This entry in my 2023 in review is a smörgåsbord, covering everything I have not covered in the other parts of the series: music, photography, health and fitness, and church.

Music

The major public bit of musical work I did this year was publishing a recording of “Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight”. I hoped originally to find a label to publish that, and it might have been possible, but I was so overwhelmed by the difficult start to the year at work that I just wanted to get the thing out into the world. It has gotten only a few dozen plays all year, but then I did not do the things which would have helped, like contacting people to get it on playlists in Spotify. Lessons learned for next time! I am enormously proud of it, though. It is a good little fanfare.

(In case you missed it: you can listen to it on the streaming service of your choice, or watch a video of the orchestra playing it!)

I did a lot of musical work beyond that in 2023. It just is not public yet, and I expect most of what I did this year will not be until at least 2025, perhaps even later. When you are working on what I will continue to describe publicly only as “a large-scale symphonic work”, emphasis on “large-scale”, it takes a while to get it across the finish line. My goal in this case is to finish it by the time I am 40, some 3½ years from now, and I started it around the time I turned 34, already 2½ years ago. Working on this project was one of several major side project emphases of my sabbatical. Courtesy of the extra time and focus, I was able to get through a major milestone on the work, and I estimate I am probably about halfway through the composition in terms of the total duration of the finished work, and hopefully somewhat more than that in terms of the time it will take to write it.

I also wrote a much smaller piece a few weeks ago, a little chamber-scale work as a bit of a palette cleanser after getting across that big milestone in the symphonic work. I will have more to share on that front in the next month or two, I think!

Finally, I am on deck to write a congregation-friendly Sanctus for our church, which I need to do… tomorrow. I am playing piano for church on January 7, the first day of Epiphany, and we like to use a different Sanctus for each season in the church calendar. The ones we were looking at using were not particularly singable, and so I volunteered to write one. (Did our music director just troll me into doing this by picking music that would annoy me? No, that is not remotely her style. Did I troll myself into doing it by way of being a complete snob about text setting? Maybe.) I will share that once it is done, perhaps even recording it nicely with Jaimie singing and self-publishing it. These sorts of things will likely crop up more and more going forward. While I do not expect church music ever to be my primary musical context, it is good to put my abilities at the service of the church.

Photography

This was a slow-but-steady kind of year for photography. I kept sharing regularly to Glass. I caught up on a large chunk of my backlog of unedited photos from years past. I also kept working on my editing skills, from learning how to use masks to building a good-enough preset that I can use for the vast majority of the photos I take of family events. That was good learning and saves me a ton of time, given I usually come out of an evening like our extended family Christmas get-together with at least 150 photos.

On the other hand, I do not feel like I particularly improved in my skill at taking photographs this year. When I look back through the year, there are a fair number of photos I like, some of them a lot. There are none, though, that I could not have taken a year or two ago. I am considering ways to improve this in 2024, including the venerable “take and share on a schedule” plan. The main thing, though, is that I did improve on at least one axis this year.

Health and fitness

Despite experiencing some excruciating back issues in the spring (I know now what the phrase “threw out my back” means from direct experience) and spraining my ankle on a trail in Sequoia National Park in July, I had the best year I have had since 2015. It felt even better by way of contrasted with 2022, which I described as “terrible-against-my-baseline”. That goes double given the injuries. I spent some time at the start of the year studying up more on running and cycling training, leading to my adopting a new set of training plans, and it really paid off.

I set out to run a sub-1:30:00 half marathon again. I did so twice, with a 1:28:36 (6:45/mile pace) in the Colfax Half in May and then a 1:26:41 (6:37/mile pace) at the Colorado Springs Half in September. The latter was almost 1,000 feet higher than the former, so running it 2 minutes faster felt particularly satisfying. Adjusted for altitude, that is likely my best-ever performance; I have run faster only twice before, and then at sea level.

Both races were extra fun for having friends at them. I got three of my best friends — none of whom had ever run a half marathon before! — to do Colfax in the spring, and one of them to do Colorado Springs with me in the fall. I have never before had a “team” to train alongside, even virtually, and it was great. Encouraging each other along the way, through the various kinds of injuries that start hitting you in your mid-30s as we all are now, helped us all. Despite being hours apart across the Colorado Front Range, we even managed to run together a couple times this year. I definitely hope to repeat parts of this in 2024.

I also set out to do both of the 40-mile rides at this year’s Courage Classic, which I did, and felt much stronger and more capable when I last did the Courage Classic back in 2018. Biking made up much more of my training this year than any previous year, in part because of those injuries and in part because I was able to pick up a smart trainer at the start of the year. When I could not run for the sake of my sprained ankle, for example, I could still put an hour on the bike. That made all the difference when it came to being able to turn in a good half marathon time in September despite not being able to run for half of July and half of August.

Strength training remains a mixed bag for me. I simply do not like it. It is a useful complement to running and cycling and makes me better at both. I can acknowledge that in the abstract. Knowing I need more strength training in the mix, I also acquired some weight training equipment mid-summer. I have used it some, but not as much as I would like. I was more consistent about regular push-ups work; I managed to maintain that habit most of the year despite setbacks from pulled back in the spring. Strength training is definitely my biggest area to improve fitness-wise in 2024, though.

On a happier note, this was the first year I managed to be where I wanted weight-wise since 2015. I have been at healthy and reasonable weights since 2010, for which I am grateful. The last 7 years, though, I have been sitting just a bit higher than the ranges where I feel best and perform best. I also see, looking around at folks in the decades ahead of me, how easy it is to gain just a little weight each year and have it never come back off. Getting back to my target range was really satisfying, and I could definitely see the impact on my performance in the September half marathon. Now to stay here!

All together, then, a good year on this front, albeit one with a clear path of where and how to improve in 2024.

Church

Where last year was very transitional for us as we joined a new church and found our footing in a new tradition, this year was the year we started stepping back into actively serving. I described my feeling about the year to our senior pastor a few months ago, when still recovering from the sprained ankle I described above: When you have done something like that sprain, you really need to stay off the injured part of the body as much as possible for a while to let it heal. There comes a time, though, when you actually need to start putting weight back onto it and working it normally, so that it will finish healing. Last year and early this year, I was slowly coming back into a healthy spot in my faith. By mid-year, it was clear it was time to start working again.

The aforementioned writing of church music is one part. Closely connected is another, and the way I ended up in that boat in the first place: agreeing to serve monthly in the music ministry by playing piano (with Jaimie singing!). Before jumping back in this year, it had been a full decade since I had played music for a church. It has been good to knock the rust¹ off my fingers for piano-playing, and it has been a real joy to serve this way again. “Serve” is the right word, though: it is not a small amount of time or work to prepare even just monthly. There is a lot of music in an Anglican service like ours — and I mean a lot.

Going forward, I may find ways to serve beyond that, in terms of teaching and preaching in particular. Much as I love those, though, I do need to prioritize carefully: with finding a new job and giving multiple talks and several essays committed and that big orchestra piece in flight, I already have much to do. I am leery of overcommitting, especially as I see that we will not have all that many years with our girls at home (they are almost 12 and 10!).

There will be years for all these things, Lord willing. This is my new refrain. There will be years for all these things.

And with that, a happy close to 2023! Many more words here, no doubt, in 2024. Godspeed.

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Notes

1. Not that Rust… but I did at first typo it as “Rust” instead of “rust” just out of habit. ↩︎