Long Course Nationals in Miami!

One of the tactics I employed while getting ready for my first Ironman (so many years ago), was to let everyone I possibly could know that I was doing it.  The motivation behind this was not, "Hey look at me, I'm bragging about doing this crazy-ass ridiculous sport."  It was much, much more selfish than that.  I knew that, in the middle of a 140.6 mile long race, any number of reasons for not finishing could start to make sense to me.  I also knew that if everyone I knew was aware I was doing it, nothing short of physical danger to myself was going to cause me to voluntarily quit the race.

So, I'm being selfish again, and I'm putting it out there to be held accountable again.  Sometime during my trip to Brazil, I decided I wanted to switch things up a little bit, and make a run for qualifying for age group worlds to represent Team USA in Spain next year.  Long Course Multisport Nationals is the place you have to qualify for this event, and it's Miami in early November.  I do not have a shot in hell to qualify for the team in the half-iron distance triathlon.  My running capabilities make that the case, but I am (of course) exaggerating a bit.  My best half iron time is 5:19, but that was done on a course that was a little short, so it's probably reasonable to say my best time is more in the 5:30 to 5:40 range.   With the top 18 places in each age group going, the 18th place in the age groups that matter for me (I'm going up an age group next year) were 5:47 (40-44) and 5:33 (45-49) last year.  I'm aware that last year's race was a hot and windy day, so the times may not be consistent with the courses I've done my best times on....though Vineman 70.3--that's a maybe.


In any case, it would require a good, if not great, performance from me to make the team in that event, and all of the stars would have to line up correctly, and it's something I'll consider in the future. This year though, I've said I always wanted to try an aquabike event, because it's no secret that running is my third best sport in a triathlon, to put it mildly. Sometimes, I wonder what goes through people's heads when they pass me during a run at the end of a triathlon--I'm certain that anyone vying for a spot on the podium is basically like "Good, one more down."  Though, others may have an internal dialogue going that amounts to "Dude, you can't run for shit."  Don't get me wrong--I enjoy running, and it's continuing to improve for me.  It just remains the sport that has the most room for improvement.

The Aquabike is a fairly new introduction to the world of multi-sport competition.  One reference I found said that it became official in 2010.  The race consists of a swim and a bike, with no run following, and it's really kind of ideally suited for someone like me, or for someone who was once a triathlete that can't run anymore due to injury, or anyone really, who wants to give it a shot.  It is not, however, heavily competed.  At long course nationals in November, the Aquabike is a 1.2 mile swim/56 mile bike. There are 18 slots for age group world qualification in each age group at nationals, and there were 10 people and 13 people that finished the race in the 40-44 and 45-49 age groups last year.

This comes as a bit of a double edged sword for me. I'd like to qualify for worlds, and then go on to compete at them and race (as an age grouper) for Team USA, but I also like to have a challenge. For anyone who doesn't know, this level of competition, at least to qualify, is a hell of a lot lower bar than anything regarding anyone qualifying for a USA national team at the elite level.  But it's a good goal for me, and something I think would be fun to pursue.


So, the primary goal is always to go out and have a good time doing it.  Secondary to that is qualifying for worlds, and then the third level goal is seeing how high I can place at nationals.  Beyond that, I have another goal in mind that the measurement of my success is going to be something like--did I race a time in the Aquabike that would have put me in the top 18 at the end of the bike in the half iron distance triathlon?  That event is a lot more heavily competed, and while people do go a bit slower on the bike than they would if they didn't have a run to do, the difference is not as large as you might think it is. Don't get me wrong--if I don't race faster than that theoretical 18th place time, and I still qualify in the Aquabike, I'm going to take that and be happy as a clam. I'm just going to think better of the effort if I do go faster than number 18 off the bike in the triathlon.

So, that's it! It's what I'm doing in November in Miami, and then hopefully again in May in Spain. And if you want to get into Aquabike--come on out!  I'd love to see this discipline of multi-sport grow.

And I'm not done running--I'm doing the Long Beach half marathon the month before this race in Miami--and I love running...it puts my head in a zone that no other sport does.

Being an athlete does not make you immune to age.

As most endurance athletes do, I have to
supplement salt due to heavy sweating during
long workouts.

I've known for a very long time that there would eventually come a day when my blood pressure would rise, and stay risen, and, in all likelihood, require life long medication to control it.

I'm not a hundred percent certain that's where I'm at now, but I am now on a blood pressure medication, as I was for a short period of time in my 30s. Back then, it turned out to be this transient issue, that might have been due to stress, or a temporary reduction in my training regimen, or whatever it was at the time. If anything, I've grown to understand that medicine is not an exact science, but can sometimes be a series of trials guided by scientifically backed studies and principles. I will never know what the root cause of that temporary spike was in my 30s, but I do know that I've been predisposed to this sort of thing all my life.

Blood pressure tends to rise with age due to a number of factors, some of which can be controlled through "lifestyle changes" (ie. diet and exercise, and stress reduction), and others that cannot be avoided. Structural changes in the body essentially amount to increased artery stiffness which may or may not be associated with heart disease.

My blood pressure has consistently hovered around 130/80 to 140/90 since as far back as we could find medical records on me (back to age 7), when I first had to have this conversation with my doctor shortly after I got out of college. We decided to watch it, and about 10 years later, I wound up with my first round of BP driven higher by a number of factors--job stress was quite high at the time, and I was at a relative downturn in my athletic training. I was swimming and beginning to train for what would be the first marathon I completed, but I was in denial about that marathon--I thought I was calling Brian's bluff when he said he wanted to do one, and I half-heartedly went through the training plan and got to the start line--I walked the last 8 miles of that marathon.

During that time, I had a number of appointments with several cardiologists and a nephrologist.  It was when I discovered that I have a PFO with atrial septal aneurysm, which sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.  It's a flappy opening between the atrial chambers of my heart, and a weak wall that moves with every beat of my heart.  The combination of the two is considered not common (2-3% of the population is estimated to have that, while the PFO by itself is probably present in 20% of the population).  Long story short--I had to have a TEE (trans-esophogeal echocardiagram) to diagnose the thing, and I do not recommend this procedure to anyone--having an echo machine shoved down your throat while you're conscious and being told to move around and strain your abdomen is not a fun way to spend an afternoon. I carry an increased risk for stroke because of this, and take daily aspirin to reduce that risk.

In any case, I thought my blood pressure was related to this structure, until I was told otherwise--kidneys control your blood pressure, not this structural heart abnormality.  I went on blood pressure meds--at first a diuretic, and was told to limit my salt intake, and watch my diet, and do all the things cardiologists are trained to tell their patients that they assume are sedentary and don't sweat out all that salt all the time.  I cramped up and become unable to train, and I would sweat profusely under the easiest of workouts, and then cramp up some more.  I came to the conclusion that a drug that left me unable to exercise was probably going to have worse consequences in the long term than what it was treating me for.  My first cardiologist suffered from a bit of a god complex--I couldn't get a word in edgewise to ask about details like this, so I left him and went elsewhere.  I wound up on a drug called Atacand, which worked for a while, and then overdid its job, and my doctor cut down the dosage, and then cut it down some more, and then some more.  I eventually came off of it, and my blood pressure stayed in the normal zone for me.

My guess is that the way my first cardiologist treated me is not uncommon--a very common issue that causes BP increases in people as they age is an imbalance in electrolytic salts that increases BP, and a diuretic is appropriate in these cases. They see a guy in his 30's, assume that's what it is, and write it off as an everyday common occurrence. It also turns out that sweating 5 or 6 days out of the week does the same thing, and combining the two can be disastrous. At the time, maybe my temporary increase in BP was due to a salt issue--I was on the upswing of a training plan that turned into the very active triathlete lifestyle that I have now. Maybe it wasn't--I won't ever know for sure. What I do know is that exercise can help to ward off blood pressure increases because of salt issues, but it doesn't make you immune to other causes.

I got a good reading the other day
Hopefully, it will stabilize there!

Increasing inflexibility of the arteries is something that happens with age--in some people, it's later in life than others. Ignoring it is the biggest problem, because increases in blood pressure are associated with significant medical events (heart attack, stroke, kidney damage to name a few). You are not immune to this just because you work out all the time.  So, if you're not having physicals on a regular basis, get on that. And if you're not seeing a doctor you can have conversations with about all of these things, find another one.

Exercise can (and does) help. It's just that it's not a guaranteed cure--in my case, it probably staved off the inevitable for a good 20 years or so. Maybe I'll need to stay on this drug for the long term, or maybe I'll have a similar reduction over time like I did in my 30s...I'll work with my doc on that one.

Stay healthy, and live long!

What's it all about?

In the summer between my senior year in high school and freshman year in college, I competed at the only Junior National Swimming Championships I ever went to.  I earned what I did to get there, but I didn't qualify for the meet.  At the time, the standard for men to qualify for this meet was 54.39 in the 100 meter free, and that season I went what would be my lifetime best of exactly 55.00 seconds, and in retrospect, that's not too shabby.  I swam relays at this meet, and it was perhaps one of the most interesting experiences in athletics I have ever had.  For those who don't know, Junior Nationals is, perhaps, the point at which elite level swimming begins, and for those that go on to bigger levels, a stepping stone towards the pinnacle of the sport.  So, I earned what I did to get there--my time that season was used to put in the qualifying time for our team for relays to compete in that meet, and I chose to go to this meet over the Zone Championship that I qualified for in the process of swimming that time.  However, it never felt like I belonged there--the literal pool of talent so far exceeded anything that I was capable of that I felt like an outsider, and that I had somehow cheated my way into the meet--officially I was not even registered in the meet, since relay only swimmers were in a different classification.

As time went by, when I would talk with other swimmers about this, I would always have to qualify my description of that meet with "I only swam relays." Sometimes I have said that it killed the experience for me, but the reality is that I always appreciated being there, and being able to participate in the biggest athletic event I've ever been in. But it's only been by putting it in the context of "I earned getting there--I just didn't get as far as I dreamed I wanted to."

So, I wonder what it is with all of the people in athletics that take every shortcut possible--every avenue, including the use of performance enhancing drugs to climb their way up the ladder to international glory, or professional level sporting. What is it that drives a person to want to achieve something that they didn't earn?

People have their theories--there are many explanations that have been proposed about what causes one person to decide that it's ok to cheat. Certainly, once money becomes a significant factor in racing, there's a stronger likelihood that someone in the field is doing some sort of drug use to get there.  That major motivating factor is likely what drove the ring-leader of the US Cycling scandal to do what he did, and it probably has led to countless others in lesser funded sports.  Fame, glory, the desire to stand on top of a podium and be told that you're the best--that's an explanation that holds water.

At the forefront of today's headlines is the story that the country of Russia was banned from competing at the Winter Olympics.  A process was put into place that allowed Russian athletes that had not been involved in this particular systematic doping scandal to still be allowed to compete, but not as a member of what would have been Team Russia.  In this case, it's easy to believe that politics and the desire of a country to prove that they are the best at any cost is what went into this.  No doubt that Russia applied pressure to its athletes to force some of them to participate in the doping plans either against their will or with the promise of significant incentives--that doesn't make them any less guilty of what they did, but it does paint the picture of what a massive national organization is capable of to "prove" that their team is the best.

At a lower level, and something that has shocked me since I learned of it, is that there has been a rise in doping at the amateur and age group level in sports such as triathlon.  There is no money in this sport--well, there is some money at the professional level, but for an age group competitor; the type of which I compete against?  No.  No money.  That part of the equation is immediately removed.  I would venture to guess that I have never been in a race with someone who is participant of a systematic doping program....well, except for the possibility that Lance Armstrong was in small triathlons that were not sanctioned by USAT while his final fate was being decided.

Estimates of doping in the amateur triathlete population are difficult to get a handle on.  A study done in 2013 based on anonymous surveys of triathletes showed results of 13-15% of those athletes admitted to doping (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078702).  That's somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in every 7 athletes is actively taking banned substances.  This study did much more than just try to establish if and what number of athletes are doping--it looked for things like correlations between people taking illicit doping substances and their use of legal substances, such as caffeine, that serve as performance enhancers.  The point, however, is that 1 in 7 athletes is huge.  Why are these people doing this?

Some may be trying to break into the professional ranks of triathletes--that doesn't explain the high numbers, since only a fraction of triathletes are in a position to potentially cross that threshold.  Some may be doping to qualify for the age group world championships.  Some may be doping just because they want to win.  Whatever the case, there appears to be a huge number of athletes that are actively cheating and racing in the amateur ranks.

I can't get my head wrapped around this--the study was 2997 triathletes, which means that 13% of that number is close to 400 athletes with admitted (but anonymously admitted) doping. Does 13% of the field really feel that the most important thing is to win at all costs? 

I've always thought that if I got there, and I didn't earn it, I simply didn't belong there.

A lifelong undiagnosed case of ADHD?

I'm extraordinarily happy to say that since my last blog post, I've had a dramatic improvement in the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and otherwise annoying feelings that I've been experiencing. These peaked this year, likely due to the series "undesirable events" that I dealt with--I'll save you the rehash on those...I think I've blogged enough about them, and it's time to move forward.

My dogs have always made me happy, so that's why
 they're in this post.  This is Barrett

Moving forward has taken a different path for me that I might have ever imagined. At the last appointment I had with my psychiatrist, we discussed the very real possibility that I may be dealing with a case of ADHD, which has been missed, and attributed to episodes of depression since my teenage years. As I write this post, and this is due to the engineering side of my brain, the diagnosis is not 100% certain, though it never really is, since medicine, and in particular medicine in the field of mental health is a substantial amount of art combined with science and medical knowledge.



Everyone knows what a hyperactive kid looks like--and that is somewhat difficult to miss--he or she has problems staying still, can't focus on a damn thing, and often breaks down into screaming fits for very little or no reason whatsoever.  That was never me. What was me is this form of ADHD known as inattentive type ADHD which presents in a different way. It's a lack of focus that takes the shape of the day-dreamer, resulting in things like an inability to stay involved in a conversation, doing things like rushing through tests and quizzes unnecessarily fast and making careless errors on them, starting but not finishing project after project, forgetting where you leave things like your keys or your wallet and having to spend endless time finding them. Reading through this list (https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/symptoms-of-inattentive-adhd/) makes me think "This is me, and this has been me ever since I can remember."

Josie and Max after dog park

There are a number of reasons why I can imagine this got missed--first and foremost is that a large percentage of inattentive type ADHD cases go undiagnosed. Estimates vary, but somewhere on the order of 50%-75% of adults with ADHD go undetected (https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/other-related-conditions/adult-adhd#). In addition to that, inattentive type ADHD affects women and girls more often than it affects men and boys.

Additionally, long periods of my life were occupied with things that resulted in self-treatment of ADHD symptoms. Exercise is one of those things, due to exercise's effect to aid in increased levels of dopamine in the brain (https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/adult-adhd-and-exercise#1). During my high school days and portions of college, I was a swimmer, training upwards of 5 hours a day, and my ability to focus on things was reasonable.  It helped that I was good at school--I was the master of the "study break"--which is exactly the opposite of what you're thinking. I would spend an hour doing anything else, and then 5 minutes studying and absorbing some piece of material until I understood it and lost interest in studying it anymore. I swam in college, and then I didn't swim, and then I swam again when I lost my direction. In the off-swimming semesters, I became a caffeine addict and it turns out that caffeine is also a treatment for ADHD, although a somewhat less effective one (https://www.additudemag.com/treatment/caffeine/). At the peak of my caffeine issues in my adult life, I was consuming 12 shots of espresso a day.

Max--most photogenic dog ever

Some semesters in college, I resorted to alcohol, and substance abuse is clearly associated with untreated ADHD. People turn to alcohol (or some people turn to other substances) as a way to quiet the mind, or in some cases, to relax inhibitions to incite the impulsivity issues that go along with ADHD. I say that I drank a lot during some semesters in college--that statement is often a no-brainer.  College is a place where people tend to experiment with drinking, and often do it a lot. It's a societal norm. The thing is that I drank a lot during the semesters that I wasn't swimming, that I wasn't overly focused on finding a way to stay on top of school work (drinking a pot of coffee a day), and often to get through some of the more mundane tasks I had to deal with. There was a structural analysis class that I went to either already buzzing or with an alcoholic drink in my hand because it bored the crap out of me--when it came time to take the final, I decided I had to be in the same state of mind that I learned the material in, so I went for drinks before it. I got an A, and I believe one of the highest scores in the class.

Josie

These types of self medication (exercise, caffeine, alcohol) are common in people with undiagnosed ADHD. Some people who are open to it, and able to do it, also resort to marijuana--which I'm unable to try due to my job. Interestingly enough, out of those self medication options, weed may be the best option of them all, but it remains illegal at a federal level, and therefore is not an option for me in my profession.

So my psychiatrist put me on Adderall, and when the dosage was increased to where it is now, I saw an immediate and profound effect in my ability to get through my day. Tasks became less daunting. Challenging work became interesting again, as opposed to just being aggravating. Over time, my level of happiness has increased to the point where the job that I'm dealing with now, while on travel, is difficult, but more in the vein of a "challenging and interestingly type of difficult." Don't get me wrong--having to leave the hotel at 5am to get to a maneuver this morning was not my preference, but it didn't seem like the weight of the world was crushing me either.

In the world of triathlon, I look forward to workouts now. I've signed up for a couple of races in April and May, and I'm working out what my larger goals are for the year. I feel like life is resuming for me.

So now I'm off to get a run in along the Seine. It's really one of the most picturesque places in the world to go running--I'm very lucky that way.

Eiffel Tower/Statue of Liberty

I am not OK, but that's okay.

To round out October as National Depression Awareness month, I thought I'd put all my thoughts of how I'm doing in one spot. As some who have read my Facebook posts might have wondered, I'm in a less than optimal state these days. Perhaps the largest indicator that something has been amiss is that I stopped writing in my blog--I remember a high school English teacher once telling me that people should be worried, not when I write about potentially dark or concerning things, but when I stop writing about them.

I've occasionally seen posts from several Facebook friends with the relayed message that goes something like "Please post this so that people know that someone is listening." Frankly--it doesn't do a whole lot for me, but I'm sure there are people that it does help, so please keep on with that.  What did help me enormously was when a friend reached out to me late last week over text message and just asked how I was doing, and offered to help in any way that he could. Just being able to explain my frustration with the state of mental healthcare in this day and age went a long way to settling my thoughts.

I should begin, not at the beginning, but at a point where this snowball began. Somewhere around a year and a half ago, I saw a new psychiatrist who put me on Remeron, which did wonders for immediately fixing my issues with getting to sleep and staying asleep. She was fairly certain that based on my activity level, the usual side effect of weight gain would pass me by. I gained somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds almost immediately, and then plateaued, and I accepted this as a necessary side effect. More concerning was that I woke up most mornings in a fog that did not clear up until noon, and I lost pleasure in the simple act of getting a workout in. You know that feeling of runner's high? Gone.

Just gone. The endorphins that went along with working out were eliminated from my psyche.  Working out became about effort. It became about looking at my workout on paper and deciding if it was good or not after the fact. It became about redefining joy around a performance--be that finishing a workout, or about meeting a speed objective. I lost the ability to independently say whether I enjoyed doing what I was doing or not.

My psychiatrist suggested lowering the dose of Remeron, which appeared to help with the "been in the hit head with a shovel" aspect of waking up every morning. Strangely, the weight gain picked back up again, and there was no improvement in the runner's high side of things. I made the determination that I needed to come off of this drug, and with my psychiatrist, we decided that we would see how things would go in an unmedicated state. I'd been on this antidepressant for a year, and we agreed to taper off of it. She said she didn't need to see me again unless things went wrong. At the end of it, I gained 17 pounds, almost 10% of my initial body mass.

So, I came off the Remeron. I passed four kidney stones in three months, and work became a great upheaval of overcommitment. I recognized the problem as it was happening--I was on a trip, and having to deal with another program from my hotel room, in a double duty fashion, and a third thing occurred. When I politely explained my predicament, the requests just got louder (as in emails to include the managers in my group about me not getting stuff done). I wound up doing the work, and made mistakes like forgetting to load files onto my laptop so I could work on it while I was flying--I was just in a state where all the cylinders weren't firing, and it was digging an even deeper hole for me. After landing in Paris, I spent a good chunk of time in my hotel room completing a document because of that screw up. Maybe it helped with the jet lag. I don't know. I started on Klonopin again to get myself to sleep--which is the red flag I had set for myself that things had gone awry.

I passed that fourth kidney stone a few days after I got home from Paris. Dehydration from flying probably had something to do with it. I then threw out my back the day after my stone, and met with my therapist and my urologist. At the urging of my therapist, I met with my manager to talk about how to reduce my stress load at work, and he said all the right things in that meeting. "We need to find people to take over some of the work you have"..."we need to find ways to eliminate some of those problems that cause you issues, like the commute from Long Beach to El Segundo"--my experiment with a desk in Seal Beach failed miserably over the past year, because I had nearly daily reasons I had to be in El Segundo.

However, I left that meeting with no concrete plan--no actual changes to the schedule. No actual shifts in responsibility. So, the days unfolded as they had before. I would work on something, at the demand of somebody who had already thought that I had failed by being late, and get that done, and then go to another building the next day and repeat the process. The discussions with my therapist about going out on disability for stress leave became more real. I also decided I needed to get back with my psychiatrist to go on another anti-depressant, and it turned out that she was gone on vacation for 5 weeks, and refused to start me on anything from a distance because it had been too long since I had seen her--5 months apparently exceeds her threshold. She said I should go to my GP to get started on a different drug, and it was in that moment that I decided she had simply washed her hands of me.

So, I simultaneously tried to make appointments with a new psychiatrist my therapist had referred me to and my GP to get me started on Wellbutrin. The psychiatrist's first availability was Nov. 22nd, and my GP's was after my scheduled trip to D.C. I agreed on a same day appointment with another doctor in the office I had never seen before. He asked me a series of questions basically covering his ass, and then prescribed me a dosage of Wellbutrin that is, in all likelihood, ridiculously insufficient.  It's less than half of what I took when Wellbutrin worked for me before.

For anyone who was concerned about why I posted "I'm pretty sure one of the leading causes of suicide is 'we can't get you on the schedule for 2 months'"--this is it. To be very clear, I am not suicidal--but I believe that anyone who is that faces this complete load of crap in trying to seek professional help might just have problems making it through. I had follow up discussions with my manager over email, and he now understands just how serious this problem is, and is working on a path to correct it. The plan is not concrete, but it is coming together. I am hopeful that my life will begin to turn around very quickly.

But something needs to change. And I mean something very significant about how this country views and treats mental healthcare. It should not be the right of only the super rich who can afford to pay out of pocket for professionals who know what they're doing. And it should not only be the right of the wealthy upper middle class who have decent insurance.

I have a plan. I am not ok. But I will be ok, so that makes it ok. And I am hopeful that, as I claw my way out of this hole, I will find the joy of working out again, and the feelings of accomplishment that come from doing a good job on something at work, while not having to prioritize things in a way that starts with "Who do I want to piss off the least today?"

So, for all you out there who may be going through something similar--I'm here.

Returning to Normal Life

Passing a kidney stone ranks in the top 10 of pain caused by medical issues, along with things like cancer and childbirth, as well as other crap everyone should be thankful that they haven't had the pleasure of dealing with.

I passed 3 stones over the last 5 weeks, and it wasn't like the experience of the previous ones made the next ones any easier. They just made me aware that I probably wasn't going to die from this. Before I got the first one diagnosed in the ER, I thought I might have been dying, because that's how intense the pain was. There are some forms of pain the human body was not meant to be able to deal with.

As I was passing the 3rd stone, I referred to it as a "stone fragment" because that's what I thought it should have been. I had lithotripsy done 5 days before that in an effort to crush the stones into sand...and well, that didn't work out quite the way it should have. Doctors sometimes tell you the best case scenario, and if something worse (or more painful) happens, they're happy as long as it gets you past it.  In my case, the remaining stones were probably reduced in size, making it possible to pass them, but no less painful. I spent about 36 hours in agony on the 2nd day after lithotripsy and another 12-18 hours on the fifth day. The third stone was roughly the same size as the first one, so the use of the term "fragment" could not have been more wrong.

On Friday, I was elated to find out that I had no remaining stones left--that the ones I had formed were all successfully expelled in the week following my lithotripsy. I would like to be able to say that I feel like I'm 100%, but that's not actually true. I get tired really easily, and I'm hoping that will improve quickly. A little bit of me has been smacked in the face with the cold, hard reality of my own mortality. One does not go through three stones being passed without taking a moment to pause and reflect about the human body's capacity to suddenly betray you.

So, I'm sitting here in my mid 40's, grateful to be alive, but also conscious of the fact that being alive is a gift that should not be squandered. And I'm sleeping and resting a lot right now, and that's ok.

See you back out there, sometime soon.

"I'm no superman..."

"Well I know what I've been told
You gotta know just when to fold
But I can't do this all on my own
No, I know 
I'm no superman
I'm no superman"  

--"Superman," Lazlo Bane, theme song to Scrubs

Occasionally, life throws a curveball at you, and you have no choice but to adapt to it. 13 days before I was to leave on a trip for work to the east coast, I dealt with my kidney stone, and returned to work to find out that my trip had been canceled. My reaction was relief--these work trips leave everyone involved in them exhausted, to the point of sometimes being unable to recall complex words after they are over. You know--like when you're putting on your shoes, and you're sitting there going...I need to put on these other things before them.  What are those called...you know, made out of fabric? "Socks." I need to put on "socks."

I thought I'd be able to balance the follow up appointments--the scheduling of my pre-op appointment, the scheduling of my surgery, and get all the way through this phase of the new normal for me. It would result in blasting the crap out of the large kidney stone sitting in my right kidney so that there wouldn't be a chance it would get stuck between my kidney and my bladder if it were to start moving.

I thought I'd be able to do that while ramping back into a healthy amount of training. I thought I'd be able to return to eating well.

And then, three days later, we were told to reschedule our travel, and the trip was back on. I initially did not, and decided I needed to prioritize the lithotripsy for my kidney stone over this work. The doctor thought there was very little chance that the existing stones would start moving in the few weeks since my last one, so while traveling with the impending doom of pain that would literally bring me to my knees was a concern, it was unlikely to actually occur. The problem was that I didn't know when I would be able to schedule this surgical procedure.

That Monday, I got it scheduled for the 17th of August, and the pre-op appointment was clear of the trip. I was free to travel with all my coworkers.

By the way, "Scrubs" was an awesome show

I was not free to do what I typically do on these trips--which is to get a workout or two in before I go in to work, further stress my body out by dealing with extensively long hours, and throw caution to the wind in the amount of time that I should be sleeping. My marching orders are clear--keep the kidney happy. Things that would raise my blood pressure were to be avoided.  Working too many hours was not allowed. What I did probably pushed the line, by working every day that I was in DC (yes, including the weekend--this is normal for everyone that I travel with). I chugged a 1.5 liter bottle of water every day at work, in addition to the usual fluid intake that I have, and made many, many trips to the bathroom.

I'm learning to say no, out of necessity. Within the first couple of days I was in D.C., an urgent request came through that I agreed to take care of my first day back, but I refused to reschedule my pre-op appointment around it. On Thursday, someone else will present that material for me. So, I'm completely brain-dead from the work I just got through, and I'm going to go in to work tomorrow and crank some shit out....do not get me started on why no one else is able to do this for me. But I'll leave, and I'm going to take the next two days off.   I need to put my life back together.

I'm going to take those two days and relax...and get the fairly manageable looking workouts done that I have on my plan, and not get stressed out about any of it.

Sometimes, life throws a curveball at you, and your health should always take priority.