Potpourri #1

Instant messaging is a great way to communicate. It’s more real time than e-mail, but you can actually be somewhat involved in other things without being rude. Problem is Facebook chat has been unreliable, so conversations seem to just end suddenly. That or I’m offending all of my friends.

There’s slightly less than 60 hours until the Ayer Thanksgiving day 5K. Hell yes I’m excited about it. This will be the third straight year I’m running the race. The best way I can think of to spend a holiday is to be surrounded by friends doing a positive and healthy activity.

I bought a neti pot today for $12. In terms of price for expected function, it’s a good value. Several people I know rave about them. On the other hand, I spent $12 for about as much plastic as you get for free with a gallon of milk and a handful of individual salt packets. Not sure a used neti pot is the way to go either. Once it’s been stuck up your nose, it’s basically yours for life.

Can’t believe so many stations are playing Christmas music around the clock already. How about waiting until December 20th? Time to break out the Guns ‘n’ Roses CDs. I don’t see Axl Rose writing any happy holiday tunes. Ditto for AC/DC, unless you count “Big Balls”, which is about parties and sort of festive.

I rotated the tires on my truck this past weekend. Keep tire wear even is the least of my concerns. Checking that the tires are wearing normally, that the suspension doesn’t have any loose bits, and that the brakes have some life left are the real reasons for rotating your tires. As a bonus, should you find your tire flat in the parking lot, you know your wheels aren’t rusted onto the hubs and your spare is ready to go.

And last but certainly not least, hiking/running up Mt. Wachusett was a great experience. I found out that I can hike in my trail running shoes and run with a backpack on. So when you combine being able to jog the flat and smooth sections while hiking the steep rocky sections, you get an awesome workout at a reasonable heart rate. Great way to cover some serious distance.

I’m also finding that I dislike hiking in boots. It seems that in the process of supporting your ankles, they transfer a lot of load onto your knees and hips. On an uneven trail, sometimes it’s simply easier to have your ankle rotating all over the place and your leg gets to stay straight.

Tire Tribulations and an Outhouse

In retrospect, Tuesday’s tire tribulation was the turning point for my week. I had a solid plan for running. The alarm was set for Tuesday morning, and I got up, had my breakfast, got out the door earlier than usual and had an awesome run on what was a dreary and almost rainy morning. Everything was right with my world. And then I noticed the tire that was almost flat.

Now here is where my mental processes tend to go a bit wonky. You’d think I’d be rather happy to catch a flat tire in the garage, at home, where we happily have more cars than drivers. This should only be one level up from a blown light bulb.

But not quite. In my mind, I recalled how I recently drove around with a leaky tire and a bike pump in the back seat for about a month until finally getting around to buying a new set of tires. New tires are supposed to hold air. This was a violation of contract. How could the tire do this to me? Tires have evil intentions, I know it.

And then I think about the remnants of the old outhouse sitting next to the driveway. They were supposed to be hauled to the dump a couple weeks ago, except I needed the truck for something else while the dump was closed, so it all got emptied out. A few weeks went by and I never got around to hauling them to the dump. In fact, I had blissfully forgotten that this chore even needed to be done.


So it’s not just a flat tire, it’s a history of procrastination and suddenly seeing all the things that need doing. How am I ever going to stick to my running plan with all these other things that need procrastinating? I need to spend lots of time worrying now, don’t I? Therapists make a living off of this kind of thinking.

But wait! Here’s an opportunity to have a calm and rational reaction to the situation. An opportunity to begin building a new habit of sticking to an original plan while making reasonable adjustments, if needed, as things come up. Okay, in that moment, it was really difficult to see opportunity.

But on Wednesday, I tricked myself by adding “remove flat tire and replace with spare” onto my running plan. Now I’m not dealing with a hassle anymore, I’m exercising. I like exercise; it makes me healthy and optimistic. And it turns out that jacking up a car on a cold morning is so much easier when your muscles are loose and you’ve already worked up a bit of a sweat. And as it turns out, there was an easy to see nail in the tread. Should be a simple flat repair. Toss the flat into the back of the truck and go on with my day.


On Thursday, I ran some intervals, and took the flat tire back to NTB for a free flat repair.

On Friday, which was a planned rest day, I loaded the outhouse remnants into the truck along with some other trash and hauled them off to the dump (oh, excuse me; it’s now called a “transfer station”). After getting up early for hard runs on Tuesday and Thursday, it was positively delightful to sleep in until 7am and take a leisurely side trip to the dump. As a bonus, since they had to weigh my truck before and after, I now know that my pickup truck with an empty bed, half a tank of gas, and me driving weighs an even 5,000 lbs.

So not only did I stick to my original running plan for the week, I handled an unexpected tire problem and also did a task I had been procrastinating on. Forget the cardiovascular benefits of exercise, simply creating a plan and sticking with it as other things come up feels awesome.

What a great week! The irony is that without the flat tire, I probably would have stuck with the run/work/sleep routine and not gotten the outhouse bits to the dump. So it was a better week because something went wrong and I rose to the occasion, and then kept going. Now if I can only do that without the bit about the flat tire.

Need for Speed

Let me start by saying I’m having dreams of running a full marathon in 2011, specifically the BayState marathon in Lowell. This race has two key advantages. First, I’ve run the half-marathon version already, and am familiar with the start and finish portions of the race. Second, the Squanacook River Runners, of which I am a member, manage one of the water stops. And thirdly, it’s only a 30 minute or so drive from home to the starting line. Okay, so I can’t count very well tonight.

Not that I’ve put a lot of thought into this (okay, maybe I have), but being able to reliably finish a marathon in under 5 hours seems like a good goal. Most marathon courses close after 6 hours, which means no more water stops or traffic cones, and probably no medal at the finish line. So if you plan for 5 hours and have a bad day, you’ll probably still finish in under 6. Or at least so goes my thinking.

And if you combine the two half marathons I’ve run, you end up with a time somewhat over 5 hours. I need to get faster. I also need more endurance, but building endurance hasn’t been a problem for me. I just go slow and take walk breaks and can go quite a long ways.

As luck would have it, I’ve got two races coming up in the next month, the Ayer Thanksgiving 5K and the Mill Cities relay race. The fun part of the relay is I don’t know how long a leg I’m going to need to run yet.

So my short term goal for the next month is to get some good speed work in, and not focus so much on the total weekly mileage. I’m thinking tempo runs on Tuesdays and interval runs on Thursdays. Wednesday would be an easy run. Monday and Friday off. And a good long slow run/walk or trail run on the weekend, just so I don’t lose what endurance I might still have.

Okay, now that my plans are in the public domain, I am honor bound to follow them, right? If anybody is reading this, send encouragement please!

Hitting the wall? Or something else?

My body has finally said “ENOUGH!” This message was brought to me by a sharp pain in my chest. Not quite like a heart attack, but more like having your back go out, except the pain is in the ribs/breastbone. This is now a routine signal that my body gives me when I overdo it with the exercise.

I believe what I am experiencing is called “costochondritis”. The careful reader will notice the lack of the phrase “I have been diagnosed with costochondritis by a doctor.”

Several years ago, I did go to the ER during an episode, in the hopes a doctor would be able to tell me to either take an antacid (heartburn), or take an ibuprofen (some kind of muscle/tendon/cartilage problem), or get a quadruple bypass (hope not!).

It turns out that if you go to the ER with chest pain, they aren’t really concerned with diagnosing the cause so much as ruling out the possibility of a heart attack. So after much ado, the result was “we don’t think it’s your heart, avoid overdoing the exercise.” Ugh.

Some time later, I finally had an appointment with my regular doctor. I mentioned the occasional chest pain, the fact that I seemed to sleep a tad more than necessary, and how if I took a few days off from exercise, my pain levels would increase instead of decrease. She looked in my ears and said “This could be Lyme disease, have you ever been bitten by a tick?”

“Only several times a year for most of my adult life. Did I mention I grew up in Connecticut, where Lyme disease was invented?”.

“Let’s do some blood work.”

And so my blood was analyzed in great detail. And my Lyme test came back negative. But it turns out a negative result doesn’t rule out the possibility of chronic or long-term Lyme infection. There were other aspects of the tests that suggested Lyme disease, but of course it can’t be proven one way or the other.

Adventures in medication and supplements followed. Some success was had. But I’m still skeptical about the actual diagnosis. So I’ll say I have Lyme*, with the asterisk, to indicate that it’s only a best guess.

Which brings me back to hitting the wall. After several very energetic days off from work, involving cutting firewood, picking up leaves, and lots and lots of running, I’m exhausted and my chest hurts. Is it Lyme*? Or did I just run into a figurative wall when I reached the limits of how much physical activity my body is currently capable of? Either way, it seems like a good idea to curl up in bed with a book and get a good night’s sleep. A few days rest and I’ll be recovered and back to running and procrastinating on my chores.