Starting jogging

As I announced at the end of February (in Twenty-eighth weight progress report), I plan to start running again, with the goal of running  Bike Santa Cruz County’s  12km run on 26 August 2018 at Wilder Ranch.  It has been four decades or more since I did any real running, so I’ll have to work up to it slowly (adding 1 km a week).

I started out this weekend by jogging around the block (1.1 km) each day.  My times are not great: 5:30–6:14, which is 10.7–12.1 km/hr, or an 8–9-minute mile pace, but my goal for the summer is just to build up my legs until I can run 12km, not to get particularly fast.  Even back when I jogged on a regular basis, I was not fast.  I’ll be very pleased if I can hold a 8-minute-mile pace for 12km by the end of the summer, without injuring myself.

I plan to continue doing the 1.1km every day this week, increasing to 2km next weekend.  Eventually I’ll start alternating between long and short days, perhaps even adding a rest day each week for recovery, but while my distances are so short, I might as well do them every day.

Season theater tickets purchased for 2018

In the past week, I have bought my season tickets for both Santa Cruz Shakespeare and Jewel Theatre. For both, we ended up buying three subscriptions—for my wife, my son, and me, although there is one of the Jewel Theatre performances that my son will not be in town for.

The SCS tickets are only available to “members” at the moment, but go on sale to the general public on May 15 (but for $50 you can become a member right away).  By buying tickets on the first day that sales opened to members, we managed to get ideal seating. We are going to everything:

• Love’s Labours Lost
• Romeo and Juliet
• Venus in Fur
• Men I’m Not Married To (the interns’ production)
• Doll’s House (staged reading—free)
• The Taming (staged reading—free)

In fact, we’re going to Love’s Labours Lost twice, because my mother-in-law will be in town during the previews, when our son can’t go, so we’ll go with her to the preview and with our son to a showing later in the season.

Similarly, the Jewel Theatre tickets are only available to subscribers (they haven’t even posted the new season on their website yet), but you can become a new subscriber at no cost (other than tickets).  We are only going to 4 of the 5 shows, because we see no point to going to their musical.  (I don’t like musicals in general, and my wife likes some musicals, but not this year’s.)  We’re also not bothering with their non-subscription holiday show—again it is a musical we have no interest in. The shows we are seeing are

• The Beauty Queen of Leenane
• Red Velvet
• Breaking the Code
• The Explorers Club

The Jewel Theatre plays look like an interesting season, though I’m a bit worried about Julie James having cast herself as the lead in the first one—she has a habit of casting herself in parts intended for much younger actresses, and she is almost old enough to be playing the mother rather than the daughter in this play.  Still, it is less of a stretch than some of the roles she has tried to pull off in previous years.

We bought subscriptions to Actors’ Theatre at the beginning of the year, since they start selling in January.  We still have two plays to go in that subscription:

• The Realistic Jones
• Red

This weekend, we are going to a non-subscription theater event: WEST Ensemble Players’ production of Antigone. WEST Ensemble Players are the grade 10–12 invitation-only troupe for WEST Performing Arts, and they are usually pretty good.  We enjoyed the performance of She Kills Monsters that they did in February.