I have goals, and I don't mind getting dirty to achieve them.
I'm back on the blogging landscape after a two-year hiatus. It was a reluctant but necessary sabbatical, born of my engagement on the front lines of Life's Great Scrimmage. To wit, battling the external and internal forces that vie to take me down as I juggle kids, school, work, and relationship and personal maintenance. Keeping your head above these murky waters takes a lot of elbow grease and mental effort, as evidenced by me in the above picture.
But though it's been a tough stretch, especially in the last year, I never give up, because a) my kids need me to keep it together; b) there are just too many amazing things to do and see and experience to pack it in prematurely (that's me being inspirational); and c) what doesn't kill you makes you do crazy things that just might kill you. And by "you," I mean "me." And by "crazy things that might kill you/me," I mean this, which I'll be competing in on June 1.
The Spartan Race is one of the leaders in the "adventure race" category, competing against Warrior Dash and Tough Mudder for the title of Most Extreme Obstacle Course for Regular People Ever. There are knockoffs, including an amusing zombie rendition, but these are widely considered the big three. The New York Times has published a couple of engaging articles covering the genre, including this and this, and there's a whole intriguing substory about the not-so-friendly competitiveness among the guys who created these individual races. Will Dean, the evil genius behind Tough Mudder, has been called "the Mark Zuckerberg of extreme sports," and that's not meant to be a compliment.
However, from my own obsessive research and personal experience (I completed the 2010 Warrior Dash at Windham Mountain in gloriously pathetic time), I've found that all of these events are simply anchored by mud, fire, barbed wire, costumed competitors, and a Woodstock-esque festival ambience replete with music, meat-on-a-stick, and beer, all of which preclude anyone from taking these challenges too seriously. Not that you don't deserve bragging rights for completing the course, but I'd love to know what someone like Dean Karnazes thinks.
Anyway, I'm now registered for my latest adventure, ready to start training in earnest. I'm the world's laziest human being (I'm not even initial-capping that title for emphasis, that's how lazy I am), so it's always exciting to see how these exercise endeavors turn out. It's sad and funny and heartbreaking and inspirational and devastating and boring, all at the same time!
The toughest part for me, though, will be to get back into the groove of longer-form writing, another one of my goals for 2013. My 9-5 job requires condensing lengthy items and concepts into 100-word blurbs, or "infosnacks." This, along with Twitter, has proven terrific for boosting my literary/semantic discipline and conciseness, but pretty terrible for my attention span and ability to string together more than five sentences in one sitting. Fewer than 24 months ago, I was whipping up brain-asploding papers for an attempted English master's (more on that particular battle another time), but I don't think anyone gives a crap about reading my 25-page manifesto entitled "Abelard's Insurrection: Rejection of the Cattle Thief's Conventions in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." If you are interested, I'll send you the abstract and we'll take it from there.
So here I go again, on my own (H/T Whitesnake). I'm going to resurrect my Warrior Hauswife Facebook page, so keep up with me that way, or head over to Twitter to witness my daily brain dumps.
The Spartan Race is one of the leaders in the "adventure race" category, competing against Warrior Dash and Tough Mudder for the title of Most Extreme Obstacle Course for Regular People Ever. There are knockoffs, including an amusing zombie rendition, but these are widely considered the big three. The New York Times has published a couple of engaging articles covering the genre, including this and this, and there's a whole intriguing substory about the not-so-friendly competitiveness among the guys who created these individual races. Will Dean, the evil genius behind Tough Mudder, has been called "the Mark Zuckerberg of extreme sports," and that's not meant to be a compliment.
However, from my own obsessive research and personal experience (I completed the 2010 Warrior Dash at Windham Mountain in gloriously pathetic time), I've found that all of these events are simply anchored by mud, fire, barbed wire, costumed competitors, and a Woodstock-esque festival ambience replete with music, meat-on-a-stick, and beer, all of which preclude anyone from taking these challenges too seriously. Not that you don't deserve bragging rights for completing the course, but I'd love to know what someone like Dean Karnazes thinks.
Anyway, I'm now registered for my latest adventure, ready to start training in earnest. I'm the world's laziest human being (I'm not even initial-capping that title for emphasis, that's how lazy I am), so it's always exciting to see how these exercise endeavors turn out. It's sad and funny and heartbreaking and inspirational and devastating and boring, all at the same time!
The toughest part for me, though, will be to get back into the groove of longer-form writing, another one of my goals for 2013. My 9-5 job requires condensing lengthy items and concepts into 100-word blurbs, or "infosnacks." This, along with Twitter, has proven terrific for boosting my literary/semantic discipline and conciseness, but pretty terrible for my attention span and ability to string together more than five sentences in one sitting. Fewer than 24 months ago, I was whipping up brain-asploding papers for an attempted English master's (more on that particular battle another time), but I don't think anyone gives a crap about reading my 25-page manifesto entitled "Abelard's Insurrection: Rejection of the Cattle Thief's Conventions in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." If you are interested, I'll send you the abstract and we'll take it from there.
So here I go again, on my own (H/T Whitesnake). I'm going to resurrect my Warrior Hauswife Facebook page, so keep up with me that way, or head over to Twitter to witness my daily brain dumps.
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