I'm 53 and among my many accomplishments I have raised 3 lovely young adults who like me and think I'm pretty hip. This blog chronicals my efforts to spend the second half of my life getting better instead of just getting older. Like Sister Madonna Buder, I am using triathlon as one of means to that end.
I've mentioned that I've lost 6 pounds in the last 3 months, right? (about 100 times, I know - SORRY!)
One of the things I did was have a come to Jesus meeting with myself over how much whole grained goodness I enjoy and cut a bunch out. No granola for breakfast any more; I have a protein powder miilkshake made with water, berries and protein powder. No 2 slices of whole wheat bread sandwiches for lunch any more; I have a salad in pita bread now. No potatoes, rice or pasta for dinner any more; I eat other stuff.
Result? I am not one of these crazy people worried about a global rice or flour shortage. I'm pretty sure that the 1 pound bags I have of each will last just about until hell freezes over or until I've enjoyed enough occasions to make treats for other people to use them up, and that works for me.
It's Tuesday! So shoot me - I just didn't feel like writing yesterday. I thought about all of you all week and all weekend as I blogged in my head repeatedly. I thought about how it's the little things in life that make a lot of little smiles grow into a big one. Little things that happened that made me smile:
1). The cat ate a teeny, tiny piece of turkey that I didn't have to cram down her throat. And then she stopped and it was back to the force feeding. At least she tried.
2). The cat has started leaving my bed to come sit on my lap when I'm watching TV. This is HUGE
3). The cat visciously attacked my hand the other day while I was petting her - she's coming back to life!
4). I had a great call with Humbly Ann who was struggling with some stuff and I helped her feel better. Nothing warms a Mom's heart more than helping her child out of a shadow. (That and learning that she didn't get eaten by a shark - see previous post).
5). I was good about getting my 2 weekday rides in. I even rode the road that has the hill that kicks my butt and it did not. Good times!
6). The weather was gorgeous this weekend. My 90 minute run did not suck as much as last weekend's 70 minute run so I was very happy about that.
7). I ran out of book on the run and started listening to music and heard the most perfect, sunny day running song, Sunny Day by Hyim If you click on that link you can hear it, too. The tempo is a little slow but on a hot sunny day when you are out running it feels just right.
8). I went to a bike maintenance clinic and not only learned some stuff but was finally told I look like I've lost weight. It wasn't really the first time. Humbly Ann told me I looked skinnier in early April but I hadn't started noticing it yet so it didn't have the same impact as me noticing I'd lost weight and then not hearing that from other people. Now I SO appreciate both comments. I'm 6 pounds down and doing fine.
9). I climbed to the junction of Mt. Diablo again on Sunday. It wasn't quite as hard as it had been the week before. The rest of my group went on to the top but I just didn't feel like it was my day to do that so I'm scheduling that for May 17.
10). I have 2 events coming up! Next Saturday I am riding the Wine Country Century (metric) and May 10 I have my season opener triathlon, The Golden Bear. I'm excited!
11). I went to swim clinic Saturday morning and went from flailing in the water like a crazy person to actually pulling some water and making some progress. It was really great to have that experience BEFORE my first tri where I'm sure I would have gone nowhere fast for the first 10 minutes of the swim, otherwise. I love my race club!
And all of those little things add up to big things - sunny days, training progress and happiness.
This is my life with the cat now. We do this 2 or 3 times a day:
The beautiful thing about getting to the end of one year and living in a culture that celebrates the beginning of a new year is that it gives us pause to stop and reflect on things past and on what we want for the future for ourselves. Most of our lives are wrapped up in thinking about other things and people - our jobs, our homes, our families, our community. All too often we barely squeeze ourselves in to the mix of what is important and when we make ourselves a priority we suffer guilt and then we suffer guilt when we don't make ourselves a priority and fail to meet our goals. Oh geez - must life be so difficult?
New Year's Day is all about the goodness that is "me". It is about assessing the year gone by for its highs and lows and deciding how this year can be better, richer, more fulfilling, and both more self absorbed and more selfless. It is about finding ways to be more dedicated to what is really important in life which requires us to think about what is most important in life and how we can, i n the words of my all time favorite insect, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. .
My goal for 2008 is to do just that - be more positive. Most of you don't know this but I'm a bit of a cranky pants. I'm pretty quick to focus on the negative get all worked up about perceived injustice and then act on that and when I say "act" I mean "lash out". And then I get a grip, stop and cover and apologize and smooth things over. I'd like to improve on that and really focus on seeing that glass half full so I don't go through the cranky pants routine.
Another tendancy I have is toward self-sabotage so I want to start honoring my intentions instead of blowing them off with cheap excuses. I want to toss myself out the door for a swim or a run or a ride knowing that whatever reason I have to avoid it isn't worthy of derailing my plans. I want to spend less time surifing the web and more time indulging my interests. I want to push for a strong finish in whatever I am doing be it a race or creating a report for work and not give up with that cheapest of all cheap excuses "it doesn't really matter, anyhow". In short I want to stay on top of things instead of putting myself in react mode and then pushing the rock up the hill against the added weight of self generated defeat. I want to march forward with a sense of purpose and optimism calling out "Feets don't fail me now!" with no particular reason to think they will.
All of this reminded me of my favorite Tracy Chapman song - Change.
This song asks the question 'how bad does it have to get before you'll change". The beauty of New Year's is that the intention to assess and change isn't motivated by fear or sadness or problems - it is motivated by hope and the promise of new beginnings and New Year that is as bright and shiny and unsullied as a newly minted penny. So here's to everyone's shiny bright New Year. May you realize your goals and may your penny be as bright and shiny at the end of December as it is today.
Today I had my final test for my heart - a treadmill stress test with an echo cardiogram. This was good as it took care of my daily run (which I missed yesterday - drat!)
I guess I wasn't supposed to go swim 2500 yards before I took the test but oh well... I had and we just had to deal.
There is something important they don't tell you about these treadmill tests. Something that cannot be true if you are doing a V02 max test at a sports clinic. Something that would ONLY happen in a doctor's office when they are doing the test for the purpose of ruling out a disease condition.
They made me run on a treadmill with no bra. NO BRA!
It was a first for me, running along with the twins bouncing like a pair of bobble heads in a car's back window. Now I happen to be fairly flat chested so it wasn't a huge deal but I looked at the tech and said, "How in the world does this work if you are a C cup?" The mind boggles - more than the boobs did.
They start the treadmill out kind of slow but on an incline. Every 3 minutes they up the speed and the pitch. By the 4th increase I wasn't running as fast as I could but I was holding on to the bar for dear life lest I go tumbling backward ass over tea kettle. Not fun. She finally told me I was at 100% (of what I have no idea) and asked me if I'd had enough. I said if it was 100% for her it was good enough for me. My heartrate was at 170 and I know I can push it higher but I was ready to stop. I had to exit the treadmill and wobble over to the examining table and lie on my side as fast a possible so they could get another echo shot. I had visions of me twirling and pitching, knocking over aluminum trays and causing computers to crash to the ground but it didn't happen - I made it.
Conclusion - I have no problems. None. I got back my blood work and my cholesterol is great in all the right places. I am one healthy specimen and for that I am quite grateful. It makes celebrating life through athletic competition seem a whole lot less insane and I feel safe now - completely safe. I'm also just rocking my bra - it never felt so good.
I don't think I've written about it before but I have been under going a "suspicious cardiac activity" investigation for about a month. My issue is nothing like IronJennys but it has been really nice to have a kindred soul sort of in the same boat while this was going on.
My situation was that I went for a physical on 9/7 and they did a quick EKG. The doctor saw a rhythm she said shows up in 1 of 2 places. Either in the ER while a person is having a heart attack or sometimes with athletes.
This heart thing is something I can feel, particularly after a race. My heart pounds in my chest much harder than normal and it sort of bothers me. After a couple of days the pounding goes away and I am not constantly aware of my heart beating in my chest. This has been happening for years.
She gave me a referral for some other tests and I picked 'athlete' as a cause and went on about my life including competing in 3 more events. During that time I had a 24 hour Holter test (where you wear a monitor for 24 hours and an echo cardiogram . No one called to tell me I should sit in a chair and wait for an ambulence so I didn't worry about it. Today I had a consultation with a cardiologist.
This guy was great. He explained in great detail how my pattern is just a mild idiosyncrasy of a normal patten (in fact it is called an idioventricular rhytm) and he told me how an athletic event would generate this pattern. He sat with a clipboard on his lap and drew this picture and wrote, upsidedown, as he gave me this explanation (click for larger image).
He dispelled some myths I had about the heart of an athlete pumping more blood because it is stronger or bigger. He said my heart is no stronger than any random 80 year olds (assuming they don't have heart disease). I'm not sure I really got what does make our heart rate lower but he referred to it as having better parasympathetic tone. That is, our hearts don't need to work as hard to deliver 02 because our parasympathetic system (which is chemical in nature) is stronger so our 02 delivery is more efficient. We have better parasympathetic tone because the training and racing elevate adreneline which elevates your heart rate and blood pressure. The parasympathetic system kicks in to lower it regardless of what you are doing. I guess the parasympathetic system is not sympathetic to your race - ha ha (that's a little lay person joke!). Anyhow, it seems that my parasympathetic system is still in high gear after the adreneline has calmed down so my ventrical assumes leadership for my heart beat instead of leaving it up to my atrial sinus. Okay so I took a little leap there but honestly - he didn't exactly fill in that gap. In any case, it all added up to me having a healthy heart so I'm good with that.
On the far right hand side of the page you see some more questions. He said my heart is perfect and healthy but my family history suggests that my arterial health needs some looking in to. It turns out that for women my age a heart attack is the leading cause of death and in 40% of the cases no one sees it coming. It also turns out that those garden variey cholesterol tests just aren't good enough. High HDL (which is good and which I have) is no asset if you lack a certain type of HDL (HDL-2). So I'm in for 2 more tests - a treadmill stress test which I have ALWAYS wanted to do (and sort of informally did when I had the Holter on by going running with it) and a more detailed cholesterol test called a VAP test. If those come back normal I will rejoice in my head to toe great health and continue to plan next year's race schedule. I have some ideas but since I'm not done yet this year (*sniffle*) I'm not quite ready to plan next year. Not even I know the answer to the question, "is there an Ironman in my future?"
Speaking of which - good luck to all the athletes in Kona!! The canon goes off in about 16 hours!
Marion Makes History was the title on the cover of Track and Field Magazine just after she won 5 medals at the 2000 Olympic games. She's making history again - admitting to her use of illegal, performance enhancing drugs prior to those victories.
I am so disappointed and disgusted. Not only because she has fessed up, but because she was so adamant in her lies. She sued Victor Conte for testifying that he saw her inject herself and he spent a lot of money defending himself. Not that I care a whit for Victor Conte who founded BALCO and is responsible for the production and use of this substance known as 'the clear as well as other performance enhancing drugs'. I file that lawsuit under 'karmic back lash' and that guy can die and rot in hell for all care. I am, however absolutely deflated that she would assert her innocence so vigorously when in fact, she was lying.
She says she didn't know at first she was using these things. That's a little hard to believe when you look at pictures of her back then and look at how remarkably and miraculously her performance improved. Was it all wishful thinking? Did she really think some mystery substance and vitamins would lead to those results? Very hard to believe.
Marion Jones in 2000 and then again in 2004
The good news is that these doping scandals aren't going away. I honestly hope that her coming forward is part of a grand scheme to finally bring Barry Bonds down. His doping is more dangerous and nefarious than that of any track star or cycling star simply because of the popularity of baseball. He has set the bar that says if you want to set a record you have to pump yourself up with steroids. That leaves every ambitious man behind him in a position of defeat or cheat. I'm tired of cheat and he in no way deserves to claim that he beat Hank Aaron's record. He did not.
Let's keep the pressure on to force people to perform as best they can under their own power, complete with fully in tact integrity. That's what athletics is really about.
I found this student project which is a biography of Marion's rise to the top. It looks quite different in light of recent news.
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She gave me a referral for some other tests and I picked 'athlete' as a cause and went on about my life including competing in 3 more events. During that time I had a 24 hour Holter test (where you wear a monitor for 24 hours and an echo cardiogram . No one called to tell me I should sit in a chair and wait for an ambulence so I didn't worry about it. Today I had a consultation with a cardiologist.
