Shut the front door and back the truck up

Couldn't think of a title for this miscellany.

Next big thing in running books

Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken."

"Born to Run" introduced a lot of people to the Tarahumara (and led to more people wearing minimal footwear), though I'd been interested in them as long as I can remember - I can just barely recall the Mexico City Olympics, where they first came to attention in the U.S. and I have clippings of articles about them from as far back as 1971. I like being ahead of the curve, I guess.

"Unbroken" is about Louis Zamperini, who I first heard about in 1985, reading an old copy of Fred Wilt's "How They Train." There was mention made there of an autobiography that sounded fascinating. A few years later, I met Wilt and I was able to obtain a copy of Zamperini's book - a very interesting story, made for being turned into a movie, but poorly written and smacking of exaggeration. During the Nagano winter Olympics, there was a profile of him and there were some interesting developments. Now Hillenbrand, who made a name for herself (and a pile of money) writing "Seabiscuit," has retold Zamperini's story. I'm not a fan of Hillenbrand, but the book will undoubtedly catch an audience. There won't be any training changes similar to those from "Born to Run," though; the book's largely starvation and torture (and forgiveness).

It came from Steve's Evil Kitchen

Haven't done a post about my cooking exploits in a long time. I'm currently trying to make a good pumpkin pie. So far, I've found about 20 things wrong with the standard (awful) Thanks(fornothing)giving pie I've been making and I've been making corrections. It's coming along, but I'm starting to think that people find the flavor of pumpkin objectionable and will do anything to hide it - sort of like when people give you something made of rhubarb and it's strawberry and sugar with a stalk of rhubarb waved over it.

How I plan to train if I ever get healthy

I've been looking at all the training schedules I've written for myself over the past 15 years and I'm forever trying to be extremely specific to one distance. It's got me thinking: I ran my first couple of ultras well because I was well-trained to do shorter distances; then I abandoned the short-and-fast training to focus on running longer, but ended up just getting slower. Now I'm not running well at any distance.

Is it possible to train to do it all - to train to run very short fast races and still run extremely long ones? I've always thought that being non-specific was wasting effort, but perhaps being "well-rounded" is the way to go. I've started planning again, this time to be "adequate" at all distances, rather than "very good" at one.

I prefer planning training to actually training. This should keep me busy all winter.