(Note: the news right now is disturbing. I feel like it seems to be growing more and more so by the day?! AND life also continues to flow in its usual way, too. Which I will continue to write about here. I hope this provides a bit of a respite; I definitely find that in the blogs I love to read.)
Weekly Workouts
M: 9 mi with my friend Jacy 8:58/mi ave. HOT.
T: 2 warmup / 10 x 2 min @ 5K effort with 1 min walk/recovery intervals / 2 cooldown. Warmup was 9:40/mi, intervals were between 7:01/mi and 7:14/mi, cooldown was 10:14/mi. I was hotttttt and was happy I was able to keep my interval paces pretty consistent (felt like I was slowing down a ton but my watch says otherwise). I also did CG’s Iron leg workout, which left me sore for about 4 days. HOTTEST day of the week, 81 with 87% humidity at the start.
W: Group run, 8.5 mi @ 9:23/mi. Took a route I never take on my own, which was nice. Weather from here on out was slightly more tolerable, like 77-78F instead of over 80. It does make a difference!!
R: Easy 8 mi @ 9:52/mi, strides at end.
F: No running or workout because of Japanese straightening on Thursday!
S: 14 mi total, 9:30/mi for first 4 miles, 8:15/mi for 6 MP miles, 9:37/mi for last 4 miles. This was my first run trying the ASICS Superblast 2. I did not love them. I think I expected them to feel like super shoes and they absolutely did not. Ahh well. They are fine for trainers though I didn’t really like them any more than my usual (much cheaper) Novablasts. My HR was 174-177 for those “MP” miles which is crazy. I felt it, too.
S: Strength. Confession – I was going to book an F45 class but got too scared!!! I . . . need to suck it up and just do it. I am worried it will be all guys throwing around super heavy weights in an unwelcoming environment. (Does anyone do F45 and is that . . . accurate?)
Total miles = 47 // Strength – hopefully x 2, I am determined to do SOMETHING today . . .
Reading – A WOW Week for Me
I finished two books this weekend: Sandwich by Catherine Newman and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Honestly, they both spoke to me. Neither were perfect works, in my opinion. But both made made me think and reflect and even . . . grow as a reader as I was reading them. And that means a lot!
Sandwich is centered around a woman who is in her late 50s with grown children (they are 20 + 24) and aging parents (in their 80s, I would guess). I loved the joy in her interactions with her young adult children, even in mundane activities. I thought the parents were portrayed SO WELL, too. The book just made me think so much about the various phases of parenting and the passage of time. I actually DIDN’T feel she romanticized the little kid years much (and openly acknowledged how hard they were!), and I appreciated that.
The Anxious Generation is about . . . well, mostly about Gen Z and phones. It is filled with research findings and takeaways and while the opening chapters felt a bit sensationalized (and made me anxious myself), some of you noted that the tone shifts as the book progresses and I agree. There was basically nothing in this book that totally surprised me, and yet I came away with a deeper understanding of many of the issues AND appreciated the practical suggestions laid out in the third part of the book. SPOILER ALERT, the 4 big suggestions made are (this is directly from the book):
- No smartphones before high school (NOTE – the evidence provided makes me feel an even more specific rec would be no social media before high school)
- No social media before 16
- Phone-free schools (how I WISH my kids’ schools were phone free. The current school is theoretically phone free but not actually phone free, and the school A will be going to allows kids their phones between classes and for a period of time after lunch. I really really wish they wouldn’t.)
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. I am here for this, and also find it very challenging in practice (but want to seek out ways to make it happen).
Anyway. I highly recommend BOTH books I finished this week (#28 and #29 for the year, respectively).
15 Comments
What a great week of training for you! I just did my long run this morning and it was a really hard run. Humidity was 95% and it was in the 70s and I felt every step and had to take a lot of walk breaks.
I don’t know that Newman romanticized the little kid stage but she was very nostalgic about that stage so I feel like I am not quite the target audience for the book. But I still really liked it.
I’ve never done F45 so I don’t know- but I would be anxious about it too. I ALWAYS feel like a “strength imposter” at the gym, and I hate it when I’m surrounded to super muscle-y guys. My advice would be to just go anyway, and if you feel intimidated at all just keep thinking “you guys might be strong, but I’ll bet you couldn’t run a BQ qualifier like I just did!”
That book… it makes me so frustrated. When my son was in 6th grade we gave in and got him an iphone, because LITERALLY everyone else had one. And even the teachers would occasionally tell kids to take out their phones and look things up! It just didn’t seem fair to him to not have one. Plus it’s just such an important part of social interactions now. You would really have to be surrounded by like-minded people, and have to school be completely on board with a no-phones rule. Otherwise it’s not realistic, which makes me upset because I agree with all the evidence that it’s not good for them.
About the news- every once in a while I sit down to write a blog post and go off on a tangent about current events… then I say “nope!” and delete the whole thing. No one wants to hear about that- we’re all anxious right now, and there’s no reason to add fuel to the fire.
But I feel like he presented arguments that might persuade schools to do just that – NOT let them have their distraction machines with them all day long when they are supposed to be learning and interacting with others. If nothing else I am going to contact the leaders at the schools my kids go to and ask them to please read the book. I guess I have some hope! Though not unrealistic levels of optimism. And I also felt the ‘free range’ part of the book was valuable. I will say the current ways our communities are structured makes it hard. Getting anywhere out of our neighborhood even is a mile so it’s not like you can go easily on a jaunt to the ‘corner store’. But you COULD go to the community pool or playground with friends.
I know there are a lot of administrators and teachers who would really like to enforce no phone rules and they are sometimes afraid of pushback from parents. So if they get pressure from parents to install and enforce bans, that could help the pendulum swing.
I think collective parental pressure could work. Teachers must hate the distraction and drama phones cause. Whenever the school says something about phones, I send a message of support for it.
This is where I think there needs to be a multi-pronged approach. There is policy change both at the local level at schools etc. and regulating social media companies. There is also what you do at home. You can both do your best at home and work on supporting changes at the policy level especially at the school level.
My kids have phones starting in middle school. Kids in our town get a lot of freedom in middle school including the ability to leave school to walk into town for lunch. We do do smart phones mostly because we give them our old ones. They also use Greenlight and Apple Pay often as well as Apple maps. This summer both of my older kids have been taking the commuter train and NYC subways on their own and that is all much easier with a smart phone for tickets and maps. Even my 17 yo does not use social media. This is what works for us, but I fully appreciated that it might not be the right choice for other families. However, I am fully in support of our schools doing a better job enforcing the existing no phone policy which they have promised to do in the coming school year.
lol! At first I interpreted “Japanese straightening “ as a decluttering technique and thought “wow, this must be intense if Sarah is skipping her workout!” 😂
The juxtaposition of normal life and world events (or things that happen even closer to home; something impacting me intensely this week) is…very hard to wrap the mind around. It feels like the only response is to live life more fully and with more love and compassion but…ooff…it’s hard.
I want to read sandwich, the other I think I am convinced about its takeaways without reading the whole book. I read the sample and few interviewed and they validate my prior thoughts and decisions.
I need a wow book to kill my jet lag hours. see? I’m commenting at 3am, was up since 1am. Sigh…
Maybe I’m not understanding what a P45 class is all about, but do men these days attend group workout classes? I don’t remember this being a thing 20 years ago (my last group workout class lol). Mostly I’d be afraid of looking weak and pathetic to the other attendees in general, and getting scolded by the instructor for some reason (like being weak or inflexible or — like my last yoga class — vomiting in my mouth and stepping out of the room).
F45 has slightly CrossFit vibes and I think a more “heavy lifting” rep but you may be right! Only one way for me to find out … if I can get past the (probably dumb) intimidation!
Oh it’s definitely not dumb, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how it goes. Keep us posted!
SHU, I haven’t done F45 but know lots of women who have tried and love it and I don’t think it’s a super male heavy zone. Pure Barre also has a heavier weights class now (Define) if there’s one near you! I think it feels more accessible for some.
I agree the AG recommendations around giving kids more independence are challenging to implement in the culture/society we live in, but I am feeling motivated to try some of them. We have had our kids walk home from school alone (we live in a big city) since ages 8.5 and 10 (they are now 10 and 11) and that has been one of the best things for their independence that I have observed, honestly. So then the book pushed me to try to do more things like that–having them walk to friends’ houses alone, walk to the neighborhood rec center with a friend to play when they have a friend over, forcing non-screen play with friends preferably outside with free range of our immediate neighborhood, going to the corner store to buy small items alone, etc. I realize a lot of this is neighborhood-dependent, though! Not everyone can walk to all these things–adults or kids.
We have also done short sleepaway camps and camping trips with friends. When we do family camping, we prioritize places where the kids can go off on their own and do stuff and basically just check in for meals and such. I also printed off a list for the summer of life skills to teach your kids and we have been working our way through that list.
The book also definitely motivated me to advocate for a phones-free policy at my rising 6th grader’s middle school–I asked about this on the tour and it sounds like they currently have a policy that the kids can use phones between classes and at lunch which is NOT enough.
Love this! This sounds a lot like what we are trying, and we are also lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where free play is both possible and encouraged and all the parents quietly keep an eye on everyone. It is my absolute favorite part of living where we do. We purposely dial back all the structured activities to allow more time for this. We certainly still do some, but I’ve always wanted to prioritize free time over all the structured time, but I get that what you do is influenced by where you live.
The state of VA (where I live) is attempting to ban phones in schools. With all the data, I’m guessing we’ll see more of this soon.