The End of Preschool

Today I ran my best 5K treadmill time, with an incline on the first mile, which made me feel good since I took last week off from exercising to help my knee heal. Of course, it didn't, so I guess I'll try working it to see if it heals, since not working it didn't help. Anyway, I again worried I'd gained weight and lost fitness, and then I performed just fine. I really should stop doubting myself.

But what I really wanted to write about was that tomorrow is Thumper's last day of preschool. It's been a fulfilling experience for both of us, and he's done better than I could have hoped. I haven't told him that he won't be going back next week, and I'm not sure how that will work out. I'd love to keep him in, and keep getting glowing reports back about his sociability and outstanding language skills, but man, preschool is expensive, and I think we've picked one even more expensive than average. I'm nervous about how I'm going to pick up the academic slack, because I'm lacking in patience, and he's lacking in desire to please me in the same way that he's happy to please his teachers. I understand that this is perfectly normal.

We, all three of us, watched his old videos last night (Thumper mostly talked about that kid in the videos in third person; he knew it was he, but I guess it was hard to really conceptualize as himself), and I'm stunned at how quickly we got here, and how much he's changed in so little time. Many of the dads in my playgroup that have kids the same age or younger than Thumper are now announcing their second pregnancies or second births, and part of me still hurts whenever I hear about other families' joy. But another part of me knows that it's already a stretch financially for us with just one child, and it's already a stretch for my patience and my abilities to be a good dad. One child is best for us, but the time is going so fast. Many people have told me how wonderful it is that I get to spend this time with him and that we'll both treasure these years for the rest of our lives, but it's just flying along so quickly. My baby boy will (probably, if we decide he's ready, and his preschool experience makes me think, yes, he'll be ready) be in kindergarten in 2012. And I swear, he was just a minute ago talking about his boo oddypop.

Me and the Knee

Warrior Dash was a blast, again. I'm not sure I can articulate why; it's partly the crowd, which has huge variations in age and physical ability, and partly the course, which has obstacles of different degrees of difficulty. It's just fun to run, and fun to hang out after, watching the crowd and its costumes while listening to the music, watching the people dance, and drinking a few celebratory beers

I got down on myself in the days before the race and decided I was going to fail miserably. Then I performed better than I expected, as usually happens when I get down on myself. I didn't meet the 32-minute goal I set after the last time I ran it, but I came pretty close. I ran the entire way without walking and finished at just over 34 minutes. I ran it with Biggest Brother again, and this time I didn't feel like he was holding himself back to stay with me. In fact, I think I might have impressed him with my performance a little bit. Making your big brother say, "Wow, that was great!" is something every little brother wants to do. I'm proud of him, too, since he managed to make the guy with the top time for men 40-44 scoff when he told him what age group he was part of and declare, "I'm on the 10-year plan to be like you!" It was just a great time all around. I love that my brother is a youthful, active, athletic man who wants to do these things with me.

I still don't know what to do about the knee, though. Maybe the knee pain is just a physical manifestation of my lack of motivation and boredom with running. The knee felt better after Warrior Dash than I feared it would, but the next day, it was sore again. I skipped workouts all week to give it a chance to heal, then Saturday I stepped off a curb that was higher than I expected, landing awkwardly, wrenching it again, and putting myself right back where I was at the start of the week. Today, I returned to the gym since I have The Bun Run coming up this weekend. I tried an elliptical instead of the treadmill, hoping a "no impact" workout would help, but I couldn't make it work. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, or maybe I'm too tall with too long a stride, but it just didn't feel right. It felt like I was trying to run while staying a good foot or more shorter than I actually am, putting a huge strain on my thighs. So I returned to the treadmill. I walked, instead of running, at the steepest incline and fastest pace I could manage. Then I did weights. Maybe the squats were a bad idea.

So, I don't know. I hear about Brandon Roy and his cartilage-less knees and I think, "Maybe I'm grinding bone on bone after years of my weight putting extreme stress on my knees." Or maybe I'm arthritic. And what am I going to do, and how am I going to find my motivation, if it's not as a runner finding 10Ks and 5Ks and obstacle courses for which I must train?

But more or less, I think I'll find something. My weight loss has stalled at 240 pounds, but I think I can ride it out until I can make it start falling again. Aerie walked in on me naked, getting dressed after a shower, and asked me if I am lighter than I've ever been. No, but I'm 7 pounds short of the lightest I've been in two years, which was lighter than I'd been for 10 or 15 years before that. Considering the fact that I met her when I was around 200 pounds, I'll gratefully take "are you lighter than you've ever been?" Maybe I'll keep running, or maybe I'll start riding my bike more, or maybe swimming laps at the neighborhood pool. But my diet has greatly improved, and athletic performance (such as it is for an overweight 39-year-old) has become important to me. I think I'll keep on keeping on. Or keep on hobbling on.

Draggin'

My weight loss has stalled, my running performance has plateaued, my knee refuses to heal, my lungs are full of glue, and my motivation is waning. I'm 2 days away from Warrior Dash, and there's no way in hell I'm going to meet my overly-ambitious 32-minute goal. My past three workouts have been a disaster, with my energy level in the toilet (maybe I should try going to bed before midnight) and my heart rate inexplicably at a surprisingly high 169 today, which is way outside of what the chart on the gym wall says it should be at the ripe old age of nearly 40. I don't know if the Paleo Diet is letting me down, or if I'm not doing it right, eating too many fruits and not enough vegetables, or if Paleo's a crock and I should chow down on some pasta tomorrow night. It has not, as I thought it might, made a difference with my lungs or with my skin. My knee still hurts and never heals because I keep running on it. When I try to remember my Chi Running fundamentals, my knee bothers me less, but still, it hurts during and after a run.

Maybe I need to start riding my bike more instead.

Oh yeah, I did remember that this summer (July specifically) will mark my 5-year anniversary of quitting smoking, which is a year longer than I made it the previous time I quit smoking. Hooray, me!

Running on Empty, and with a Sore Knee

I ran the Austin American-Statesman Capitol 10K last Sunday, along with 23,000 other people. I thought, since I ran 1:01:44 at the Longhorn Run last year, and since I ran a 56:04 10K on the treadmill, that I would blow my best time for an official 10K out of the water, so when I posted a time just a little less than one minute faster than my Longhorn Run time, I was disappointed in myself. The official photographers of the event quickly posted their photos, searchable by bib number or name, and looking at the pictures of me, I felt old. And fat. And though I've been running and training with nary a sign of knee pain or other injuries, the week before the race, I twisted my knee playing soccer with Thumper and his best pal, and by the end of the race I was downright hobbling.

So I took the week after the race off from exercising to give my knee a chance to recover, and I thought about whether I'm really a runner. I became morose and maybe a little pissy, thinking that I'm not going to meet my fitness and weight loss goals and I'm a terrible father who yells at his kid too much and I haven't kept up with the 100 push ups and I haven't even started the 200 sit ups and there are no solutions to ongoing family problems and I'm constitutionally incapable of keeping a clean house and there's no possible way I'll meet my copywriting deadline and nobody loves me everybody hates me I think I'll go eat worms.

And then I picked up Thumper from preschool and the teacher gave me a daily report that was glowing about his social and verbal skills. And then I went to the gym, ran on a steeper incline with only a slightly slower time than my last 5K workout, and I'd only gained a pound over my last weigh in. Suddenly I don't feel quite like I've totally blown it, though I'm not sure what to do about the knee. And I still have to finish 40 more of those stupid product descriptions in the next 24 hours.

Don't Call It School

Thumper started pre-school last week. We talked about it, and he was extremely excited. His Mama bought him a special first-day-of-school outfit, and he marched into the building with a jaunty strut:



When we got to his classroom, though, he suddenly got nervous, turned around, and said, "I want to go to a different classroom!" and started crying. I didn't think it would last long, and when I came to pick him up, his daily activity report said he had a wonderful day and was great at making friends. Each of the subsequent days, he's never looked back and has glared at me with angry eyes when I come to pick him up. He doesn't want to leave.

Don't call it school, though. It's pre-school, as he forcefully reminds anyone who asks him if he likes school. We told him a long time ago that he would go to school when he's five, so since he's 3 1/2, another fact that he, along with his full name, tells everyone he meets, he clearly can't be going to school. Q.E.D., as they say.

The school (pre-school) we chose is the one that I called "impressive" and "state-of-the-art" and "out of our price range," but we got a big break on the tuition for a couple of months. When the money runs out, he won't be going back, but we might move him to a cheaper program, maybe when the next school year starts in the fall. Or maybe we won last night's lottery, and we won't have to worry about that annoying income-expense balance anymore. I should go check our numbers.

Doctors, Therapists, Runners, and Cavemen

3 1/2 months after breaking my finger, I was told today by my orthopedic specialist that she was "cutting me loose." So no more doctors, no more occupational therapists, just more bending and straightening and special splints to get it straighter and more bending to get it flexible, though it's almost entirely there. I'm typing! Look at me, I'm typing!

1 1/2 weeks after starting the Paleo Diet, I'm feeling pretty good and noticing what may be improvements in both my lungs and my skin. There are so many variables involved, including allergens and pollutants and who knows what else, that it's hard to say for sure. But I think so. I'm amazed at the volume of fruits, vegetables, and meat that I'm eating. Every few days, I have to make yet another trip to the grocery store because the giant pile of produce and meat that I thought would last me a week or more is gone. The Paleo Diet combined with Thumper's addiction to bananas is sending me shopping far more than I'd like. It's more expensive, too. But I'm still losing weight.

I've been struggling on the exercise front. By all appearances, I'm still progressing (with the exception of 100 Push Ups; I've tried week 3 twice now, and both times I've been unable to meet the requirements of day 3), with improvements on my inclines on 5K's and on my speed on 10K's, but it's been much harder to keep running. A couple of times over the past couple of weeks, I've quit before reaching the distance goals I set for myself. One of the "So-and-so's Story" anecdotes in the book was about a former Olympic athlete who agreed to try Paleo for a month, certain that his athletic improvement couldn't possibly improve without the pasta carb loading. At 2 weeks, he thought he was well on the way to proving he was right, because his energy levels were lower, but another 2 weeks changed his mind. Maybe the next couple of weeks will see my energy bumping up, too.

Of course, maybe it's a crisis of motivation and not of energy. I haven't, in the times that I've quit before achieving what I wanted, reached the point of puking that Le Trevolution acquainted me with when he kindly gave me an introduction to Crossfit last October ("that's the puke bucket; that's the chalk bucket. Don't puke in the chalk bucket."), so maybe I'm not pushing myself as hard as I could. But finishing has been tough. Maybe I need to change my focus from running for awhile, but with Cap 10K next weekend, I think I'll stick with the running for now.

So anyway. That's what's up with me. What's up with you?

King of the Wild Things

It seems like, at just past 3.5 years, every other day is a trial. Today was one of those. He challenged every decision, refused every activity, threw things, hit, kicked, slammed doors, and just generally made everything more difficult and unpleasant than it had to be. Some little part of me is happy when I see him working that same behavior on his mama. We read Where the Wild Things Are as part of the bedtime routine tonight, and I swear he is often the spitting image of Max yelling, "I'LL EAT YOU UP!" Though as of yet, we haven't sent him to bed without eating a thing.

Much of his attitude is his attempt, I'm sure, to assert his independence, to exert his will over mine, or his mother's. This weekend I worked the boys' high school basketball championships, which is sometimes exciting and sometimes, like this year, completely mind numbing. Not the event, really, just my position during the event. This year, I worked two consecutive shifts courtside, sitting in a chair behind the photographers keeping them from moving too far forward and tripping the players or officials and keeping the patrons from coming down onto the floor. In reality, though, I was just sitting and watching basketball. There were some good games, sure enough, but it made for a long, slow day without the moving around and interacting with people and solving problems that I like best. The other two shifts I worked were in the "usher room," a closet where ushers can check in their belongings and check out things like radios, ticket scanners, and the like. Even more boring.

So where I was going with this is, while I was in the usher room, I read two issues of The Atlantic cover to cover, including the most recent, which had a trio of articles related to the entire Tiger Mother brouhaha. One article was "Sympathy for the Tiger Moms" by Sandra Tsing Loh. I took this one in a sort of Chris Rock "I'm not saying she was right, but I understand" sort of way. (NSFW link, BTW). There was also "The Ivy Delusion" by Caitlin Flanagan, which I took as, "The reason you middle class white moms are upset is because clearly the Tiger Moms are taking college admissions spots away from your kids by choosing what you're not willing or able to choose."

To me, though, the most interesting was "Leave Those Kids Alone" by Christina Schwarz. The images of childhood reverberated for me ("finding a stone that 'they could believe was an axe-head, or a fossil'"; "Girls could carry their books in both arms across their bellies, but boys had to carry them in one hand against their sides"; "A kid needs time to lie on his back, opportunity 'to find out whether he breathes differently when he’s thinking about it than when he’s just breathing' and to wonder who she’d be if her parents hadn’t gotten together. A kid needs enough downtime to be bored, yes—bored enough to stare at the sky and study the imperfections in his own eyeball.") I thought, not for the first time, about the difference between what I remember from my upbringing and what I've seen of children's experiences today.

When I was a kid, I had to come home after school, and then I was free and clear until dinner time. My mother had no idea where I was or what I was doing for hours every day. And this was perfectly normal. From what I've seen, it's not normal now. The exception that proves the rule, as they say, is the little girl next door who spends hours each day and seemingly entire weekends roaming the neighborhood freely without so much as a head stuck out the door from her parents, a fact which amazes the local parents, myself included.

On the one hand, thinking of an unsupervised childhood in terms of Thumper terrifies me, because some of what I was doing when I was a child (like crawling through storm drains and setting fire to golf courses) was inadvisable at best and dangerous and destructive at worst. On the other hand, I recognize how much freedom to learn, explore, and develop my own personality, interests, and relationships that time away from grown-ups gave me. My friends and I, and my brother and his friends, explored creeks, caught crawdads, built things, destroyed things, talked, wondered, and did nothing at all, completely free of adult involvement, adult supervision, adult rules, and adult safety gear. And ultimately, I think I'm better for it and only occasionally approached anything like serious danger. And I have no doubt even the danger taught me a few things, too.

So this afternoon, I asked Thumper if he wanted to weed with me. For some reason, he was thoroughly excited by this proposition and ran to tell his mama. Confused as to his excitement about weeding, she said, "What? You and Daddy are going to go weed? Or Wii?" Weed! he happily assured her. Once outside, though, his enthusiasm quickly faded and he said, "Can I ride my bike?" I agreed, got his bike out, and strapped his helmet on his head before returning to my weeding. He stayed close, circling in the driveway. Then he said, "Can I go ride by myself? Because you're still weeding." I thought about it, thought about that article, and said, "OK." I told him what his boundaries were and reiterated more times than he was comfortable with that he couldn't cross the street. He took off happily in the direction of the sound of other kids having fun.

The boundaries I set for him were essentially my sight lines. I dug up a few weeds then checked on him. He was still there where he'd dropped his bike, playing with a gang of other kids, on the correct side of the street. I dug up a few more weeds and looked again. He was fine. I gave him over an hour of freedom, looking in his direction every so often, and when I couldn't see him, riding my scooter (yes, the scooter that broke my finger) down the street until I could see him and then turning around again. I got a fair amount of weeding done, and he got a fair amount of playing. No one was hurt or abducted.

Incidentally, a neighbor walked by with his dog as I was weeding. He is a fitness, and apparently tanning, fanatic who owns a small dog. I try not to jump to conclusions based on this information, but well, I do jump to conclusions. My first experience with him was during the neighborhood triathlon before Thumper was born. He was out jogging before the event began, and I casually mentioned to him as he passed that he might want to run on the sidewalk instead of the bike lane because a huge crowd of kids was soon to be filling the bike lane. He mumbled something about asphalt being better for the knees than concrete and kept right on running in the bike lane.

My next experience with him was when Thumper was riding his bike through the neighborhood, and he was in his yard, digging up weeds and grumbling about how much easier it would be to keep a neat yard if his neighbors ever did anything about THEIR weeds.

Other than that, I've only ever seen him walking his dog, or running, or biking, and he's never looked twice at me or had a pleasant word to say. To be fair, neither have I.

Well, today, he walked by, looked at my big pile of extricated weeds, smiled, and said, "Hi."

What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah, childhood's freedom from adults and their rules and their structure and their "hanging around and bothering them and... making it so bloody important." And maybe 3.5 is too young to be playing unsupervised with slightly older and much older children hundreds of feet away from me, but despite all my fears as I dug up weeds, he didn't get snatched, he didn't get run over, he didn't get shot in the eye with a pellet gun or beat up.

Later, when I asked him what he did when he played with those other kids, he said, "I climbed into Mikey's truck, and I got inside it, and you didn't see me."

"If Mikey said it was OK," I said, "then that's all right. The only reason I told you not to climb on that truck before is that no one was around, and I didn't want you to get in trouble with Mikey's dad."

"Yeah," he said. "It was OK. I climbed in the truck. You didn't see me because you were weeding. Maybe we can weed again tomorrow."

Maybe we can.