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.

The Finger Revisited

I broke my finger on December 8, and today was finally my last day of occupational therapy. I've learned that there's a difference between physical and occupational therapy, but please don't ask me to explain it. I'm amazed that a broken pinky has taken so much time and work to return to (nearly) mint condition. I say "nearly" because it's still a little stiff, sore, and weak, but if I work at it for a few minutes, I can bend it far enough to touch the tip of my pinky to my palm. That's pretty good since not long ago I called it "an intricately detailed wooden carving of a finger."

Thumper warmed up to the whole idea of going to the therapist 2 and 3 times a week, so much so that when I told him that today would be the last time we'd see Ms. Lisa, he said, "Don't say that!" It's been a long, strange three months, and the moral of the story is: don't break your bones.

Dirty Old Man

One thing I like about ushering is that you never know what will happen when you walk through that door and start working. Most days, it's a waiting game: waiting for an event to start, waiting for it to be over, waiting for the building to empty of people. Some days though, I start out pretty certain of what my day will look like and it takes a sudden turn into totally new territory.

Today I was assigned to work in arena seating, helping patrons find their seats, looking for spills and other safety hazards, solving problems on the fly, and just generally providing that kick-ass customer service that I do my best to provide.

Several minutes after the doors were supposed to open, the lead supervisor in the seating area called me down to the floor. There was a safety issue that couldn't be fixed in time for the patrons to get in and the televised event to start on time. It was something that could have put the front row of one of the student sections at risk, so I was stationed there to point out the problem to the students, keep an eye on them, and remind them throughout the game to stay well back from it.

The students in that first row were lounging comfortably. They appeared pretty much like any of the other students in the section, though the first two of the group of six were casually painting their faces in patterns of orange and white. With about half an hour until game time, though, the first one stood up and said, "We ready to do this?" And as one, they stood up and pulled their shirts off, including the woman in the middle. She was wearing a black sports bra, which immediately got the attention of the camera operators on the floor whose video feed goes to the scoreboard screen.

Five of the six friends began painting letters on their chests. The woman helped her friend outline his "E," and then he began filling it in himself. She tried to outline her own "X," but was unsatisfied with the straightness and symmetry of her lines. Soon she had 3 guys surrounding her, helping her get it right. The sixth friend, incidentally, if you're keeping score, did not remove his shirt, but instead worked the Pentax camera, documenting the occasion.

So there I am, directly in front of them, trying not to ogle the smooth, curvaceous college body and trying particularly not to get on camera ogling the smooth, etc. etc. Then suddenly I was entirely surrounded by the cheer squad. Apparently I had set up shop right in the middle of their territory, and there was barely enough square footage for me among their pom poms, megaphones, and sundry promotional items, including t-shirts, mini-basketballs, and other giveaway items.

So bare abs to my left, short skirts to my right, and me in the middle trying to look professional, is what I'm saying here.

The game progressed, and the students were pretty good about remembering to stay back from the safety issue. I got a few smiles from listening to them razz the officials ("OK, I'll give you that one, Ref, but I'm expecting a make-up call!"), and the opposing team's coach ("Don't yell at them, Coach! It's not their fault they can't read!") and players ("Hey, #23, is that Frost & Glow?") and fans ("Lighten up; it's just women's basketball!"). They participated in all of the cheers and songs, and lamented the rest of the crowd's lackadaisical attitude. "Our fans suck," one observed. "Yeah," another agreed. "That's because they're all old people."

As the end of the game approached and our team closed the gap and came within a few baskets of the opposing team, the student section came to life. They danced like crazy on the time outs; they jumped and waved and screamed through the free throws. The front row even picked up their string of interlocking folding seats and pushed it back into the row behind them, giving themselves some more room to move and groove and jump. Sadly, our team wasn't able to pull off the come-from-behind victory, but the students' adrenaline was up, and after the end of the game and the singing of the school song, they started rough-housing, jumping on each other, and trying to smear each other's body paint. One jumped on another's back, transferring his own "A" to his friend, and suddenly they were staggering backwards, about to topple right over my safety issue and right on top of me. I stepped forward, and pushed them back onto the risers, preventing potential injuries to them and to me, and covering my hand and forearm in sweat and body paint. I was relieved that the one I touched was not the woman.

So maybe I saved some lives today without groping a nearly topless woman, and managed, I hope, not to be filmed or photographed looking at the bare abs or sports bra of a woman half my age or contemplating the legs of God knows how many short-skirted cheerleaders. I'll call that a pretty good day.

Predictably

1) My motivation for counting Weight Watchers points faltered pretty quickly. I'm still making good mealtime choices, but when I'm not counting, it's easy to throw in an extra snack here and there and think of it as unimportant or incidental, or to eat in their entirety the staff meals that were provided at work this weekend, including dessert, because it's really not that bad, and it's only occasional. But repeated and untracked "occasional" or "special" meals or snacks add up quickly. I'm going to keep trying to make good choices, but clearly counting is not for me.

I just ordered The Paleo Diet from Amazon (along with new ear-clip headphones and lubricant to prevent nipple chafe), so hopefully that will help me keep my calories under control and improve my lung function. I'm running and running and pushing myself to ever greater respiratory achievements, but somehow I'm still constantly wheezing and clearing my throat. My lungs suck. And blow. Ha! See what I did there? Respiratory humor! Anyway, maybe the Paleo Diet will help me discover that some portion of my lung dysfunction comes from a food allergy, like wheat or dairy, and suddenly I'll be able to breathe effectively again. Or something.

And yes, I did parenthetically mention that I purchased a special salve to put on my nipples to keep my shirt from sanding them off entirely as I run. And no, I couldn't let it pass as just a parenthetical comment. Nipple chafe for runners is a fascinating topic to me. Never would I have imagined such a thing. Never would I have imagined so many people pursuing a hobby with nipple chafe as a side-effect. Never would I have thought of Googling images of runners' bloody nipples. And yet, here we are.

2) Old stressors temporarily muted are starting to rise in volume again, pushing my wife to make tough choices and to anguish over them. There are, still and again, no good solutions, and every option has unpleasant consequences. Which is partly why:

3) I'm also struggling on the elimination of alcohol from my weekly routine.

So there you go. I'm working hard, running and lifting weights and doing push ups and losing weight, but every weekend is one step back on my week's two steps forward. I'm succeeding and I'm failing, and I'm happy, and I'm sad, and I'm mad, and I'm guilty, and I'm proud, and that's pretty much how life goes.