Month: February 2007

Fifty minutes on the stationary bicycle, going up and down hills while going nowhere at all. But at least I finished The Atlantic and The Week. Lazy, lazy Saturday otherwise.

Another almost-rainy run, this time downhill to work, with alternating fast/slow blocks as I ran down Market Street. 23:00.

This weekend, I’m going to take a closer look at We Endure as a training log.

Tim Bray ends his essay “Music and DRM” with a doozy of a line, which I had to cite.

The RIAA? If it had gunpowder for brains, it still wouldn’t be able to blow its nose.

I don’t feel quite so strongly about DRM, since I’m not a music fiend, but I love that line all the same.

Gentle 25:00 run home from work, beating the real rain.

I don’t know if the rest of the country celebrates the arrival of Super Bowl Sunday with a running race. But San Francisco does, with the half-marathon and 5K race in Golden Gate Park. Once again yesterday, I chose the shorter distance. Actually, I never even considered going 13.1 miles. Age brings wisdom?

The 5K course shifted a bit again this year, but it’s still slightly downhill overall and therefore the time is a salve to the ego. Official results have me at 18:37, for a 5:59 pace, and 15th overall. Compare to 2006 or 2005. My first mile split was 5:57, when I mistakenly hit stop instead of lap, so later splits were erratic.

Not sure what the next race will be, but I was pleased with this one.

When We Were Kings opened my eyes to why Muhammad Ali holds such a special place in the sports pantheon, and far beyond. While I’m too young to have first-hand knowledge of Ali’s flair and Homeric virtues, this documentary lets Ali entertain you. The fresh wit, the fierce fighting, the consciousness of his opportunities and the uniqueness of his role in American society… all comes through in this film. When We Were Kings was filmed mostly in 1974, but wasn’t finished and distributed until 1997, when it won an Oscar for Best Documentary.

The fight itself — the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” — is a frame for the film. But the story told doesn’t depend on the boxing. It’s about Ali, and the other figures who revolve around him (like it or not): Don King, George Foreman, and others. Even James Brown and other musical legends were part of the Zaire event. I had no idea the African stage became such a wide-ranging festival… all because Mobutu Seko, the Zairean dictator, offered Ali and Foreman $5M each to hold the fight in the middle of Africa. The more contemporary interviews with Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, both of whom covered the fight as journalists, were sparing, but provided useful background for the now-period footage.

The best parts, again, are simply watching Ali in his prime, both as a man and a boxer (at least, he won). These images help offset the Atlanta Olympics torch-lighting, and subsequent public appearances over the last decade, where the physical consequences of years in the ring are all too apparent.

Metacritic score of 83 denotes “universal acclaim.” Sounds right.

47 minutes at a leisurely pace in Golden Gate Park on a clear, crisp morning with Carla. Great way to loosen up for tomorrow morning’s 5K.

John Dunning writes mysteries set in the world of books. The Bookwoman’s Last Fling is the most recent of his novels centering on bookman Cliff Janeway, a more dramatic version of the author himself, who does run a bookstore. I was drawn into these via my mother, whose fondness for Dick Francis she inculcated early on.

In this book, at least, Dunning blends books and horses, so a good mix — although I really don’t know horses beyond what I’ve read in Dick Francis mysteries. This book is a pleasant enough read, but happy it’s going back to the library now.