Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Easy week ahead (and a question)

Because I've been fighting a cold and cough for close to two weeks, and because I spent 7 of 9 days outside skiing while sick, this is going to be an easy week. I also want to do any workouts indoors, hoping to let my lungs and my voice (some mild laryngitis) recover in warmer air.

So, last night, I did an upper body lifting workout. I was in and out of the gym in 45 minutes. No super-high weights. Not a long workout.

I came home, ate a quick dinner, and I was in bed before 8:00. I read for a bit, but I was asleep before 8:30. I got 9+ hours of sleep last night.

I'll continue that trend this week - low-key workouts, early bedtimes, and I'll wait until my lungs recover before I do any running. My mileage for the year is pretty pathetic so far - one run of about 3.5 miles.

On another topic, it seems that many of the blogs I read - personal rather than professional - are updated less frequently these days than in the past. Maybe it's the time of year that endurance athletes are taking it easy. But, I have to wonder if Facebook and Twitter are slowly killing blogs. Many of the authors of the blogs I read are also Facebook friends. Has our attention span gotten so short that Facebook is the limit of what we want to write or read?

Print magazines have certainly changed over the last couple decades, with long, detailed stories becoming less common, and short fluff pieces filling many magazines. One of my favorite magazines was Gourmet and I subscribed for 25 years. Right up until the end, there were still long, in-depth articles in that magazine. And then, the magazine got killed by its publisher last year.

The greatest magazine article I think I ever read was "Consider the Lobster" by the late David Foster Wallace. How many magazines these days have readers with attention spans to read an article like that? I remember even Gourmet readers complaining about the article, although much of that was disagreement with the theme of the article itself.

Are we heading to a point where our attention span is so short that text messages and Twitter are the limit of how long we can think about one topic?

What was I talking about?

1 comment:

Harriet said...

Yes, blog posts consume more time. I still write them as I like to babble.

But yes, I've had to FORCE myself to take time off of the computer and to actually read books; I've had some success with that.

My ability to concentrate had been dropping.

I think that it is no coincidence that I finally finished writing a long-overdue math paper when I forced myself to read more.