Category Archives: health & fitness

A narrative of my journeys with diet, exercise, and various healthcare professionals

running

Proud Member of the Slow Runners Club

On Friday the 7th, I was honored to be a guest on the Slow Runners Club podcast with Zen Runner (aka Adam Tinkoff) and Eddie Marathon. We talked about my first 5K last month, and what the experience was like, among other related and unrelated tangents. I haven’t listened to the final edit yet, but hopefully Adam was able to make me sound a little less rambly and more like the seasoned podcaster he made me out to be!

Seriously, though — as I mentioned with Adam and Ed, I read a comment from someone on my Twitter feed that identifying as a runner is like identifying as a writer; if you don’t do it for a while, you tend to lose the identity. That was how I felt this past week; I ran on New Year’s Day, then didn’t run again until this evening. Talking with the guys on Friday really helped me to reinvigorate my identity as a runner.

(It still feels weird to even think that. I’m a runner? Me?)

Anyway, here’s Slow Runners Club Episode 5 for 7 January 2011. Enjoy!

[Download mp3]

running

Race Report: 2010 Toledo Jingle Bell Run 5K

I was sitting in the parking lot of the movie theater, eating a banana behind the steering wheel of my car, watching runners and walkers of all ages trickle into the building.

“I’m sitting in the parking lot before my first 5K, eating my breakfast banana and watching the other runners arrive,” I tweeted. “Exciting, surreal.” And it really was.

I walked into the building, car key clicker looped onto my shoelaces, bib and timing tag in hand, looking for the flock of bright green shirts that would be my teammates (even though I only really knew one person on the Heartland team). Turns out they were right by the door, so I didn’t have to look far.

The Heartland team in their lime-neon green team shirts

I also found that the one person I knew was in charge of doling out the remaining green tech shirts, so she wasn’t going anywhere. We chatted while I got my timing tag on my shoe and my bib on my hoodie. While we chatted, I looked around at the other runners and realized that I really should have layered one of my thrift-store tech shirts under the new green one I got for my fundraising efforts. They say not to change anything up for the race, though, and wearing the hoodie and scarf over the tech shirt was how I’d been doing things, so it’s just as well.

As we chatted to pass the time, she asked me what my pace was. I hadn’t run the race last year, after all, so she was understandably curious. I only lied a little when I said I had an 11-minute mile (it’s actually about 12:15, but has been as low as 9:15 for shorter distances). She offered that, if I could run the whole 3.1 miles instead of run-walking, we could run together! I was doubtful, but was feeling the pre-race hype, so I agreed to try to pace her.

She also decided she wanted to be ON the starting line, instead of farther back in the pack. I had no place whatsoever being on the starting line — I might have actually enjoyed the experience more had I been ensconced in a swarm of fellow runners — but there we were.

And the gun went off, and there we went.

(Photo by Ferguson Photography)

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running 4 Comments

Running

If I searched back through my blog archives, I could probably find an instance or three of me admitting that I knew running would be good for me, if I would just do it. I know I’d find multiple instances of me doing it wrong and kicking my own ass too hard the first time out. I’d find documentation of several false starts, self-proclaimed failures, and lots of excuses.

I’m running my first 5K this coming Saturday.*

Technically, I’ll be run/walking my first 5K, since I can’t run 3.1 continuous miles quite yet. I’m trying really hard not to be embarrassed about this fact, and to just get out and do what I can. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to improve later.

So, how the hell did I even get interested in running? As with many things, the influences came from many directions, and I’m not sure which of the many planted seeds was the one that finally took.

I can tell you that the first time I seriously considered running was after one of my co-workers started running for weight loss back in Spring of 2008. He was using Roy Palmer’s method, and he shared the program with me. I wasn’t quite ripe for running yet, though, even though I knew I should do it.

Some time later, or maybe it was around the same time, I heard about the Couch-to-5K program — I think Mur Lafferty was the first to get C25K on my radar, although I continued to hear about it from other sources, too. Finally, after letting the idea circulate under the surface for a while, I got out and started C25K in March of this year.

Week 1 went great! I did Week 2 twice, since I’d missed a day and didn’t feel comfortable incrementing my run time yet. Week 3 didn’t go so well, and I stopped running for a month or two, then restarted the program in late June. Eventually, I gave up on incrementing my running time and just picked an interval that felt good and went with it.

I’d been toying with the idea of signing up for a 5K when sign-up time came for Race For The Cure. It was to be held in downtown Toledo, and I had a month or so before the race. I’d only been running once every couple of weeks, although I’d been walking two to three miles almost daily. Not surprisingly, when I decided to see how far I could run without stopping, I only made it one mile before I pretty much imploded. I haven’t tried to do that since.

Even though I could easily have run the race with walk breaks, I came up with a boatload of excuses as to why I couldn’t or shouldn’t sign up, and I didn’t. So, when the corporate e-mail came through about the Jingle Bell Run, I felt almost obligated to sign up. In fact, I barely gave it any thought; I signed up the day the e-mail showed up in my inbox.

My training has been sporadic overall: one week, I’ll run/walk 2.5 miles three days out of the week, and the next week I’ll only run 1.5 miles for a day or two. Since I signed up for the Jingle Bell Run, though, my training has been a little more consistent (except for that week when I was sick). Having basically a public performance to prepare for is a big motivator — even more so than the technical shirt I was going to promise myself as a carrot-on-a-stick reward for running three days a week.

I’m curious about how this 5K is going to pan out. Will I love it and want to train to do even better next time (and seek out more wintertime races), will I decide to hang up my running shoes for the winter, or will I go into an all-out fitness backslide?

Even though I can’t run more than a mile yet, I think I’m a runner in my head, finally. A slow runner, but a runner nonetheless.

I’m a runner, and runners run.

* The Jingle Bell Run benefits the Arthritis Foundation. I would humbly encourage you to make a tax-deductible donation, if you haven’t already. Arthritis affects someone you know.

health & fitness 2 Comments

Wisdom Teeth: One Week Later

When I started telling people I was getting my wisdom teeth removed, it seemed like everyone had a story. Some people gave me good advice and helpful tips; others just told me their horror stories (presumably in the hopes that my experience couldn’t possibly be that bad). Probably 75% of everyone’s horror stories ended with, “And then I got dry socket,” which, of course, prompted me to do some Google research, which freaked me out even more.

It was bad enough that I only had a week to prepare — or, come to think of it, maybe that was a good thing. I’d made the appointment immediately after my drill-n-fill the previous Friday — one filling on each side, so my entire jaw was numb (for five hours). I had NOT expected the nice cashier to say, “We have some openings next Friday…”

I had so many questions, but barely managed to enunciate my most important one: “Will I need someone to drive me home?” The cashier had assured me that, no, I wouldn’t be sedated. The procedure would be done under local anesthetic, “just like today!”

Everyone has a wisdom tooth story; now I have one, too. And, as my mother would say, it’s a lot of words.
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health & fitness, the ongoing saga of my job

Adventures in Dentistry

Friday was a little stressful.

We’d had a major network outage on Thursday, so the long-awaited move to production for one of my biggest ongoing projects at work had to be pushed to Friday — and I had a dentist appointment at 3pm, which meant I had to leave work by 2:45 at the latest, which meant that all the planets had to align just right for me to get everything moved into production in time.

I almost didn’t make my deadline. But things came together at the last minute — around 11am, actually, which left me enough time to get everything moved and tested and pass off one final last-minute task to a colleague on my way out the door.

I haven’t checked my work e-mail this weekend (I rarely do), but I’m sure that I’ll go back to work tomorrow to find that one minor (or not-so-minor) detail is keeping everything from getting passed on to the users. Even so, it feels good to have this just about behind me and just about in front of the people who need it.

Stressor #1 out of the way. On to Stressor #2: the dentist.

Of course, I got on I-475 to hightail it to the dentist’s office, and what did I find but bumper-to-bumper traffic. Of course. I contemplated calling and letting the office know that I’d be late, but I knew that their calls go to a central call center, anyway, since they have three or four locations, so by the time my status update got to the people who would need to know, I’d probably be there already. So, I just arrived ten minutes late, and no one seemed to mind.

[ALERT: NEEDLES AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, SHERYL.]

A few minutes after I arrived and checked in, the dental assistant called me back and let me know that she’d be doing my fillings. At this point, I was a little nervous about what was to come, because I’ve heard tales from my co-workers who have been to this same office and had Very Bad Experiences. One guy got injected with anesthetic and his cheek was swollen for a week; another’s wife got her cheek drilled by the dental assistant. So, I made sure to find out who was doing what and confirm which teeth were getting filled. No problems there: the assistant was numbing and injecting, the dentist was drilling, and the assistant would come back to do the actual fillings. OK.

She put the topical numbing jelly on swabs in my mouth and left me with the TV remote for a few minutes, to wait for the gel to take effect.

My dentist’s office is pretty keen: they have wall-mounted flat-panel TVs with cable, and they give the patient the remote. In the rooms where they do drilling and filling, they also have TVs mounted on the ceiling above the chair. I saw that HGTV was on the screen above the chair, and it was showing my favorite show that I haven’t seen in forever because the network switched it to weekday afternoons (the bastards). Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what channel HGTV was, and I didn’t have time to surf to it before the assistant came back at me with Very Long Needles. So, I had HGTV to watch, but Man V. Food on the Travel Channel on the wall TV as its soundtrack.

So, anyway. Very Long Needles. One in the left jaw, waaaay in the back, then one in the right, then another in the left. Pinch, some pressure, you know the drill. Then they left me alone again to wait for the real anesthetic to kick in. (Still never found HGTV.) Eventually, my entire bottom lip went numb, as did my tongue and jaw, all the way up to my left ear.

The rest really wasn’t so bad. The dentist did some drilling, of which I felt nothing; then the assistant did some filling, which took at least twice as long.

What was slightly embarrassing (and very annoying) was having a non-working tongue and bottom lip for FIVE HOURS after I left the dentist’s office. I had to try to communicate with the nice cashier on my way out, to pay my bill and schedule my wisdom teeth extraction.

I was more than a little shell-shocked when the cashier/scheduler told me that there was an opening next Friday with the oral surgeon. Um, okay. That’s a little sooner than I’d been banking on, but I guess we may as well get it over with. I somehow managed to enunciate, “Will I need someone to drive me home?” and was told that the standard procedure is for local anesthetic only, not full sedation, “so it’ll be just like today!”

Since they fly in their oral surgeon from another state, I had to prepay my co-pay for the extraction at the same time as paying the co-pay for the fillings, which hit me for about $200 total. Tell you what, I’m mighty glad to have insurance.

So, think of me this coming Friday at about 10:30am. I’ll be having my right upper and lower wisdom teeth removed by an oral surgeon — and after looking at the results of a Google Image Search for “wisdom tooth extraction,” I think I’ll be keeping my eyes closed as much as possible during the procedure. I really don’t want to see what implements of destruction this doctor will be wielding at my gums.