Marathon Monday and More BHAG

Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts, otherwise known as Marathon Monday, as usually the Boston Marathon is held on this day, excepting years with pandemics.  This also means it's now been a day and 10 years since I ran my one and only marathon, which happened to be the Boston Marathon.  Did I mention I ran the Boston Marathon?  I wouldn't want that detail to be overlooked.

I still remember making the last turn onto Boylston Street, and breaking down in tears at how far away the finish line still was.  The marathon mentally broke me.  I finished not so much because of determination, but more because it was the fastest way to end the torture I had been enduring for five and a half hours.  However, while many people in similar situations say "never again", I thought "I'll be better prepared for my next marathon".

But then overuse injuries started happening when I tried to increase my training, and then eventually this cancer thing that's a real downer has basically scuttled my marathon dreams.  I'm not saying it's impossible I'll run marathon number two, only that I don't currently see a path to being able to cover 26.2 miles in a single day.  Prior to marathons, I need to get the cancer out of my liver and find myself in a situation where I'm not on continual chemotherapy, or at least can lengthen out the chemotherapy cycle to give me more recovery time between each infusion.  My worst fear is the cancer will start growing again and I'll be back on the street looking for a potential treatment, for what would be the fifth time.  That fear is very high this week as I have a CT scan scheduled for Wednesday, and I'm currently batting less than 50% on getting good CT scan results.

In the meantime, I'm trying to focus on my Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, of running/walking/crawling a 5K or more in 50 different towns.  It's a way to keep me moving and with a treatment miracle or two put me in a position to consider another marathon campaign.  So far I've completed 3.

BHAG #2, Mine Falls Park, Nashua NH

Mine Falls Park is a handful of trails along the Nashua River in Nashua NH.  It's a favorite of many of my running and walking buddies because it's nearby and relatively scenic.  This time I went with Donnie, my walking buddy and fellow cancer survivor.  It's both exercise and a support group of two at the same time.

There was still a bit of ice on the river...

A wide spot in the river makes for a scenic view, excepting the parking lot on the far side.  It is on the outskirts of a city after all.

Me and Donnie posing for a selfie in front of what I think are the Falls.  Still masking since we're both immune compromised and we haven't completed our vaccine shots yet.  Yes it's outdoors but we talk a lot within 6 feet of each other, and we're both erring on the side of reasonable caution.  I'm very pleased that my friends are appropriately paranoid about infecting me.

BHAG #3, Barre Falls Dam, Barre MA

Barre Falls Dam has been one of my go-to destinations since the pandemic began.  Getting there requires a scenic drive through rural Massachusetts and there's a number of trails to explore, particularly the Midstate Trail which is how I discovered the dam in the first place.  However, I've pretty much explored all the trails by now, so it probably won't be as frequent a destination going forward.

Fun side story: Years ago I was with a small group of guys who drove to Barre to pick up something.  What we picked up and why I've long since forgotten, but I vaguely remember there was some gathering in the town center with various groups promoting themselves.  Barre is pronounced "bare", and thus we were sorely disappointed in the Barre Women's Club.  It wasn't what it sounded like to us, just some fully clothed women who happened to live in Barre.

This time I did the bare minimum 5K.  This was only day 7 of the chemo cycle, and my body wasn't very thrilled with the exercise.  Normally I'd hope it would tell me I'm out of shape and slow.  But no, it just made me feel like garbage and my mood tanked.  I was crying my eyes out at mile 2, which is not unlike my marathon finish on Boylston Street 10 years prior.  Chemo affects the brain, and makes it focus on all the awful possibilities involved with a cancer diagnosis.  I blame the chemo because in the last days of the cycle I have much better success focusing on the day and enjoying what my body will allow me to do.  I do a lot of crying on the first weekend of the chemo cycle.  Coincidence?  I don't think so.

Perhaps I need to treat these BHAG outings more as casual walks with lots of photo stops and breaks as needed, and not worry so much about how long it takes me to actually cover 5K of distance.  Maybe that will help with the moods.  I'm on my 9th cycle of this chemo and still trying to figure things out, but then again, I've never found two cycles of any chemo to be quite the same.

I also had to include a picture of my car, which is still clean after having been recently washed on a good day that I blogged about previously.  It's now about 24 years since I custom ordered it from Ford (5 speed manual, crank windows, V8 engine, and not much else) and still going strong.  That's the dam in the background, over the car's roof.

Here's a shot from the top of the dam looking at the downstream side.  If you click on it and zoom in you can see a bench down there, and stairs leading down to a rock right by the rapids.  I would have walked down and taken photos, except then I'd have to walk all the way back up and that didn't seem very enticing.

Obligatory selfie in the flood plain upstream of the dam.  If needed, this whole area can fill with feet of water to prevent flooding downstream.  I've only once seen any water in the flood plain. 

A shot of the upstream side of the dam from the Midstate trail.  Note the yellow triangle on the stone post in the bottom right.  Just follow the yellow triangles and you can walk all the way from the New Hampshire line to Rhode Island.  The trail goes to the right up to the road, over the dam, and then back into the woods.

Day 904 Was a Good Day

I have to be really careful when looking at my blood test results online. This week I caught myself paying attention only to the data that supports how I'm feeling. Bad day?  My liver enzymes the week after infusion show a very slight increasing trend.  Better day?  The same test is basically flat when looking at the tests done on the day of an infusion. Meanwhile Chromogranin-a, the only test to have been above normal, has dropped into the normal range during this time.  That’s really the only meaningful change in my blood tests in the past month and it’s a good sign.

I drive my wife nuts with my changing moods.  One moment I'll be the lucky soul that will have an inexplicable complete remission and lives for decades, the next moment I won't survive to see 2022.  Interestingly, when I got her so down that she agreed my cancer was advancing again, suddenly I started pointing to all the signs that it wasn't.  Reverse psychology works on me.  Consider that the next time you try to cheer me up.

Today is infusion day.  Allow me to take this moment and remember what a really good day looks like, for example, last Friday: I woke up in Vermont, because with the arrival of spring we’re now able to spend the night at our weekend getaway, which being on medical leave from work we can now use during the middle of the week.  After breakfast we packed up for the trip back home, which involved numerous trips up and down the stairs carrying such things as a cooler and a cat carrier loaded with our fat, diabetic feline (in this case fat generally means the insulin is working because he was losing weight before diagnosis).

I was healthy enough to drive for the two hour trip home, after which we repeated the exercise of unloading the pickup truck.  I rested a bit after lunch, then got the Mustang out of the garage to run some errands, including dropping a deposit check into the mail for another property we’re buying in Vermont.  Wait, what?

This is going to take some explaining.  My obsession with land in Vermont started when my future father-in-law bought a 100+ acre parcel in the early 1960s and built a one room camp (think wooden tent with a wood stove).  Now, one odd thing about this property is that there was a separate 2 acre parcel smack dab in the middle of the frontage of the property.  And where did he build the camp?  Of course, right near the border with this parcel.

Fast forward to the late 1990s, after I had married my father-in-law’s daughter, and we occasionally spent a night camping in Vermont.  If the neighbors were at their camp, we’d know it because they’d be outside drinking and talking loudly well past midnight, and we could hear it all because we were maybe 150 feet away on our 100+ acre parcel.  At the time, we used to fantasize about buying said parcel if it went on the market just so that we wouldn’t need to worry about what the next neighbor would be like.

But for the last 20 years or so, that property was mostly abandoned, and we got used to having effectively have no neighbor there.  My father-in-law eventually passed away from cancer.  My wife, being an only child, inherited his entire estate.  We ended up selling his house in Connecticut and using the proceeds to buy a 1-bedroom A-Frame directly across the street from the camp, which very conveniently went on the market at just the right time.  Now we had a place with electricity and running water.  An indoor flush toilet is a big improvement from an outhouse, especially if you’re a chemo patient who is prone to diarrhea.

Then in what can only be a sign from from fate, God, or whatever you believe controls the universe, history repeated itself.  My wife’s aunt passed away, and since she had outlived her children and wasn’t on speaking terms with her sister, left her entire estate to my wife in her will.  After selling her house in Connecticut, I got a message from a friend and real estate broker saying the little two acre parcel was on the market, and would we be interested in it?

And as a result for the second time in about 5 years, we are buying a property in Vermont with money my wife just inherited.  Life isn’t fair, but it works both ways.  It’s really unfair that I have an exceptionally deadly form of cancer.  It’s also unfair that while other cancer patients go bankrupt and lose their homes trying to pay for their treatment, we’re adding to our real estate empire in Vermont.

We’ve now filled that annoying gap in the original property, and own the property on both sides of the road for about a quarter mile.  The A frame is roughly right in the middle. So the closest any neighbor can be is about a thousand feet away, which suits us very well.  Our neighbors in Vermont are generally very friendly, but we also enjoy not seeing their houses the minute we step out our front door.

I feel a bit sinfully prideful about our Vermont properties.  Since I was a kid I dreamed of having a weekend getaway, and now I own land that goes all the way from the edge of the local pond to the top of a hill.  To go from one to the other it’s about a mile hike with a 400 feet of elevation gain.  I suits my personality very well to be able to go out my front door and be alone in the woods.

But getting back to Friday, after running my errands I decided to hand wash the Mustang for the first time since sometime in 2019.  It was a very dirty car, but now it shines surprisingly well for a 24 year old car, excepting a few minor battle scars it’s picked up over the years.  This includes some clear coat damage on the hood from bird poop years ago that wasn’t cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time.  It was probably exacerbated since I generally don’t drive the car in the rain, so it didn’t get washed off naturally either.  But I digress.

After washing the car, I had to drive it somewhere so we decided to get Chinese takeout for dinner.  After dinner, well nothing happened because after having been active for most of the preceding 10 hours my body was revolting.  I was stiff and sore and generally nailed to the couch for the evening.  I had effectively had three days worth of activity in one day.  Driving back from Vermont and unpacking is usually enough to tire me out for the day.  The same applies to running several errands or washing a car.  Doing all this in one day is unheard of.

Of course, I always assume when I have a good day that I’ve miraculously healed and will continue to have exceptionally good days for the rest of my life.  Reality hit hard on Saturday as I awoke with a head full of plans for what to do outside on a nice spring day, and instead my body decided to go full blah with a side of diarrhea.  The symptoms were manageable with Imodium and Benadryl and other pills, but that had its own consequences and as a result I was depressed and not at all happy about laying around the house all day, because of course I’m having a bad day and all my days will be bad for the rest of my life.  Do you notice the pattern here?

Sunday I bounced back in the afternoon and went out for a long walk and set a daily mileage record for 2021 and just barely beat my weekly step count high from two weeks ago, both are small signs that I’m still improving.  Unfortunately this walk didn’t count toward my Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 50 5Ks because I did it locally instead of finding some new town to walk in.

So far I’ve only done 2 of the 50 5Ks (or longer) needed for my BHAG, but I always expected it would be a slow start with me gradually building my capacity to both walk and drive some distance in the same day.  Right now there are many days when I can do one or the other but not both.

And now it’s time to rush off to the oncology office and get my chemo infusion.  I’m not really thrilled at the idea, but logically it makes sense to continue treatment.  After all, I wasn’t having days like last Friday prior to switching chemos in late December.  If I want more good days like that, ongoing chemo is a necessity.