plans to do away with one another. If you want that, than why not simply observe your own dysfunctional family or find one to adopt you? And yet shows like Big Brother do get ratings? Is this another example of our dual nature, that we are compelled to watch shows we know are awful?

Of all of the reality shows on T.V., I can think of exactly two that might have something to offer. American Idol is one of these although I must be one of the ten people in the country who does not watch this show. It just isn't of much interest to me. However, this show has decent production value and I can see why so many people find it entertaining. It features real talent that we might not otherwise see. Another show that I don't usually watch but have found to have some substance is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It may be repetitive, but it is brimming with hope and has a real constructive purpose behind it. I'm aware that I may be exaggerating a bit here and that there are probably other examples of decent shows in the reality show genre. The point is that they are few and far between.

Turn to virtually any news program if you want to see another example of the worst programming ever to hit the airwaves. Television news has been going downhill for a long time, but that thing we once called news finally met its demise in the last decade. A specific example that immediately comes to mind is Fox News. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this mishmash of crazed punditry and half-baked journalism, but it certainly isn't anything I would rely on to tell me what is going on in the world around me. We might blame Fox News for being the proverbial nail in the coffin, but I think that cable television as a whole really deserves that noteworthy distinction. Cable television has shown us yellow journalism at its worst in the last decade. The practice of sensationalizing and exploiting absolutely every topic in a mad grab for ratings seems to have completely overshadowed what we thought was a news show's primary purpose of reporting news. Remember the movie Network? I guess life imitates art.

Sadly, cable television news is dragging regular broadcast news down with it. What is left to do but shake our heads when we turn on the Today show only to find that the top story is about the love affairs of Tiger Woods for three consecutive days? How many disasterous events have you seen turned into media circuses? I'm almost afraid to turn on my television out of fear that stations will treat the horrific and sorrowful events of the last few days as if they are a movie of the week instead of imparting information and ideas that would actually lend help to the people of Haiti. In their attempts to fight with cable T.V. for ratings, I wonder how many viewers the network channels have lost. I now rely on radio or pick and choose from printed stories for nearly all of my news. What kind of crazy time is this in which the Daily Show, a fake news program often does a better job of delivering the news than regular news outlets?

Now that I have had my rant about how television has eroded in the last decade, I am free to discuss how much better it has become. Cable T.V. may have been the death of the news program, but it has done quite the opposite for scripted television. It was cable television that gave birth to a slew of incredibly, high-quality dramas like The Sopranos. Cable television has taken the "cop" show to entirely new levels with such wonderfully crafted shows as The Wire and The Shield. Forget the old dime-a-dozen, cop versus bad guy formula. It's been replaced with gritty, well written, superbly directed, expertly acted scripts that grapple with corruption across the board. Ironically, these shows are so good that they feel more real than the typical reality show. At first it may have had something to do with the fact that cable television was less subject to censorship and, therefore, free to be more creative. However, the tendency toward producing better quality fictional shows has since spilled over to network television.

I'm not arguing that previous decades have not produced some very good shows. What I am saying is that the number of really great shows has increased dramatically. When I think back, shows like MASH, Barney Miller, All in the Family, Homicide (before its untimely cancellation), and X-Files (before it jumped the shark) immediately leap to mind. It is just that the last decade alone has produced more shows of that caliber or better than any time in the past. Shows such as Mad Men, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, 24 (for the first 2 seasons, anyway), Weeds and The West Wing, Dexter, and Battlestar Galactica are only a few.

We have also had an influx of fantastic comedy shows in recent years. I think it is because so many more creators of comic television have chosen to follow the Seinfeld model. What I am talking about are shows like Flight of the Conchords, 30 Rock, and The Office. At their core these shows are nothing more than a modern version of the screwball comedy, but what makes them good is that they are centered around characters and dialogue as opposed to situations. Think about it. We liked I Love Lucy because Lucy was funny. We tuned into Three's Company not because the plot was great but to watch the antics of Jack Tripper. In the last decade there were more choices of shows where all of the characters not only made us laugh but underwent a certain amount of development even though many of them were shallow. Take The Office, for instance. This mockumentary based on the British comedy makes for great television because of its focus on great characters. We laugh at the stupid things they do, but they are also caricatures of real people that we have known.

In almost every genre we can find a larger selection of quality television. Books are still king, but we find television increasingly able to produce the kind of literary thought-provoking or witty material we can often find in the written word and sometimes find in movies. This brings one particular show to mind. You are probably tired of reading this by now, and I am tired of writing it. However, I would be remiss if I did not give a special nod to my favorite television show, especially since it is about to embark on its final season.

This is a show centered on a tropical island features plane crashes, shipwrecks, monsters, time travelers, temporal anomalies, the walking dead, hallucinations, quantum physics, and a host of other weird things. The show references the work of a vast array of authors from Lewis Carroll to Stephen King to Philip K. Dick. It borrows mythology and concepts form practically every major religion and philosophy, including Buddhism, Christianity, empiricism, and existentialism. The show is at once science fiction, mystery, romance, western, and an adventure story. Those of you that have seen it know what I am talking about. For someone who hasn't seen it, it is quite difficult to describe. I realize it probably sounds like Fantasy Island on steroids. Perhaps it sounds like one of those shows that tries to be all things to all people. Actually, that is sort of what the show does. While others might fail in trying to be so comprehensive, though, this one does it exceedingly well.

It is hard to point to one reason why Lost has the makings of such great television. Like many of the great shows I have mentioned in this post, the writing is nothing short of spectacular. The actors, many of them not well-known before the show aired, are a fiercely talented bunch that mesh so well you could swear they had all worked together before.

Production value and format are two other things worth mentioning because they are areas in which Lost is in a class all its own. Visually, Lost feels more like a movie than a television show. It is full of camera work, props, and effects usually reserved for large-scale film production.

Lost's unique format is not quite like anything seen before on television. It is a non-linear story told in the form of flashbacks, flashforwards, and bizarre scenes that make little sense until they are pieced together with another bit of information shown farther down the road. It is almost more like a jigsaw puzzle or a jumbled up detective novel than an television series. Its painfully slow method of revealing its secrets may have driven some viewers away early on. We fans that followed the show for five years still don't know what the show is really about, but we eat it up with relish. Lost has a wonderfully nerdy fan base rivaled by no other except, maybe, Trekkies.

In fact, ambiguity may be the core ingredient that makes many of these new shows so intriguing and entertaining. Lost, for instance, presented its audience with one of the most fascinating television villains ever to appear on television. Here is a dastardly, unlikable person who kills, lies, and manipulates, yet we still aren't completely convinced he isn't somehow working for the greater good. Vic Mackey, the fabulous antihero of The Shield is someone who is rotten to the core, yet possesses a soft spot for women and children. The viewer cannot decide whether to root for his cause or hope that someone swiftly brings him down.

So I seem back to where I started in contemplating the contradictions in human nature. I rest my case.

Image Courtesy of chrisseddon.com

President Obama's First Year in Office and Why Liberals Need to Get Grounded

Are you a progressive that voted for President Barack Obama in last year's presidential election? Like me, you may find yourself full of disappointment when considering the new administration's first year in office. Furthermore, you may be facing trepidation about what the coming year will hold. Many of us on the left side of the political spectrum are in a far different state of mind than we were this time last year. In January of 2009 we were full of hope. Things were going to change, we said. The incompetency of the previous eight years was over. Corporate greed would be stamped out. The wars would end. We would finally focus on the important things like universal health care.

For so many of us 2009 did so little to meet our expectations. Here are just a few of the many things still remain unchanged. Wall street still remains unregulated. More of our young men and women have been sent to die in an idiotic and useless war. The public option, our best chance for sweeping healthcare reform has been abandoned by its most ardent champions. Maybe you feel saddened that the momentum we had during the election campaign seems to have dissipated, and you are often confused about where our President really stands. I, too, have had this underlying feeling or uneasiness during the last few months until I finally realized something. President Obama's base needs to take a reality pill.

We often accuse those on the opposite end of the political spectrum of operating outside the scope of reality. They live with the assumption that supply side economics is the key to health and wealth of our system when history has clearly shown this to be false. They contend that we are actually diminishing the threat of terrorism by waging wars against other countries when we are actually exacerbating that threat. Many of them are in complete denial of the catastrophic state of our healthcare system. You could make quite a long list of assumptions that show a tendency to let emotions obscure rational thinking. However, our friends on the right are not the only ones who fall into this trap. Let's examine our own departure from reality in the past year.

Many of us seem to have fallen for some of the assertions made by extreme conservatives. They have painted President Obama as a liberal and a socialist. Our president is no such thing. He may have been more sympathetic to leftist ideas than his Republican opponent, but he is much closer to the center in both philosophy and policy. There is nothing that defines him as a liberal, and the idea that he is a socialist is, of course, completely ridiculous. Think about it. If we look realistically at the political demographics of our country, it would be impossible to elect a true liberal. We knew this when we elected President Obama. We did not vote for him because he was a liberal but because he was significantly better than they other guy. We put him in office knowing full well that he would govern, for the most part, from a centrist point of view. So while I continue to believe that liberal ideas are the best ideas, I am not sure why we are so disappointed with the results of the last year. Perhaps we were so starry-eyed at the prospect of being relieved of the worst presidential leadership in modern history that we couldn't see straight down the road ahead.

Consider the war in Afghanistan, for instance. For those of us on the left, the war couldn't be over soon enough. For us it is a completely purposeless waist of lives and resources. During his run for the presidency President Obama told us what his policy would be. He would shift the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. Deep down we hoped that he would not send more troops there. We elected him with the full knowledge that this is exactly what he would do, yet when it came to pass, we felt bitter and betrayed.

Could it be that we have also jumped the gun when it comes to our expectations about the healthcare bill? Many of us know that a medicare style, single-payer system would be the ideal way to operate healthcare. However, we were realistic enough to know that politics would not allow it to happen. So what did we do? We latched on to the idea of the public option as the next best thing. President Obama floated the idea, and we drank it up with great relish. Think about its likelihood, though, while trying to set aside the fact that it is an extremely good idea. Think about past defeats of healthcare legislation in the United States. If we are honest with ourselves, we knew that the chances that Republicans would block a public option were extremely high.

Am I arguing that liberals should give up hope and stop being vocal about their ideas? Certainly not. Hope is what keeps us all going, and we should continue to do whatever it takes to further our cause. What I am proposing is that we stop grumbling and forge on. While holding our leadership to high standards, we need to recognize that President Obama is not a bad leader simply because he has not accomplished everything we wanted in a year's time.

In so many ways the Obama style of leadership is exactly what this country needed. Due to the severe beating we received because of the knee-jerk, reactionary policies of the previous administration, we were sorely in need of grounding and pragmatism. We have already seen evidence that the current president thinks before he acts. We may not agree with every decision, but we can clearly see that he takes the right approach by considering every option. We may be left with a bitter taste in our mouths when we hear about some of the political wrangling that goes on behind the scenes, but let's be honest with ourselves. Every president has had to play politics to pass legislation.

Yes, we have a really long road ahead, but let's not forget to look at the strides we have made. The war in Iraq is finally coming to a close. We might not achieve real healthcare reform just yet, but insurance reform is a step in the right direction. Eliminating pre-existing conditions is a positive move toward reigning in the insurance industry. Our economy, while still grim, is also making slow improvements. We are in the midst of a real progress on that front. Leading Chicago school economists are changing their tune about what leads to economic health. Realistically, we know that it is going to take years to recover from a situation that was caused by bad economic policy first put into place some thirty years ago.

It is time for liberals to face the facts. The President we elected is not divine nor does he possess a magic wand. Most change will only come through several years of progressive thinking, hard work, and baby steps.