an easy week

I haven't been running too much this week, and it's been nice to have an easy week.  I have been focusing this week on a lot more speed stuff, including some sprint drills Derek taught me, and on a 70 minute run yesterday morning I stopped at the track and ran some sprints and 200s.  I'm pretty sore today from all of that.  The exciting thing is, though, that it's racing season, with local 5Ks almost every weekend, and I'm excited to see what I can do at a distance that's not really the one I train for.  Frequent racing is not only fun, but helps get you very fit, fast, and mentally tough.  So we'll see whether this summer will bring a 5K PR. I'd very much like it too.  I don't think I've run under 17:00 since high school.  I wonder if I can.  Last 5K I ran was something like 17:13 (I think) and that was in the middle of marathon training last fall. 

On a totally random note--here's my plug for the PBS series Downton Abbey, an enchanting Edwardian period piece about a fictional family of English aristocrats in the ominous years between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of WWI.  There's a whole lot to say about it, but seriously, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone.  It's absolutely great.

I'm also reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan -- here's a plug for that.  His Age of Reagan begins with Nixon and ends with Obama, and it's the story of the entree of the extreme right into the mainstream of American political life and the eclipse not only of New Deal Liberalism, but moderate conservatism.  Reagan is central to his story, but in the end, he's less important than the extremists--like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan--whom his own un-ideological pragmatism and politic willingness to compromise ultimately leaves disappointed and disaffected.  Wilentz redeems Reagan from right-wing haigiography and left-wing demonizing, and the 40th president who emerges from his portrait is one whose achievements in ending the cold war owe to luck and private idealism rather than to the hard-line stance he often faked in his rhetoric.