1:21

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I guess I can use the holidays as an excuse. Christmas was pretty run of the mill here. I'm finding as I get older I enjoy giving people gifts more than receiving them myself. This is a good thing. Among Christmas gifts this year were a bunch of books I'm psyched to read. I left my Cicero biography back in Boston, so I started "The Lost Painting" by Jonathan Harr (also wrote "A Civil Action", which I just finished, and featured Foley Hoag, the law firm I work at). It's pretty good so far... fairly light reading. Hopefully I'll finish it sooner rather than later. I'm most excited to read "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. He's a Op-Ed columnist in the New York Times. (Thank god we have a subscription and I can read Brooks, Dowd (barf), Krugman and Friedman now that the New York Times online has started charging for these columns.) The book deals with globalization in the recent past. This is interesting to me becuase with the advent of the internet and techonology, progress is being made at an incredible rate. The ability of people to communicate on a global level is breaking barriers that people had held for granted for a long time. Reading books like these also makes me feel smart.

Running: On Christmas I did 5.5 from home. It was like 40 and raining. I asked myself more than once what the heck I was thinking leaving my cozy house to go out and run on Christmas. Oh well.... I guess my high school running streak (5 years 11 days) has had some residual effects on my running mentality. Monday I did Skidmore backloop, 8.5. Such a great run. I've been doing it since I was in 7th and 8th grade and it never gets old. Today I ran 11.5, long strock loop plus backloop. Took 1:21:05. I probably should have run 14 or 15 to made up for a lack of a Sunday long run. Oh well. Plan is to head back to Boston on Thursday, and run a mile race at BU on New Year's Eve. That should be interesting to say the least considering I haven't done any speedwork since the summer....