Miscellany: Mulliga Runs a Marathon, Part 4 - The Inspiration

While there are plenty of books written about how to run long distances, this post features memoirs about why people run long distances. The value of these personal stories wasn't immediately obvious to me when I first started training, but when the miles on the road get tedious, or when life or injury interrupts a training plan, the experiences of others can push you over the hump:

Looks Like We're Running: An Amateur's Companion to Becoming a Marathoner

Dustin Riedesel is a fellow who has been through a lot - leukemia, alcohol addiction, and marriage and kids.  One day he decides to take up running, and commits to entering the Disney Marathon with his wife.  Looks Like We're Running is the humorous, conversational, and sometimes heartfelt story of Riedesel's marathon training.

This book is one of the most relatable accounts of marathon training I've ever read. While Riedesel was a former minor college basketball player, he is otherwise a total amateur in pursuit of an amateur's goal - run a sub 4-hour marathon.  He takes it seriously, though, giving the story some real stakes and a nailbiting finish - you feel like you are with him through every grueling mile.

How to Lose a Marathon: A Starter's Guide to Finishing in 26.2 Chapters

Joel Cohen's marathon memoir, How to Lose a Marathon, is a lot more flippant than most.  Cohen is a longtime writer for The Simpsons, and he brings the irreverent tone of that series (and rudimentary line drawings reminiscent of the Tracey Ullman years of the show) to the book.

It's not all jokes though.  There are some real training tips and motivational nuggets here, and Cohen certainly respects the thousands of runners who put themselves through the marathon grind. The book ends in suitably climactic fashion: Cohen races the New York City Marathon, and yes, he does lose - but he did finish.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author known for two things: surreal literary fiction and running.  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running compares the two pursuits, both solitary endeavors where sometimes there is no end in sight, and how one feeds into the other.  The title (a reference to Raymond Carver's story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) hints at the philosophical, introspective nature of the book.

Murakami is by far the most accomplished runner in this blog post (his marathon PR is 3:27, a great time for an amateur, and he's run ultramarathons), but the book is pretty silent about the nuts and bolts of his training and nutrition, and there's definitely no braggadocio here. It's more about what running long distances feels like to him, delivered in an engrossing monologue.

Movies: Devil Horror Double Feature

I like a little bit of counterprogramming for my Eastertide, so today we are featuring two movies about demonic power - one new, and one old.

Late Night with the Devil

Late Night with the Devil has a killer premise. Most of the movie is presented as a long-lost tape of a '70s late night show with one very unusual guest - a girl possessed by a demon. Is it all an elaborate hoax? Self-hypnosis? Or is all hell about to break loose?

David Dastmalchian plays the smarmy host to perfection, and the period touches are all pitch-perfect (aside from a few controversial AI-generated interstitial graphics). Late Night only falters when it cheats the found footage conceit, leading to a somewhat disappointing finale.  There isn't a ton of good indie horror out there, though, so it's still worth checking out.

Rating: 7/10

Prince of Darkness

Barring the occasional (incredibly profitable) megahit like Halloween, John Carpenter movies flop on initial release. Prince of Darkness follows the pattern - it bombed in the theaters, but has since gained a cult following as the second entry in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" - three movies that depict world-ending horrors.

Prince of Darkness has the flavor of a Quatermass story - a harried priest (Donald Pleasance) asks a group of scientists to study a canister of mysterious green liquid. The liquid is locked in the basement of an abandoned church and seems to be not of this world...or this dimension. As you can imagine, things go south quickly, and soon the survivors are fighting for their lives against Lovecraftian cosmic evil. It's not quite as well-made or well-acted as an all-time classic like The Thing, but there's a nice build-up and a chilling, famous recurring dream sequence:

Rating: 8/10

Miscellany: Pop-A-Shot Pop-Up game review

I was looking to entertain people at a "March Madness"-themed convention, and the Pop-A-Shot Pop-Up game fit the bill perfectly. It's a portable, folding version of the arcade-style basketball game you see in man caves and rec rooms across the country, so you can take it to some remote location and set it up in about a minute. It doesn't require power and works outdoors, but it's not built to withstand the elements.

Some other downsides: for about $180 off of Amazon, the Pop-Up is not exactly cheap, yet there is quite a bit of assembly required (took me a couple hours with hand tools and an occasional extra pair of hands):

The Pop-A-Shot was a hit at the convention. Generally, the game was durable, although it was somewhat less stable than anticipated, with the rim moving slightly after each shot. The electronic scoring functioned properly, but the small speaker was difficult to hear against the din of the convention. All in all, it was well worth the money for all the smiles it generated.

Books: The Skean - The Distinctive Fighting Knife of Gaelic Ireland

Military historian Robert Gresh has written the definitive (and perhaps the only) book devoted to the skean (Irish: scian), an Irish knife that fell into disuse after the Tudor conquest:

How did one use a skean? According to Gresh, while the skean had a single cutting edge and could slash when necessary, it was more often used for stabbing in close quarters with a point-down icepick grip, usually through weak points in mail and plate armor. To this end, most skeans were fairly long (big enough to be used as a forearm guard, like a tonfa).  Shorter versions could supposedly be thrown, end over end, like missiles.

Skeans aren't common today. The ones Gresh features in the book were found at the bottom of rivers, or in the dusty closets of collectors and museums, and surviving examples are often mistaken for Scottish dirks. But it's an authentically Irish weapon, from a time when Irishness itself was in danger.

Food: Guinness 0.0

I've been drinking Guinness every St. Patrick's Day (and plenty of other days) for years now, but since I'm in marathon training I thought I'd try subbing the usual pint out for something healthier - Guinness 0.0, a zero-alcohol version of the St. James's Gate classic that took four years to develop:

It's good! I wouldn't say it tastes exactly like a Guinness (even the best vacuum distillation methods unavoidably change the structure and flavor of beer), but it's pretty close.  Regular Guinness doesn't have all that much alcohol to begin with, and the beer's signature roasted malt flavors seem to make the jump to nonalcoholic pretty easily. So, if for whatever reason you are trying to reduce the alcohol in your life, a Guinness 0.0 is one of the better choices out there.

Books: The Measure

One of fiction's oldest tropes is arcane foreknowledge of the time of a person's death - from Julius Caesar and the Ides of March, all the way to Justin Timberlake in In Time. Nikki Erlick's novel, The Measure, takes this idea to its logical extreme: in the book, everyone on Earth magically receives an indestructible piece of string that indicates when they are going to die with perfect accuracy, down to the month and year.

I read The Measure for my book club (the cover quote literally says it's "perfect for book clubs") and I liked it okay. The novel is relatively short yet has an ensemble cast of eight characters, so they all feel like sketches rather than fully realized people. 

On the plus side, the story moves briskly and Erlick does a decent job of imagining the societal effects if everyone knew "the measure" of their lives.  Some people with "short strings" become hedonistic travelers, others become depressed, and a tiny minority become violent, which is all woven through the plot.  It's a relatively thought-provoking, breezy read that is...perfect for book clubs.

Miscellany: The Rosenberg Railroad Museum

Like many kids, my nephew is absolutely crazy about trains, so we took him to the Rosenberg Railroad Museum in the city of Rosenberg, Texas.

As far as railway museums go, this is one of the best ones I've been to, mostly thanks to the friendly and knowledgeable staff, and the cool restored railroad cars (there's a MoPac caboose and a railcar from 1879).

Admission was cheap, the tour was truly excellent, and my nephew absolutely loved the model trains and the playroom. If you're in the Fort Bend area and you have any interest in trains whatsoever, the Rosenberg Railroad Museum is well worth a visit.

Music: Schoolgirl

It's spring cleaning time here at Shangrila Towers, and that means a whole lot of rock music playing in the background as I excavate all the bric-a-brac in my house.

One obscure band that I just discovered is Annie Taylor, named after someone similarly obscure - a schoolteacher who was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. They're a Swiss band that sounds like a cross between Wolf Alice and Hole, with some killer grunge/punk riffs that could have come from your best friend's garage.  If you need an example, here's their track "Schoolgirl":

Miscellany: Mulliga Runs a Marathon, Part 3 - The Gear

I'm planning some serious training runs this year to prepare for my December marathon, so I'm making upgrades to my old running setup:

Hydration Pack - Hooking water bottles on a waistbelt just doesn't cut it when you're out for a 20-mile run, so I decided to pick up a "hydration pack" (essentially a form-fitting vest with onboard water). Lots of companies make good packs, so you'll have to narrow down your choices with some questions. How far are you running? Are you running on the road or on a trail? Do you prefer using water bottles or a water bladder (or both)? Ultimately, I went with the Nathan VaporAir 3.0 7L - it's lighter than it looks and can hold a full 2L bladder, plus two more soft water flasks in the front shoulder pockets.

GPS-Enabled Fitness Tracker - When I was starting out, I ran all my training runs the same - at a steady pace that was somewhat slower than what I could do in a 5k.  Now though, I am doing all sorts of runs - long distance stuff, speedwork, and everything in between, along with "easy" recovery runs to add time on my feet. To track all that, I use my Apple Watch, but really any GPS smartwatch or wearable would be fine - Garmin has plenty to choose from.

Chafing Protection - For any run over 5 to 6 miles, I watch out for chafing and blisters.  That means wearing synthetic or "technical" shirts and socks, lubing up any high friction areas with a Vaseline stick, and perhaps most importantly, protecting myself from bloody nipples (NipGuards - a very silly name, but they work).

Nutrition - For any run over 10 miles, I like to fuel with some in-run nutrition (you know, what normal people call "food"). There are a host of products out there designed for long-distance runners, most of them pretty artificial and processed, but I am usually so hungry during and after a run that I just don't care. If you don't want to break the bank, you could probably get away with stuff like raisins or gummy bears - anything small, self-contained, and sweet.

Medical/Emergency - I have never run over 13 miles, but the training runs on my plan go way over that distance. That seems like a long time to me, so I plan on taking some basic lightweight first aid and emergency items (cash, etc.), just so I can get myself back home safe.

Tech: Counter-Strike 2 review

I'm an old man in "gamer years," a geezer who can remember when Wolfenstein and Doom were state of the art. That's why it was a bit surprising that I got positively bodied in my first few rounds of Counter-Strike 2, the latest version of Valve's tactical multiplayer action game:

Like prior versions of CS, CS2 pits terrorists against counter-terrorists in a variety of scenarios: bomb defusal, hostage rescue, etc. Damage is fairly realistic; a single headshot from any of the assault rifles is usually enough to kill you, and once you die, you don't respawn until the next round. CS2 adds in a variety of fancy graphical effects and some subtle gameplay tweaks (the cloud from a smoke grenade can be displaced with gunfire and frag grenades), but it's still basically the same game I was playing on a dial-up modem in high school 20-odd years ago.

Unfortunately, this latest iteration appears to be chock full of cheaters. Wallhacks, aimbots, and the like are everywhere on the Valve servers, and the game just isn't fun when you're guaranteed to lose the vast majority of the firefights. If you can find a trusted group to play with, go for it, but otherwise, I think I might hang up my digital MP5 for good...

Rating: 80/100