It's been a very rough 5th chemo cycle, for reasons that will be saved for another blog post. Suffice to say I needed a moral victory, and decided that May 19th, 2020 should be a special day. An intentional effort would be made to have a great day. A day that would show that despite chemo and Covid-19, life could be enjoyed and old dreams re-ignited.
Why May 19th? Several reasons: It marks 31 years since I graduated from RPI, and it also marks 19 months since my original diagnosis. The weather was also about as perfect as you can get for spring in New England. Upper 50s, bright sunshine, and enough of a breeze to keep the bug away.
Let's back up a bit, and recall that around the beginning of the year I set a goal of running my second marathon. I ran my first marathon back in 2011 and have tried unsuccessfully to run a second marathon ever since. I've more or less met every running goal I've set that doesn't involve a marathon, so I'm a bit stupefied.
My initial 2020 campaign was quickly derailed my third cancer diagnosis and a global pandemic. A saner person might take this as a sign from the gods that this isn't meant to be. But I'm too stubborn to give up. Besides, defying the will of the gods just makes for better story telling.
Now, how do I word this next bit correctly so it doesn't sound like "I'm going to die!"? I'm not inclined to hunker down and wait for the pandemic to go away, because if you look at some of the predictions for how long it might stick around, and you look at the survival statistics for neuroendocrine cancer, there's a reasonable chance I might not be around to see what the world is like after the pandemic.
On the other hand, given my initial response to treatment, there's also a reasonable chance I'll enter a period of relative health later this year without any guarantees of how long it might last. Could be only a few months, could be several years or even (unlikely but possible, and what we're hoping for) decades. But how do I run a marathon when there are no organized marathons to run?
Runners can be a nutty bunch, and many have been running marathons in their own ridiculously small back yards. As much as I've talked about our Vermont property, we do also own a small bit of woods at our primary residence in Massachusetts. We also have developed a trail in those woods over the years. Can you say "backyard trail marathon"?
I decided that May 19th, 2020 would be the day I'd re-launch my campaign to run marathon number two, but my target "race" is now an informal one literally right around my house. It has the benefit of being something I can do whenever my health permits, and without worry about what Covid-19 might be doing weeks, months, or even years from now.
The other part of this plan is to extend the existing trail a bit so a marathon is approximately 100 laps. That might require some gratuitous zig-zagging to achieve, but so be it. It will be a course with twists and turns and little itty bitty hills.
And so on the morning of May 19th I started the day with a rake and a pair of lopping shears and cleared maybe 50 feet of new trail in front of the house. It wasn't too difficult. It involved lopping low hanging branches off of the trees so they don't poke me in the eyes, and raking the bulk of the leaves off the intended trail. The raking serves two purposes: It exposes any tripping hazards such as small stumps or rocks, and it seems to greatly reduce the chances of picking up ticks (on an ironic note, I picked a tick off my neck while writing this post). Here's a photo of the freshly cleared section of trail:
As an aside, using the lopping shears took all my strength in my current condition. I'm hoping that's a transient effect of the chemo, and not a sign of significant muscle loss, but either way it's good that I'm staying active because my experience has been that health is a "use it or lose it" proposition in my situation. It's time to start using the upper body a bit more.
Let's take a tour of the trail, starting with going around the side of the house and onto the main trail that my wife has been maintaining for years. We've (meaning mostly she) have slowly built what we call a "hedgerow" by taking small-ish dead trees and branches and stacking them near the property line. It's technically not a hedgerow because it's dead plant matter, but it is a sort of makeshift fence. It also helped to keep our dog on our property during morning walks, though if she really wanted to she could easily hop over it.
This hedgerow has turned into a major highway for chipmunks and squirrels, and they make quite the bustle in it (did you catch the subtle song reference?). This prevalence of rodents brings red tailed hawks and barred owls to the property. One morning we saw what must have been a particularly satiated owl sitting on a tree branch for quite some time, content to watch the chipmunks running around without making any attempt to catch one.
Further on, near our back border, the trail takes a turn and runs past a small stream. It's spring so the stream still has water in it, but it usually dries up by summer:
At the other corner (it's hard to see the stream in this photo unfortunately, but it's there) is a bench that used to belong to my grandmother. She died before I was born, but my mom remembers her sitting on this bench. When I was a kid, the wood had rotted away and all that was left was the metal bits. My dad rebuilt the bench with new wood and it was at my parent's house for years. Now it's in my back yard and I don't spend nearly enough time sitting on it. It's starting to rot out again, so another one of my goals is to have a go at fixing it back up.
So that's the brief tour of the property. Now it's time to get started on that marathon training:
Impressive, huh? That's a flat out sprint for me, and about as much actual running as I can do before I'm out of breath. My aerobic limits are very low, and it doesn't feel very good to test them right now. It's the chemo. It happened last year and I recovered afterwards, and it's reasonable to expect that will happen again. But for now, "run" most means "brisk walk at best"
And the results of my morning's efforts:
There was a price to pay for this exuberance, both in the afternoon and the following day, but it was worth it. I'm at the point in my treatment where I might be able to start increasing my pace and distance. Maybe.
I still have one more chemo cycle to go, will need a minor procedure to remove or replace my urinary stent (let's hope for removal!), and may have radiation after chemo is complete. After all that is done, hopefully my treatment will enter a maintenance phase consisting of four drugs. I have an extra week to recover before that last chemo, so it's possible I'm at my low point right now.
My plan right now is that either I won't need radiation, or it won't be as bad as chemo, and it's time to start ramping up my activity. How far I'll actually get nobody knows, but let's shoot for a marathon, give it a try and see what happens. Maybe I'll be running Boston at age 70 in 2038. There's no guarantees it won't happen, I'm just not planning my life around it right now.
Before ending on a silly note, allow me to get philosophical for several paragraphs. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to go out my door and "run" through the woods while others are struggling to pay rent during the pandemic. I can trace this luck back to my graduation 31 years ago.
In 1989 Raytheon hired about 200 software engineers, including me. In 1990 they hired less than 100. In 1991 it was 0. That first job was the start of a career that has allowed me to own this little patch of woods. If through sheer luck I had been born a couple years later and graduated in 1991, my life might have turned out very differently.
Life is unfair, but that unfairness goes both ways. When looking at my life, you can say I've been both blessed and cursed. I'm not going to say we should only focus on our blessings, but certainly I'm trying to remind myself not to focus only on the curses.
Time for some levity. When we bought our house, the borders of the lot weren't marked. We knew there was an abandoned car back there, but only after our property was surveyed did we realized the house also came with Toyota Corona station wagon. It's literally on the other side of the stream shown in those earlier pictures.
Do you remember those "Oh What a Feeling" commercials from the early 80s? I do, and one of them featured a Corolla that looks surprisingly like our junker Corona. Here I am recreating that commercial scene almost 40 years later (hint: click on the picture to see a larger version).
Here's the full comercial:
And here's an interesting story about the origins of the ad campaign.
https://vengrove.tumblr.com/post/4024546321/history-of-the-toyota-jump-the-power-of/amp
Well that about wraps things up for this post. I had a great day, but it took about a week of preparation and recovery to do so. Have a great day everybody!
