Easy relaxed day flying three coast to coast legs. Not much time to get in a run and not worrying about it. Sweet to have internet access all day while moving 600 miles an hor across the country. I wish all of our planes had this. It literally does not feel like a job at all.
I've made it halfway through a training book on Lydiard's methods and it's neat to see what has worked in my training and what I have done wrong. The most interesting are the parts that have taken me a while to come up with on my own and then read them already put down years ago by this coach.
At the start of this year several family members begged me to run the TOU marathon with them next week and paid the sign up fees. They were joined by 4 other friends and they all started "training". This week the last of them called to say they were dropping out. Out of 7 people, not one would train through to run a marathon. One friend told me that she just couldn't believe the effort it took. She wasn't going to run the thing simply because of the work to get ready for it. My own son, after getting up to 8 mile runs, just flat out stopped two months ago. It was like he just couldn't understand that you had to stay with something for so long and he really wanted this. (His girlfriend is running it). The effort in life to do something physical was just too much. It's curious to me because I think it reflects a huge general trend in society right now. We should be given things, or recognition; we just deserve them. For the first time in 17 years flying that I can remember, I will have teenagers come up to the cockpit for a tour and ask how to get a job like this, and when I explain that it's no big deal, you just have to stay in school, get a college degree and spend two years getting your ratings, the excitement just fades. They literally lose interest in a few minutes. And it's so damn easy to do. Almost anything in life worth getting at all takes weeks, months and years of work. Check out the marathon scene. Marathoning and half marathoning are more popular than ever, some sell out in a few days. So you'd think we are faster and more dedicated to what it takes to run, but the average time to finish one is steadily increasing. Maybe it's just my experience, but none of these friends and family that have dropped out had any injuries, they just didn't want to train. They just wanted to go run one. My son asked yesterday how to get ready race morning, he was still planning on running the marathon in four days. I told him no way he was going to run it unless he trained for it. It was basically trying to show him that you don't do something that you won't work for. It was an hour long discussion, but I think he understands a little more about it.
This spring I had a hard time explaining to my neighbor why my daughter would not be on the soccer team this year. They just changed to a "no scoring" status since it's better for the kids. I didn't do a very good job of explaining why sports and competition are so critical to education and to life so it's been on my mind a few times this summer. | 