Health

Limping back to form

A check-up with the doctor today resulted in a few recommendations to get me back to running again. First, it was confirmed that I pulled a muscle, likely either a hamstring or gluteus maximus, possibly the most fun-sounding muscle in the human body, but one you don’t really want to injure because it is big and kind of important for walking and such. My doctor recommended a couple of things. The first was a few visits to a physiotherapist to get the lowdown on how to gently and lovingly work the muscle(s) back into shape. The second was to generally do more stretching to become more limber, as he described my legs as “tight” and in this case tight does not mean cool, hip (ho ho) or the equivalent, it means my legs can’t bend much before stopping like rusted slabs of steel. The improved flexibility should reduce the chances of the same injury happening again.

Also when I showed him the stats from one of my runs this summer, he looked at the heart rate (155 BPM) and said while it wasn’t bad per se, it would be wise to not run any faster as I’m in the upper level of safety for heart rate. Basically I am doing long distance runs at a sprinting pace (something the TomTom tools also confirmed), which is fine if I can handle it but maybe I should be less macho about the whole thing.

I also need some kind of echo test to check out a “low” murmur in my heart to get a better idea of what may be wrong (leaky valve, etc.). It’s not a huge concern right at the moment but the doc thinks it’s best to determine what is up now before I go on to emulate famous runner and heart attack victim Jim Fixx. I concur.

Finally, there is no way to remain convincingly nonchalant when having a medical practitioner stick a finger up your butt.

Hip hip not hooray

Me, August 3rd:

I’ll see if I bounce back from this quickly or if it turns into some yucky long term situation.

Eleven days later and I can now confirm: yucky long term situation.

I knew with the way the hip felt after the last run that I would miss at least the next run, maybe two. I was hoping that I’d lose no more than that, meaning I’d be running again the following Monday, which was five days ago. While the hip did feel a little better on Monday and Tuesday and I did some walks at near my usual pace I seemed to relapse and yesterday (Thursday) a 4.5 km walk was almost kind of painful. I have no idea if the hip injury is muscle, bone or a gremlin trying to pull everything apart like the one in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” but I have a doctor appointment coming up so may have a better idea then.

That appointment isn’t until the 24th, however. In the meantime I’m taking it day by day and seeing how the hip feels. I’ve played out the old man/hip thing now, I’m ready to start running again. I am open to having bionic legs attached.

About that March haiku where snow was forbidden…

It is snowing as I type this. I am disappointed my haiku did not have the power to control the weather.

As I have become tremendously soft and flabby over the winter I decided today to go for a walk rather than watch my expanded belly bounce as I attempted to jog. But it would be a long and brisk exercise-style walk, designed to improve my stamina and burn a calorie or two in preparation for the resumption of The Runs (not to be confused with diarrhea).

I headed out on my usual run route and shortly after stepping outside the first tentative flakes began to fell, mocking my decision to experience the outdoors. It was still well above freezing and the snow was curiously hard and bouncy, resembling small white rocks. I’m sure there’s a technical term for this. Rock snow. Or maybe it was just hail.

It relented and for awhile I forgot about it and focused on the walk around the lake. When I arrived at Caribou Dam I discovered a large section of the path, stretching from the dam to Silver Creek, had been cordoned off. It turned out the Beaver Rampage of 2014 had resulted in a copious amount of coal spilling and collecting in Silver Creek and the part of Burnaby Lake it feeds into. CN is tasked with cleaning it up before it kills all the fish, birds and turtles. They probably don’t mind if it kills the beavers.

Here is one of the nice signs explaining how the turtles will not be killed but a trout or two may choke on a lump of coal further downstream:

Coal Lake, March 1 2014

The only other thing of note on the trail were a few lingering patches of snow that were mushy or easy to avoid. There were plenty of joggers, some walkers and, of course, plenty of people with off-leash dogs because dogs must be free. Free to chase, jump, knock down, bite and maul.

I finished the 17 km or so at my usual pace of 6+ km/hr and unlike previous loner walks I escaped with nary a blister on my feet. Woot.

Fit to be weighed a bit

I made a New Years resolution to stuff donuts into my face.

Actually, it was to get back to my usual running weight of around 150 pounds but given the results so far it may as well have been the former.

I told myself, “Self, losing weight is simple, you just need to stop putting so much food in your mouth, particularly between-meal snacks that are usually fatty, sugary or deliciously both.”

I hit 175 pounds today, a mere 12 pounds shy of my porcine state in June 2008. It’s time for me to put the brakes on the runaway cookie train.

To that end I have turned, as I am wont to do, to technology.

I purchased two items from Fitbit: an Aria scale and a Fitbit One.

The scale is pretty straightforward. The fancier parts are it measures body fat and syncs the depressing results via wifi to the web app, your smartphone or whatever other device you have set up to remind yourself that you should stop eating so many brownies. My weight is up slightly since I started tracking. I have reasons to have indulged a bit lately but that ends tomorrow (Wednesday).

The other device is the One, not to be confused with the Jackie Chan movie. This is a fancy pedometer thingie that tracks your steps, calories burned, the time and your sleep activity. The latter is kind of weird to look at because it feels a little like Big Brother is watching you, just in the form of a cute little electronic device.

You can set goals or just go with the defaults and let the badges roll in at pre-set milestones. It erroneously started me off with the “Hooray you lost five pounds!” badge, something I am concerned I won’t see again anytime soon.

But tomorrow is another day and it shall be a day without donuts.

Time to wrestle polar bears and walk a lot

Now that February has arrived, the first real deep freeze has come along with it. Four years ago they had to truck in snow for the Winter Olympics, so this is about right, weather-wise. Our weather has a well-developed sense of irony.

Instead of running today I opted to do a walk as a warm-up to a run tomorrow. I walked from home to Burnaby Lake, around the lake, then up to the Production Way SkyTrain station, a total of around 16 km or a bit more. My time was two hours and twenty five minutes, which is my usual exercise walking pace. When you maintain it for 2+ hours it really starts to feel like exercise, too.

I have a big ol’ blister on the lower inner part of my right foot now, just like when I did the same walk a month ago and it tasks me now much as it did back then. I could feel it forming while I walked but what can you do? Curiously I did not get the mirror blister on the left foot like last time, which leads me to the scientific conclusion that my right foot is weird.

As is usually the case when exercising, I expect my weight to be up tomorrow but I can rest easy knowing it is not because of the evil that donuts do.

A haiku to weight loss or lack thereof

A haiku in tribute to a month of nearly zero weight loss. Not that I’m bitter. I’m totally not. At all.

Maybe a little.

I confess to having nipped at a cookie or two, so I have no one but to blame but my stupid hands and their ability to pick up edible things and shove them into my willing mouth. I’ll work on this in February. In the meantime, haiku:

A desire to slim
The donuts are forbidden
But sprinkles linger

January 2014 weight loss report: A whole lot of nothing (literally)

This month I decided I would try to trim away all the extra flab I acquired in the last few months of 2013. Here are the results in graphical form from myfitnesspal.com, where I have been tracking my weight on a daily basis:

January 2014 weight loss

As you can see, over the course of 30 days I managed to lose…zero pounds.

For the curious, the low point on that chart is 171.6 pounds on January 12.

On the one hand this is not terribly impressive because it means it would take approximately infinity for me to lose any weight at all. On the other hand I didn’t gain weight, so I’ve at least stemmed the fat-filled tide.

Successes for January
I managed to reduce my snacking/donut addiction at school (where I work) to a single donut one Friday afternoon and that single donut was provided free of charge. I resisted the candy bowl filled with chocolate that sat on the front counter until it was completely empty. As the bowl itself was not made of chocolate I was safe at that point. I reduced my incessant gorging of snacks at home.

Failures for January
I did not run or exercise as much as I planned to. This is important because I typically eat less on exercise days. My snacking at home was still higher than it should be and often consisted of the wrong sort of snacks–potato chips instead of yogurt, cookies instead of carrot sticks. There is room for much improvement here. I also need to start making my own lunch again as this will reduce my caloric intake by a few hundred each day.

Goals for February

  1. Only healthy/low cal snacks at home or no snacks at all.
  2. Exercise at least three times per week.
  3. Do not eat my weight in muffins or anything muffin-like.

I was going to have a snack tonight before bed but resisted. To quote GlaDOS from Portal, this is a triumph.

I will post the results of tomorrow’s weigh-in (the last for the month) tomorrow. If I actually end up for the month I am going to force myself to pee until that changes.

UPDATE, January 31: I weighed in at 172.8 pounds, down 0.6 pounds, thus saving the need for any extra peeing. 0.6 pounds down for the entire month. Woo, I say.

 

Leaving Fatville (don’t eat the wagon wheels)

In the last few months of 2013 two things happened:

  1. I stopped running.
  2. I started eating a lot of shortbread. Delicious, yummy shortbread.

In October at my annual physical I weighed in at 160 pounds. This was eight pounds more than the previous year. It was also ten pounds above my usual target of 150 pounds. This was bad.

On January 1st I stepped on the scale (it cried out) and saw these numbers: 174.6.

Yes, I was nearly 25 pounds over my target weight and more than 30 pounds over my low of 2012 when I tipped the scale at a mere 143 pounds during the height of my summer runs.

My size 30 jeans were no longer feeling comfy. I had to stand really straight to get a sort-of flat tummy in profile. I felt blah and listless. I kept stuffing shortbread into my face.

With the new year conveniently at hand I put myself back onto a weight loss regimen. As of this morning that horrific 174.6 number has changed to the slight-less horrific number of 172.2. It could be water, it could be a rounding error, the important thing is it’s going in the right direction and even though there is shortbread here right now, mere feet away from me in the kitchen, I AM NOT EATING IT.

I have been mostly snack-free these four days and the snacks I’ve allowed myself–a cube or two of Havarti cheese, some popcorn, a few carrot sticks–have kept me well under my daily calorie total. This is the hard part, the first week where my fat stomach says “I’m hungry, please continue to shove food into the mouth, okay?” and I must tell my stomach “No, you big stupid fat thing. You’ll have your two carrot sticks and you’ll like it!”

I’ll check in once a week or so to report whether my brain or stomach is triumphing.

My uvula and why I hate it right now

I recently re-discovered the name of the dangly thing at the back of your throat–the uvula. The reason for this re-discovery started back on Wednesday morning when I awoke with mildly irritated sinuses and throat. It felt like I might get one last summer cold this year.

By Friday the sinus part had mostly gone away but the throat part compensated. It was incredibly sore and it felt like I had phlegm caught in the back of it, closing off parts I’d prefer to keep open. Swallowing, even without yummy food or drink involved, hurt a lot.

Saturday evening came and I could take no more, so off I went to the emergency room of Royal Columbian. The nice part about this is it’s two blocks away. I got there at 8 p.m. and left shortly after nine with a prescription and tentative diagnosis.

Basically my throat was infected and the uvula had become so swollen that it was now touching the back of my throat, producing a sensation that was more maddening than anything. The doctor was not sure what the exact cause was as he didn’t think it was strep throat (a bacterial infection usually caught by some goober coughing or sneezing on you on the SkyTrain, Vancouver’s preferred high-speed transmission vector for illnesses). It could possibly be allergies, bad luck, voodoo, who knows?

He cautioned that the medication (Apo-Prednisone) could take a few days to reduce the swelling and also recommended taking an antihistamine, so I picked up some Benadryl for good measure. Drugs drugs drugs!

It’s been a few hours since I took everything (well, the required dose, not actually everything) and it seems to have made a small difference. Maybe it’s a placebo effect and if so, that’s still good enough for me. I’m all for my brain being tricked into being happier.

They did swab my throat for a sample to send to The Lab for strep and I may get a call in 24-48 hours confirming that. If so I will have to take even more drugs, probably for a good ten days or so. Given my history with antibiotics (hint: the wrong ones give me a rash over my entire body) I’m hoping the test comes up negative.

Anyway, I definitely recommend not getting your uvula infected if you can avoid it. It’s effective as a weight loss measure as the thought of eating or drinking anything becomes repellant but I’d rather get my sexy figure back another way.

Happy (?) April Fools Day

April Fools Day, especially in the era of the Internet, seems to be split between clever and obviously fake ads, stories and such, along with other ‘pranks’ that are mean-spirited, insulting or deliberately meant to confuse and/or falsely raise expectations.

I’m glad it only comes once a year.

On the plus side, today was another sunny, mild day. The weather is expected to change tomorrow but I’ve taken advantage and walked or run over 40 km in the past three days. My feet may not be on speaking terms with me at the moment but I plan to bribe them with new comfy shoes next weekend.

Walk this way (around Burnaby Lake)

I did one more Big Walk® around Burnaby Lake before my first tentative steps back into running next weekend.

The weather was sunny after several days of monsoon-like weather thanks to the Pineapple Express. I took advantage and found it to be mild, with little wind and most of the big puddles already having dried up along the trail. Even the cyclists and dogs off-leash didn’t bug me. It was a nice hint that spring is on the way after The Rains.

My favorite “rules are not for me!” moment came when crossing north on Roberts Street, near the rowing pavilion. As you approach the resumption of the trail on the other side of the road there is an especially giant sign that states DOGS MUST BE LEASHED AT ALL TIMES. I watched a woman stop and remove the leash from her dog in front of this sign. I don’t know if she was going for bonus irony points or what. At least the dog was well-behaved.

I used the iPod pedometer to track my pace and came in with the following stats:

2:23:53 duration
17.6 km distance
898 calories burned
18,746 steps taken

I was walking fast enough that any faster would have been a light jog. Things seem to have held together nicely both during and after the walk. Next weekend I’m heading to the resplendent gold and blue Mercer Stadium Track to do a simple calibration run fort the new iPod. It will probably be 2-4 laps or 800-1600 meters, enough to get the calibration and see if my Achilles tendon will weep in protest or behave itself. From there I will be doing a few short runs per week, starting with some 2Ks, moving up to 5Ks and finally back to my usual 10-11.5K runs. I don’t have a set schedule in mind, I’ll just ramp things up based on my stamina and pain/discomfort after each run. If all goes well I’m going to aim to beat last year’s mark by running 1,000K. Since I’ve already missed two months, I’l need to hit at least 100K each month going forward. If I stay healthy I can do it. If not, I can always lie lie lie.

On not sleeping, candy hearts and other things both sweet and sour

There’s nothing quite like the sensation of laying down to sleep and finding yourself unable to breathe. This happened a few nights ago when my über-cold left my nose completely stuffed up. I had to breathe through my mouth, which made me dizzy. I eventually fell asleep probably due to exhaustion. When I awoke in the middle of the night one of my nostrils had kindly opened up enough to permit semi-normal breathing.

Worst cold ever.

Also the last post I’m making about it. Colds are pretty boring to read about and if I could capture the misery of the past week in a way that was truly entertaining, I’d be rich. Hmm. I may have to think about this.

Onward to the rest of what should hopefully be a healthy remainder of 2013:

Valentine’s Day is coming up. My favorite manufactured holiday when I was a kid because of the candy. I was especially fond of chocolate-covered marshmallow hearts. Mmm. Now I prefer the day after when all the candy gets marked down 50%. I usually treat myself to something small that I can work off without too much guilt/effort.

Running: This is probably still about three weeks off. I’m going to start stretching exercises to make sure my tendon is ready. The first run will be a short test that will also serve to calibrate my new iPod nano. The best thing about it, apart from the electric green case…

iPod nano green

…is that it incorporates the Nike+ sensor/receiver so I don’t need to attach any extra hardware to my shoe (or the iPod). An added bonus is no more infernal clickwheel to deal with, especially one that refuses to function in the slightest bit of rain, making the end of a jog unusually difficult to, well, end. The test run will be done at a track to ensure maximum accuracy for the calibration. In the meantime I’ll try to return to the pool/gym at least a few times each week until the runs resume. Excelsior!

Diet: My weight has steadied out around 156-157 but should start going back down soon as I start packing a modest lunch to work and resist the siren song of the donut. My goal is to be back to my usual weight by my next physical, probably a few months from now.

This site: I have found a few themes I may be able to hammer into something serviceable for my needs. This is a long term project so I’ll probably work away at it a little at a time. I am planning on having a revamped site up before the end of the year.