Library court case, Death, and Life

Because I'm married to a librarian, I've developed a bit more interest in things involving libraries than I may have otherwise. Here is a court case involving Internet filtering at a library. The library had a filter on, and the lawsuit was challenging their decision to filter.

I won't spoil the decision for you, but I happen to agree with what the decision stated, and I thought their reasoning was pretty interesting, and refreshingly straightforward. This decision was handed down by the Washington State Supreme Court. Here is the link to a summary of the decision, written by a friend of mine at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, one Michael Reitz by name, on the Supreme Court of Washington Blog.

On a different topic, the Internet Monk passed away a month ago, and his site and blog has been kept up by a very able "Chaplain Mike". He has written a very good post about a recent hospice visit to a family whose father was comatose and had never accepted Christ. The man's daughter (at least) is a Christian and asked some questions. Mike put up the questions and some very good discussion on them. Check it out, it's worth the read.

And for those of you who are familiar with Michael Spencer as the Internet Monk, you might know that he wrote a book before he died, but it isn't yet available for sale. The first chapter is available now, and you can read it here: Mere Churchianity.

My first marathon

Yup, 26 miles went by as I jogged and walked along. My sister was visiting and she wanted to run the W&OD trail from here out to it's end, about 12 one-way according to its trail-side markers we passed. She has been running for over a year now, mainly as training for her dog sled races. Most people, when dogsledding in the local races, try to run as much as possible to take the load off their dogs. She does quite well in these races, thanks partly to the fact that she has become a very good runner, and so is not as much of a drag on her dogs as other racers.

She has done several 10-mile runs back up in PA, and the trails and roads there are constantly up and down. She was looking forward to doing some running here where the land is ralatively flat. Our home is about 1/2 a mile from where we get on the trail, which is almost at the 33 mile marker. The trail ends at the 45 mile marker. So that was going to be about 25 miles total. As it turned out, there was a MAJOR detour along the trail that had us go at least a 1/2 mile out of our way each way. And just for a change of pace, we did a few side paths that meandered around following the horse trails.

I've never done a run that long. The longest official races I've been in are 5Ks, and I semi-regularly ran 5-6 miles during college. I haven't gone running longer than a mile at a shot for 6 months.

SO OF COURSE I DECIDED TO GO RUN A MARATHON COLD TURKEY!

We took off at 7:10 in the morning and got back about 1:20. In our defense, we weren't exactly trying for a particular time, and so took several breaks at different points - drink breaks, bathroom breaks, stretching breaks.

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention. I didn't stretch at all before starting.

Anyway, just over 6 hours. Bleh.

To make myself feel better, I pretend that I could have had a faster 5 miles in the beginning I had a faster jog than my sister (thanks to my longer legs) but I held back. (our jogging/walking speeds had evened out by the end, Margaret may have even had the speed advantage on those last 5 miles)

I also studiously ignore the fact that if she hadn't been with me I certainly would have taken more walking breaks during the second half, and might have called in C to pick me up in the car around mile 18.

But, we both persevered through to the end, and were met by C about a 1/2 mile from home, pushing TGM along and bringing MUCH appreciated bottles of drink. We had each taken a bottle of water with us and had refilled it along the way, but on the return trip we went through our bottles much more quickly and wound up running the last 4 or 5 miles without anything to drink.

Oh it felt good coming back home to sit down!

So we ran a marathon, and both of us felt pretty good afterward. Margaret's knee was bothering her a bit, especially going down hills, and the tendons at the back of my knees were pretty sore. My muscles feel like they had a good workout - just a little sore to give a reminder that they did something.

All in all, I had fun, even if doing a full marathon without any sort of training, stretching, or even a decent pair of running shoes is a pretty dumb thing to do.

Maybe I'll try it again in a couple weeks!