Two goals

In life, we need to set clear goals. Here are two of mine.

First, a running goal. Last night I signed up for a half-marathon in Toledo, Ohio which will occur on the morning of Sunday April 24th. It will be the second half-marathon I’ve run, the first being in Rhode Island along the Atlantic Ocean in the fall of 2017. That was challenging race, but I completed it in a little over 2 hours with a smile on my face. But now, I’m almost five years older and I about twenty pounds heavier. So I expect it to be more difficult, and I’ll run more slowly. But no matter. I have a clear goal – to finish the Toledo race and not get injured along the way.

How am I going to do that? Well I have been running and walking a decent amount this winter – 5Ks and other jogs. I’ve also been working with a running coach, Colin Turner, and group of students in a boot-camp. But with my travels and the ice and snow in Boston, I haven’t been focused on a race. Well, today, I am going to start being focused. My countdown is at 47 days.

I’m putting together a plan for how many miles per day I need to run, what days I will do long runs, speed-work, cross training, what foods to eat, etc. I’m excited for this race because my cousin, Kevan Toney, is going to be running the full Toledo marathon which occurs the same morning. Hopefully we’ll get a lot of family out at the finish line!

https://youtu.be/TdENfV4MLGI

And here’s the second goal. We need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Last night I attended a meeting of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility (GBPSR) with such Nobel Prize luminaries as James Muller and Ira Helfand, along with Regina Larocque and Joseph Hodgkin and others. I was active with the organization from 2015-2017 but stepped back for a variety of reasons. But now, with the crisis in Ukraine/Russia, I’m happy to be involved once more.

The rationale for a world free of nuclear weapons has been made numerous times since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s was a time of high alert when people became very aware of the danger, along with the 1980s with the Cold War. Now, another wave for the abolition of nuclear weapons is building.

What can you do?

You can learn more about the issue, reading the Boston Globe article about James Muller, Ira Helfand, and colleagues. You can read the Lancet article Ira and colleagues wrote recently about nukes. You can sign this petition, No Nuclear War over Ukraine.

And you can contact me – at GBPSR, we are revamping our strategy for the abolition of these weapons. It’s clear that getting rid of the weapons will require a broad social movement. More countries, such as Taiwan, are angling to get weapons. But the more countries that have weapons, the greater the risk of accidental nuclear war.

Instead, we need a new global order, led by a revamped powerful United Nations and World Health Organization.

It was Albert Einstein who once wrote in a telegram: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

In life, you need to set goals, and then figure out a strategy to achieve them.

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