Lord of the Race

Last night (Sat­ur­day), Angela and I went to see the Rich­mond Sym­pho­ny per­form the Lord of the Rings Sym­pho­ny. It’s not that I was­n’t amazed at Howard Shore’s score already, but I was com­plete­ly floored last night. Angela and I both decid­ed that this score ranks up as one of our favorites (indi­vid­u­al­ly, and col­lec­tive­ly). Fur­ther, with all due respect to John Williams, who is anoth­er favorite, this was all com­plete­ly orig­i­nal scor­ing. Williams often uses famous pieces for direct inspi­ra­tion in movie scores, which isn’t all that uncom­mon in film score com­po­si­tion as I under­stand it. Case in point: Carmi­na Burana is an obvi­ous influ­ence on the Darth Maul theme in Star Wars: Episode I. Of course, Williams has plen­ty of orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions to his cred­it (not the least of which, the main theme to Star Wars). How­ev­er, I think that Shore has raised the bar in how com­plex, both musi­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly, a film score can be. He weaves in tra­di­tion­al music, pop music, and sym­pho­ny hand­i­ly. All this, and it was very nice get­ting to see the home town sym­pho­ny play it at the Landmark.

This morn­ing, I ran the Cary­town 10k. My goal: to run the race aver­ag­ing an 8 minute-mile. For those of you who don’t feel like doing the math, that would have been at sub-50 minute race. I had even been run­ning dur­ing lunch breaks the last cou­ple of weeks to make sure the heat would­n’t both­er me too much and that I could keep a good pace going. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I can’t keep a steady pace for long enough. After run­ning a nice 7:50 pace for three miles, I dropped off sharply for most of the next mile-and-a-half. I end­ed up at 51:26, which is whole minute slow­er than my last 10k. What was the dif­fer­ence? I’d say it was the fact that last month, the larg­er race had wave starts, so I start­ed with a whole group of peo­ple to pace with. This race was a pack start, so I was just with what­ev­er group hap­pened to fall in about the mid­dle of the crowd. The les­son here is that I’m going to have to use the pace alarm on my Fore­run­ner if I hope to be able to train for a cer­tain pace. Then, I think I can break the 50 minute wall and reach my next run­ning goal. After that, I hope to work more on dis­tance than speed. After all, I’m not like­ly to ever win any of these (which is a stretch of the term “not like­ly”). How­ev­er, I can at least have some brag­ging rights for run­ning far­ther some day.