Starting Over, Again

Over the last couple of weeks, my training has really suffered. I have
only myself to blame, of course, as I either train too hard too
quickly or talk myself out of even a simple workout. "Why would I want
to run for only a half hour?" I would say in one breath, and in the
next strap on my Vibrams for a 9 mile paced run with no build-up.

This is a recognized pattern with my training: I start a disciplined
campaign to "kill it", followed by "time off". It's never
"intentional", but it happens just the same. Take January for example:
166 miles run! I took on the 2015 in 2015 challenge, and I was doing
pretty well with the average 5.6 miles per day. Then comes February,
where my discipline flags and my mileage dropped off precipitously.

Determined to "start again", I made the aforementioned mistake and ran
a "barefoot" 9-10 miler coming off a two week break. I felt great and
had a lot of fun on the trail. The following day, my legs were
trashed, weak. Tuesday was a sore day, but Wednesday I walked around
favoring my calves heavily, and the inside of my right knee needed to
be iced for two nights. It wasn't until Friday that I started to feel
normal again.

So, I'm going to start over, again. Hopefully, these 40 years of age
will afford me some sort of wisdom in the approach. The July Voyager
50 will arrive quickly enough; there's no reason to kill myself so
early in the season. I get up early enough in the day that I can
afford to run or workout before work. Let's see if I can simply get
back into the practice of daily running.

A Promise to Learn Esperanto!

It was through a deep dive on Reddit.com humor thread about the pronunciation of the acronym GIF that I learned about an Auxiliary Language called Esperanto², which which I am now enamored. After continuing my internet research and unscientific comparison of similar efforts, I'm convinced Esperanto, above others, is worthwhile to learn. The reasons haven't changed since 1887, and with the advent of the internet, I feel that access to the materials and the importance of a common, non-political, unambiguous language is needed more than ever. I may be a bit idealistic, but I think the time is right for an international language such as Esperanto to gain critical mass and break down communication barriers. To that goal, I am making the promise as requested by Zamenhof in his original work¹:

Promeso.

Mi, subskribita, promesas ellerni la proponitan de d-ro Esperanto lingvon internacian, se estos montrita, ke dek milionoj personoj donis publike tian saman promeson.

Subskribo: Chad Walstrom, Woodbury, MN USA

Translation:

I, the undersigned, promise to learn the international language, proposed by Dr. Esperanto, if it shall be shown that ten million similar promises have been publicly given.

Back Cover

In 1887, Warsaw was under the thumb of the Russian empire. In that year, an obscure Polish eye-doctor, Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, published identical pamphlets in Russian, Polish, French, and German, proposing Esperanto the easy-to-learn neutral second language for every country.

Today, Esperanto is alive and well around the world, and throughout the Internet. This is the 1889 English version of that “First Book” where it all began, reprinted for a new millennium.

“My whole grammar can be learned perfectly in one hour.”
– L. L. Zamenhof

Footnotes

¹ Zamenhof, L. L. "Dr. Esperanto's International Language, Introduction & Complete Grammar", 1887. English Translation by R.H. Geoghegan, 1889. HTML Version 2006-11-28 Gene Keyes Website http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html

²Esperanto Reference on Omniglot: Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages

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