So guys. I recently got a cortisone shot in my knee, and while I'm really, REALLY hoping that it helps and I can do things again soon, I am also simultaneously terrified because I do stupid things like "read the comments on an article about running injuries" and so now I'm sort of convinced that cortisone shot = your knee is all messed up and we can't really fix it so we're gonna stick you with the pointy end. Prayers and good thoughts, please? It currently hurts like hell.
AAAAAAaaanyway. So you wanna start running. First of all: good choice. A+. So proud. Runners are cool and nice and goofy and I am one and you can call me up if my shot works and we'll do 5ks together. Your life will be enhanced.
Step The First: Get Some Stuff
Not a lot of stuff, of course (this is running, it's pretty basic), but there are some things you should have.
The first is a good pair of shoes. This can mean different things to different people (barefoot! Asics! trail! cool colors!), but just figure out a pair that you like, that doesn't blister or pinch or hurt in any way, and that you'll be using pretty much only for running. This doesn't mean you can't wear them to go to Zumba or whatever, but these are your running sneakers, or at least your "athletic activity" sneakers, not your "I do all my stuff in them" sneakers. You'll wear them out faster and they'll be unfun. Especially if you picked out a pricey pair. There are plenty of tools online to help you pick out a good sneaker (Runner's World has a pretty fun one), or you can go into a specialty running store and ask them to fit you. Replace them before they fall apart. Some people log like a thousand miles before they replace theirs, but because I'm pounding a bit more weight into mine, I've replaced them every 300 or so. You do you, though, boo.
The second general set of stuff is Don't Die stuff. In this category are visibility things and an ID. No, neither are necessary, but please just do it because I am a worried mother. You should always carry ID with you when you're going out on a run, and it's not a bad idea to tell someone when you leave and when you think you'll be back. You can carry your license, which is better than nothing, but it usually doesn't have the right contact info on it, plus srsly how much would it suck if you lost it? I have a RoadID bracelet with my name, emergency numbers, and my blood type on it: your license doesn't tell someone who to call in an emergency. They're like 20 bucks and you'll look super fly so just do it. If you're not gonna do it just try to be smart about going out.
Visibility things are also important. If you're gonna be running at night or even at dusk, get something shiny as hell that will make you look like a traffic cone to oncoming cars. I see at least one runner a day prancing around in all black after the sun's gone down and GAH. Obviously if a car hits you that's the driver's fault but it's a really good call to wear something shiny. I have a reflective and neon yellow belt that goes on over whatever I'm wearing, but whatever highlighter + rave item you choose is awesome.
Step The Second: Sign up for a race
SET YO'SELF A GOAL, SON
No but really, the second you're good to go, sign up for a race. Pick something two or three months out: if you've got no running experience, a 5k is a good call. Runner's World has a Race Finder feature on their site, and while it will occasionally not have a race listed, it's a pretty good comprehensive list.
How do you pick the race? Depends! Is there a charity you'd like to support? Pick that race! My first 5k was a fundraiser for ovarian cancer research, so that race felt even better knowing my money was going to a great cause. Is there a theme you'd like to try? My half marathon relay was at Hershey Park and therefore Hershey-themed, and a friend is signed up for a chocolate-themed 5k. Are crowds scary? Find a little guy, especially in the off-season! Are crowds awesome? Find a huge one! Worried about pace? Check with the race director, but 5ks rarely shut down till everyone's finished, or you can look for stuff that's "walker-friendly." Need support? Make your friends do it!
Seriously, a race is the best motivation ever. I will almost certainly never ever ever win anything ever at a race (unless everyone in front of me suddenly turns into cats and are therefore disqualified), but when you do a timed race, you get an official baseline of where you're at. I keep track of my slow-as-snails PRs (personal records), because it's freaking AWESOME when you do better than you did last time. And, if you've never raced before, your first 5k is an automatic PR.
Try to not be scared. If you're not, awesome, keep that up, but I know showing up at a race for the first time can be intimidating. Don't let it freak you out! Runners are so nice, and often the front of the pack will stick around to cheer the back of the pack to their finish. Also, if you like "Eye of the Tiger" they'll probably play it, so there's that.
Step the Third: Go Slower Than You Think You Need To
Slower than that. Nope, even slower. Take walk breaks. Yep, seriously, right now. I know you've only done two minutes, it's okay, take a walk. Really. It's okay.
You can totally use a running program to help you ease into this. Couch to 5k is one of the most popular, and with good reason: it allows you to improve your fitness at a pace that should keep you from getting injured and also keep you from giving up. Many people who attempt a running program go out too hard, too fast, and too far, and end up burning out in a week or so because everything hurts. I don't blame them: your first run is gonna hurt a bit, but while you will feel some moderate soreness, you should not feel like a truck hit you.
If you're not using a program, just take it sloooooooow. Use a treadmill and set it to a walking pace, but jog instead. If you start to feel super out of breath, take a walk. The standard for runs is called "conversational pace," and this means exactly what it sounds like: you could chat with a friend without dying. If you can get out a sentence or two, you're good to go. If you're struggling to say even two words, slow down. You're overdoing it. Obviously, if you continue with this, you'll do some speedwork where you will work at that intensity, but your average runs should be chatty.
Don't get me wrong: you'll sweat and breathe hard. But if you want to be able to do it more than once or twice, don't kill yourself doing this! Nice and slow. Bring a watch with you each time you do a loop and mark your progress. Write down your treadmill stats. Add a little bit each time, whether it's an extra minute or just a "I'll run to that stop sign." See what you can do!
I've also gotten asked about a dozen times how long it took me to "like" running. And it probably took about 6 weeks. When I say I like running, this is not some macho PAIN DON'T HURT or some transcendent "nothing can touch me when I'm soaring above the road with the eaglessss" shenanigans. For me, runs take effort, every time. But after six weeks or so, it changed from "ugh, okay, let's try this again" to "oh my goodness I get to run today I wonder how it will go? And I get to go farther tomorrow!" If you try this for two months or so and still hate it, feel free to peace out: there's no reason to continue doing an exercise you hate when there are so many options. Again, you do you. But if you like it, call me up and we'll hang.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Review of "Desolation of Smaug"
I've gotta hand it to Peter Jackson & Co., they are really doing all they possibly can with this 300-ish page kids' book. I really did enjoy watching this second film, and I felt it was better than the first. This may be because I am so ridiculously homesick for epic battles scored by Howard Shore that I'll take what I can get, but I liked the movie lots. (Fun fact I still tear up when I hear "Concerning Hobbits" and if you judge me you can go away now) Review contains spoilers for the movie, and for the LoTR movies, but I won't spoil the end of the book or the third movie.
Normally, I'd break down a book-into-movie by saying what they kept right, changed right, and changed wrong, but there really isn't a good way to do this here because very little is identical to the book. So let's just talk about things based on what I mostly liked and what I mostly didn't. I know, this is some highly sophisticated writing here DON'T JUDGE ME IT'S MY BLOG
Mostly positive
Smaug. Was. Amazing. If you disagree, get out of here. I had been looking forward to seeing and hearing the dragon for about forever because I am an unabashed Benedict Cumberfan, but even if he's not your thing, the dragon was amazing. Tolkien gave some great lines in his book for Bilbo's confrontation with him (I really want to start going by "Greatest of Calamities"), but even the ones they threw in felt right. Whoever worked on Smaug's firebreathing needs some kind of award, and I'd also love to hand one out to whoever decided the extended jaunt with the dwarves through the mountain was a good idea. Seeing what was left of the dwarves' kingdom was both tragic and beautiful; the audience got to experience both what the dwarves had built and what had been taken from them. A++++. (I've also been enjoying how American English can't handle the name. We seem to insist on rhyming it with "smog" and can't do it right.)
Mirkwood. Oh my goodness, spiders. The voices, the gross webs, the naming of Sting, just...yes. It was great, Martin Freeman killed it as a slightly-Ring-obsessed Bilbo, and it was all just awesome. I would say the same for all of Mirkwood: even though the sequence was condensed from the book, the weird confusion and the "sick-looking" forest all felt very on point.
Legolas. No, he's not in the book. But you know what? It was great to see him again, even with his intense super-creepy-blue eyes. (Ease up on the colored contacts, y'all.) Throwing in the reference to Gimli was great, and with Thranduil legit being his father, it's not totally unreasonable for him to be there. I truly enjoyed watching him come around and shoot things and get off ridiculous trick shots and shooting people at point blank range and beheading orcs. And yeah, the orcs. Orlando Bloom is in the movies to look pretty and kill orcs and we can only have SO many shots of him staring prettily off into the distance. So, orcs? I'll allow it. Again, this might just be my homesickness for Middle Earth, but I'm really okay with his being there and shooting things. It felt good. It felt...right. Everything is okay in the world when elves with long blond hair decapitate orcs through Rube Goldberg-like indirect actions.
Bard. So, Bard the...bargeman? We're calling him that now? 'Kay. It took me till after the movie to realize he looks kind of like Will Turner from Pirates of the Caribbean, and with Orlando Bloom already being in the movie my brain was just kind of like "what's happening who is this." I'm enjoying the little extra back story they gave him (yeah, give him two cute kids, sure, why not), and the arrows look hella cool, and the actor playing him is doing a fine job.
Gandalf and Radagast Go Adventuring, like Legolas showing up, is also totally fine with me. The book is written as Bilbo's book, so we don't see what Gandalf is off doing when he leaves (also the whole "Gandalf disappears and then pops back in at just the right time and is like 'hey guys what's up, oh, did you do all the hard stuff already? kewl'" thing is never not funny to me). Clearly he's doing something, and Sauron was for sure planning and plotting at this point, so the fact that they're using these movies as a bit of a prequel to LoTR is A-OK with me. More Ian McKellan always.
Mostly negative
Beorn felt...weird? And underused? The bear animation was great, and I actually don't mind the way they changed the dwarves' arrival, because Gandalf's "That...is our host" got the biggest laugh from the audience out of the whole movie. I just remember reading Beorn as a sort of weird, well-meaning, jolly giant dude who really likes animals. Like, a Hagrid-esque character. Movie Beorn was so serious and almost scary. If you could encapsulate the feeling of a friends dinner party, in which one of the women brought her cage-fighting boyfriend to meet everyone for the first time, and the host brings out a giant plate of steaks, and the boyfriend quietly growls, "I'm a vegan." That discomfort and fear = Movie Beorn. For me, at least.
Lake-town was...odd. The overall structure was fine, and I enjoyed Stephen Colbert's little cameo (don't blink or you'll miss it), but the styling seemed to be a bit off. This is supposed to be a medieval-type era, but once we got into the town, the styling of everything felt very Les Mis. Including and especially the costuming for the Master. Like I get the town's supposed to be in bad shape, but I was waiting for Javert to pop out from behind the Master and sing-arrest someone. Or the townspeople to burst into "Do You Hear the People Sing" as the dwarves head to the mountain. "I dreamed a dream of Erebooooooor"
So far all this stuff has been superficial likes/dislikes, but the last part here discusses some pretty shitty handling of both race and gender in this movie.
Race: yep, Middle-Earth is hella white, and better people than me have analyzed this and Tolkien's treatment of race as a whole, so I'm not going to even attempt to do that here. However, I can comment on something that was super dumb in this movie. After two or so hours of literally all white people, the confrontation between Thorin and the Master of Lake-town and Bard happens, and the crowd is scanned by the camera. Several of the townspeople have dark skin. They do not speak. The movie then continues and it is all white people from then on, too.
This is not how you do inclusiveness, people! If you truly cared about representing everyone, you could have cast a POC for Bilbo or Thorin or (this would be best!) one of the elves. A black Thranduil would have worked quite nicely, since the elves seem to suffer most from the "good people are pretty and super Caucasian" treatment that happens in Tolkien's works. You do not just throw in a scan of their face and give them no lines and pretend like it's all good. It's almost worse to do this, in my opinion, than to keep the movie completely white. This is because in your way, you show that yes, there are people of color in this world, but they don't matter at all. I'm sorry, but two half-second shots of a black woman's face does not give you accolades for awareness.
And here we come to my fave thing: sexism. Evangeline Lilly (who is a legit Tolkien fan and went all out in weapons training and learning Elvish, so this is not her fault) was cast as Tauriel, one of the Mirkwood elves, a character who does not appear in the book. Her existence is not ridiculous, as there is an elf guard whose members are not named, and could very well be female. I didn't mind so much her inclusion when I first saw it, and figured they were just trying to throw an Arwen + Eowyn badass lady-fighter into the movie, and thought nothing of it.
THEN, I saw the movie. Her character has a flirtation with Kili, one of the two youngest dwarves, and it is hinted that others have paired her and Legolas in their minds. Kili is shot by an orc at one point in the film, and when he and Tauriel are reunited, she heals him with vague elf-magic in the most uncomfortable scene in the movie. She comments that he is tall, for a dwarf, and he says to her after he's been healed that she "cannot be here, she is far away, I must be dreaming, wow, such elf, so beauty, much ear point" or something equally idiotic.
"The Hobbit" is a bro-fest, we know. But again, if you're trying to be inclusive of women, don't cast them as a collection of the dumbest, pandering tropes known to the genre and invent an unnecessary romance. Did you think women wouldn't see the film if one of the dwarves didn't get some by the end of the movie? Did you cast her and give her stupid, weepy lines and decide that you had fully developed the character and called it a day? Did you write down in your script notes that Tauriel is "Not Like Other Elf-Girls"? Try harder, or just let Cate Blanchett be in every scene. Your choice.
Normally, I'd break down a book-into-movie by saying what they kept right, changed right, and changed wrong, but there really isn't a good way to do this here because very little is identical to the book. So let's just talk about things based on what I mostly liked and what I mostly didn't. I know, this is some highly sophisticated writing here DON'T JUDGE ME IT'S MY BLOG
Mostly positive
Smaug. Was. Amazing. If you disagree, get out of here. I had been looking forward to seeing and hearing the dragon for about forever because I am an unabashed Benedict Cumberfan, but even if he's not your thing, the dragon was amazing. Tolkien gave some great lines in his book for Bilbo's confrontation with him (I really want to start going by "Greatest of Calamities"), but even the ones they threw in felt right. Whoever worked on Smaug's firebreathing needs some kind of award, and I'd also love to hand one out to whoever decided the extended jaunt with the dwarves through the mountain was a good idea. Seeing what was left of the dwarves' kingdom was both tragic and beautiful; the audience got to experience both what the dwarves had built and what had been taken from them. A++++. (I've also been enjoying how American English can't handle the name. We seem to insist on rhyming it with "smog" and can't do it right.)
Mirkwood. Oh my goodness, spiders. The voices, the gross webs, the naming of Sting, just...yes. It was great, Martin Freeman killed it as a slightly-Ring-obsessed Bilbo, and it was all just awesome. I would say the same for all of Mirkwood: even though the sequence was condensed from the book, the weird confusion and the "sick-looking" forest all felt very on point.
Legolas. No, he's not in the book. But you know what? It was great to see him again, even with his intense super-creepy-blue eyes. (Ease up on the colored contacts, y'all.) Throwing in the reference to Gimli was great, and with Thranduil legit being his father, it's not totally unreasonable for him to be there. I truly enjoyed watching him come around and shoot things and get off ridiculous trick shots and shooting people at point blank range and beheading orcs. And yeah, the orcs. Orlando Bloom is in the movies to look pretty and kill orcs and we can only have SO many shots of him staring prettily off into the distance. So, orcs? I'll allow it. Again, this might just be my homesickness for Middle Earth, but I'm really okay with his being there and shooting things. It felt good. It felt...right. Everything is okay in the world when elves with long blond hair decapitate orcs through Rube Goldberg-like indirect actions.
Bard. So, Bard the...bargeman? We're calling him that now? 'Kay. It took me till after the movie to realize he looks kind of like Will Turner from Pirates of the Caribbean, and with Orlando Bloom already being in the movie my brain was just kind of like "what's happening who is this." I'm enjoying the little extra back story they gave him (yeah, give him two cute kids, sure, why not), and the arrows look hella cool, and the actor playing him is doing a fine job.
Gandalf and Radagast Go Adventuring, like Legolas showing up, is also totally fine with me. The book is written as Bilbo's book, so we don't see what Gandalf is off doing when he leaves (also the whole "Gandalf disappears and then pops back in at just the right time and is like 'hey guys what's up, oh, did you do all the hard stuff already? kewl'" thing is never not funny to me). Clearly he's doing something, and Sauron was for sure planning and plotting at this point, so the fact that they're using these movies as a bit of a prequel to LoTR is A-OK with me. More Ian McKellan always.
Mostly negative
Beorn felt...weird? And underused? The bear animation was great, and I actually don't mind the way they changed the dwarves' arrival, because Gandalf's "That...is our host" got the biggest laugh from the audience out of the whole movie. I just remember reading Beorn as a sort of weird, well-meaning, jolly giant dude who really likes animals. Like, a Hagrid-esque character. Movie Beorn was so serious and almost scary. If you could encapsulate the feeling of a friends dinner party, in which one of the women brought her cage-fighting boyfriend to meet everyone for the first time, and the host brings out a giant plate of steaks, and the boyfriend quietly growls, "I'm a vegan." That discomfort and fear = Movie Beorn. For me, at least.
Lake-town was...odd. The overall structure was fine, and I enjoyed Stephen Colbert's little cameo (don't blink or you'll miss it), but the styling seemed to be a bit off. This is supposed to be a medieval-type era, but once we got into the town, the styling of everything felt very Les Mis. Including and especially the costuming for the Master. Like I get the town's supposed to be in bad shape, but I was waiting for Javert to pop out from behind the Master and sing-arrest someone. Or the townspeople to burst into "Do You Hear the People Sing" as the dwarves head to the mountain. "I dreamed a dream of Erebooooooor"
So far all this stuff has been superficial likes/dislikes, but the last part here discusses some pretty shitty handling of both race and gender in this movie.
Race: yep, Middle-Earth is hella white, and better people than me have analyzed this and Tolkien's treatment of race as a whole, so I'm not going to even attempt to do that here. However, I can comment on something that was super dumb in this movie. After two or so hours of literally all white people, the confrontation between Thorin and the Master of Lake-town and Bard happens, and the crowd is scanned by the camera. Several of the townspeople have dark skin. They do not speak. The movie then continues and it is all white people from then on, too.
This is not how you do inclusiveness, people! If you truly cared about representing everyone, you could have cast a POC for Bilbo or Thorin or (this would be best!) one of the elves. A black Thranduil would have worked quite nicely, since the elves seem to suffer most from the "good people are pretty and super Caucasian" treatment that happens in Tolkien's works. You do not just throw in a scan of their face and give them no lines and pretend like it's all good. It's almost worse to do this, in my opinion, than to keep the movie completely white. This is because in your way, you show that yes, there are people of color in this world, but they don't matter at all. I'm sorry, but two half-second shots of a black woman's face does not give you accolades for awareness.
And here we come to my fave thing: sexism. Evangeline Lilly (who is a legit Tolkien fan and went all out in weapons training and learning Elvish, so this is not her fault) was cast as Tauriel, one of the Mirkwood elves, a character who does not appear in the book. Her existence is not ridiculous, as there is an elf guard whose members are not named, and could very well be female. I didn't mind so much her inclusion when I first saw it, and figured they were just trying to throw an Arwen + Eowyn badass lady-fighter into the movie, and thought nothing of it.
THEN, I saw the movie. Her character has a flirtation with Kili, one of the two youngest dwarves, and it is hinted that others have paired her and Legolas in their minds. Kili is shot by an orc at one point in the film, and when he and Tauriel are reunited, she heals him with vague elf-magic in the most uncomfortable scene in the movie. She comments that he is tall, for a dwarf, and he says to her after he's been healed that she "cannot be here, she is far away, I must be dreaming, wow, such elf, so beauty, much ear point" or something equally idiotic.
"The Hobbit" is a bro-fest, we know. But again, if you're trying to be inclusive of women, don't cast them as a collection of the dumbest, pandering tropes known to the genre and invent an unnecessary romance. Did you think women wouldn't see the film if one of the dwarves didn't get some by the end of the movie? Did you cast her and give her stupid, weepy lines and decide that you had fully developed the character and called it a day? Did you write down in your script notes that Tauriel is "Not Like Other Elf-Girls"? Try harder, or just let Cate Blanchett be in every scene. Your choice.
2014 resolutions
When I say resolutions, I usually mean "stuff that would be pretty cool if it happened but if it doesn't, I'll live." And I've only got three here. Here we go.
1. Do more call-outs
Frequently, something unacceptable and disrespectful happens to me or someone in my vicinity, and I don't say anything because I'm shy, or scared, or don't want to rock the boat. This year, I really want to (calmly and usually politely) tell people their behavior is no bueno. Not letting people harass cashiers and get away with it because the cashier can't say anything. Not letting people make jokes at the expense of persecuted groups. Not letting my personal space or level of comfort be disrupted because someone's being a butthead. (I am very adult and mature.) Obviously, I will make an attempt to assess my own safety in these situations and not put myself in danger, but I really want to stop smiling when nothing's funny and everything's the worst. If I don't say something, who will?
2. Keep better track of my reading
Y'all, I am a book menace. My Kindle and the wonderful "buy with One-Click" button are not helping this situation, but I find myself just grabbing whatever's closest instead of making a list, saving up for book purchases, or remembering that recommendation from that girl that one time at that event or whatever. I need to list what I've read, what I want to purchase, and what I should read. Especially need to keep one, solid list of everything that gets recommended to me directly or indirectly.
And yes, I do think I'm a better person than you because I read a lot. JUST KIDDING no seriously I want everyone to read not because it will make you a better person but because then I can talk to you about all my little book children and I'll be so happy. So I guess I'm selfish, but not pretentious? I don't know, I'm basically The Worst Kind of Person but plz read plzzzzz
3. Go watch your faves do things
Over the past year and a half, I have gone to see Team Starkid (of "A Very Potter Musical" fame) live on tour, met Brandon Sanderson (who wrote the Mistborn trilogy and finished "A Wheel of Time" and is just awesome) at a book signing, and went to see Cinematic Titanic (the original cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000) do a live set of riffs and met them after. All three of these were crazy amazing experiences, and I really don't know why I haven't tried harder to meet some of my creative heroes. I met Tamora Pierce in college, as well, and that was also in my Top Ten Best Moments of Fangirling. I need to look up tour dates for cool people, especially authors, and just get alllll the signatures and alllll the handshakes and alllll the squeals of joy I can possibly get.
Let's do this, 2014.
1. Do more call-outs
Frequently, something unacceptable and disrespectful happens to me or someone in my vicinity, and I don't say anything because I'm shy, or scared, or don't want to rock the boat. This year, I really want to (calmly and usually politely) tell people their behavior is no bueno. Not letting people harass cashiers and get away with it because the cashier can't say anything. Not letting people make jokes at the expense of persecuted groups. Not letting my personal space or level of comfort be disrupted because someone's being a butthead. (I am very adult and mature.) Obviously, I will make an attempt to assess my own safety in these situations and not put myself in danger, but I really want to stop smiling when nothing's funny and everything's the worst. If I don't say something, who will?
2. Keep better track of my reading
Y'all, I am a book menace. My Kindle and the wonderful "buy with One-Click" button are not helping this situation, but I find myself just grabbing whatever's closest instead of making a list, saving up for book purchases, or remembering that recommendation from that girl that one time at that event or whatever. I need to list what I've read, what I want to purchase, and what I should read. Especially need to keep one, solid list of everything that gets recommended to me directly or indirectly.
And yes, I do think I'm a better person than you because I read a lot. JUST KIDDING no seriously I want everyone to read not because it will make you a better person but because then I can talk to you about all my little book children and I'll be so happy. So I guess I'm selfish, but not pretentious? I don't know, I'm basically The Worst Kind of Person but plz read plzzzzz
3. Go watch your faves do things
Over the past year and a half, I have gone to see Team Starkid (of "A Very Potter Musical" fame) live on tour, met Brandon Sanderson (who wrote the Mistborn trilogy and finished "A Wheel of Time" and is just awesome) at a book signing, and went to see Cinematic Titanic (the original cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000) do a live set of riffs and met them after. All three of these were crazy amazing experiences, and I really don't know why I haven't tried harder to meet some of my creative heroes. I met Tamora Pierce in college, as well, and that was also in my Top Ten Best Moments of Fangirling. I need to look up tour dates for cool people, especially authors, and just get alllll the signatures and alllll the handshakes and alllll the squeals of joy I can possibly get.
Let's do this, 2014.
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