You may be a runner …

One hundred signs that you may be a runner.

1. You start carrying your running shoes and clothes everywhere, you know, just in case.
2. When people ask what you do, you don’t mention your job or profession, you say “I run.”
3. You can eat at least pound of spaghetti at a sitting.
4. People don’t want to be around you if you’re injured because you’re not running and if you’re not running, you’re not pleasant to be around.
5. You know what GU is, you like to talk about your PRs, and your major goal in life is to BQ.
6. Even though you’re not a doctor, you can talk at length about VO2Max, oxygen transport, glycogen, and assorted other physiological terms.
7. You’ve considered taking a course in chemistry or biochemistry to learn more about how the body metabolizes things.
8. You know what a snot rocket is.
9. You’ve developed an excellent snot rocket technique.
10. You say fartlek — and don’t giggle.
11. All your shirts have a list of sponsors on the back.
12. Your idea of a good day is getting up before the rooster and running 10 miles.
13. You start to say things like “I’m ONLY running 8 miles today.”
14. People begin referring to you as the human garbage disposal.
15. Even your dog avoids you because even he doesn’t want to run that much.
16. You have a sports medicine doctor on speed dial.
17. People begin to tell you “I don’t even like to drive that far” when you tell them your weekly mileage.
18. You own so many race shirts, you can’t even close your dresser drawers.
19. You’ve had virtually every common running injury.
20. The trunk of your car is filled with running shoes and gear.
21. At least one of your toenails is black.
22. At least one of your toenails has fallen off.
23. Your podiatrist recoiled in horror at the sight of your feet.
24. You know what plantar fascitis is and you can pronounce it correctly.
25. You have to buy new shoes every month or two because you burn through them so fast.
26. You’ve worn out a treadmill motor (or two).
27. You’ve run so much on the gym’s treadmill, you are burning a hole in the belt.
28. You’ve run for two hours or more on a treadmill.
29. You wear your running watch, even with dress clothes.
30. You don’t think that a guy putting band aids on his nipples is strange in the least.
31. You watch how people walk and have to stifle the urge to tell them they are an overpronator and need stability shoes.
32. When you drive down a road you think this would be a great place to go for a run.
33. People assume your water bottle is an extension of your body because you have it everywhere, even when fine dining.
34. Although you can’t walk properly, you’re still going to “try” and run.
35. You’ve had to walk down steps backwards because you’re so sore.
36. You’ve done a double digit “recovery run.”
37. Even though you couldn’t do math well in school, you have an uncanny ability to calculate mile splits in your head.
38. You find yourself daydreaming about your run.
39. People don’t dare ask you about your running because they know you won’t shut up if they get you started.
40. When you go to a new city on a business trip, you find out where your hotel is beforehand and start planning out where you’re going to go for your run.
41. If a study came out tomorrow that said running is bad for your health, you’d be out running anyway.
42. You write stories about running.
43. You keep a running log.
44. You eat and drink double what everyone else does — and yet you are always the thinnest or fittest looking person in the group anyway.
45. You have every run you’ve ever done logged in detail since you began running.
46. When people don’t even bother to ask if you’re going to go running on major holidays — they know you are.
47. When you travel, you have to take an extra bag for your running gear.
48. Your MP3 player is filled with running music exclusively.
49. You’ve run around the block a few extra times, just to meet some arbitrary mileage goal.
50. You wear shorts even when it’s below freezing.
51. When you travel, you wear your running shoes, just to make sure they don’t get lost.
52. You avidly watch weather.com and the Weather Channel.
53. You’ve seen a major thunderstorm coming, and calculated precisely how many miles you can get in before it hits.
54. You’ve found yourself ten miles away from your car, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere and you were happy about it.
55. You have trouble remembering co-workers names, but you can recall precisely the time you ran five years ago in an unimportant race.
56. You can’t throw out old running shoes because there are “too many memories” attached to them.
57. You find the first and last things you think about is your run.
58. Although you know nothing about the metric system, you know exactly how far to the tenth of mile a 5K and 10K are.
59. Your resting heart rate is so low, nurses say regularly “Oh you must be a runner” without you even saying anything.
60. More than half your paycheck seems to be going towards running related expenses.
61. You flip through your medical chart, and find your doctor regularly comments on how much you run.
62. You’ve planned a vacation around a race.
63. You own trail shoes, road shoes, lightweight shoes for racing …
64. You buy Gatorade by the case.
65. You’ve run through a blizzard, because you didn’t want to miss a day.
66. You’ve run in a monsoon because you didn’t want to miss a day.
67. You’ve run when the heat index is over 110 because you didn’t want to miss a day.
68. Your neighbors all refer to you as “that crazy runner.”
69. You run five miles, as a “warm up.”
70. You see a runner while out driving on a cold and rainy night, and still say “damn, I wish that was me.”
71. You go to races for a chance to meet the opposite sex, since at least you’ll have running in common.
72. Finding someone of the opposite sex willing to talk to you at a race, you find yourself discussing snot rocket techniques.
73. You’ve said “I’m going out for an easy 10.”
74. You’ve said “20 miles” and “easy” in the same sentence.
75. You think golf courses are a great place — for running hills.
76. You spend a lot of hours on running message boards, just to be around other runners, since no one else “understands you.”
77. When you change your running route, the people who lived along your old route notice and miss you.
78. You try and convert everyone you know into a runner.
79. You’ve been told by a doctor that he isn’t going to bother telling you not to run, because he knows you’ll just do it anyway.
80. You have shelves full of “hardware” and medals.
81. You consider 6 AM to be “sleeping in.”
82. You consider a bad run better than no run at all.
83. You like to eat salt.
84. You’ve run on every road within a twenty mile radius of your house.
85. You think meeting a living running legend like Bill Rodgers would be “way cooler” than meeting, oh say, the Queen of England or the President.
86. You know to the nearest second what your steady state, recovery, long, and tempo run paces should be.
87. When you get a new race time, you rush to enter it into a pace calculator to see what your new paces would be.
88. You know the location of all public restrooms and water fountains within a twenty mile radius of your house.
89. You’ve skipped work at least once to go for a run.
90. You’ve gone to court in running shoes because you forgot your dress shoes.
91. You double knot even your Oxford shoes.
92. You’ve run at 3:30 in the morning.
93. The salespeople are the local running store know you by name and know exactly what shoe you take.
94. You’ve tested the casual dress policy at work by wearing a running shirt.
95. You try and convince people to do a 5K, as it’s “only 3 miles.”
96. You think maybe Phidippides fate wasn’t such a bad way to go.
97. You don’t think -20 is too cold for running.
98. You don’t think 105 in the shade is too hot for running.
99. You take an especial pride in the fact that running is used as punishment in all other sports.
100. You laughed and related to most of the above comments.

why I am destiny

OK, I’m not destiny. I just always wanted to use a chapter title from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo as a blog post title.

Speaking of Nietzsche, that which does not kill us only makes us stronger, right?!?

It’s currently 4 degrees — yes FOUR DEGREES — and it feels like FOURTEEN DEGREES BELOW ZERO. The gym better be open … and my ancient rusting Oldsmobile better start …

Are you listening up there, God? It’s me, Jenny. Know we haven’t been on great terms since the whole cancer thing. But maybe You gave me cancer to test me, to make me a better person. To improve my character. Well, God, I think I have enough character. I’m tired of building character. SO PLEASE GIVE ME 50 DEGREES, SUNSHINE, AND SOME BLOOMING WILDFLOWERS!

Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme what I desire: warm weather!

Oh. My prayers were answered! I refreshed weather.com and it is now five degrees and feels like only eleven below. Break out the shorts!

(Someone please remind me of my whining in July when it’s 80 degrees at 6:30 AM.)

(And a better title of this post would have been Why I am not so Wise.)

it never fails

It never fails.

At the moment you reach the turn-around point of a fairly long out-and-back run (and are therefore at the greatest possible distance from your car or home), it will begin to rain.

At least it was never this bad!

I had some really terrible runs while fighting Bleomycin damage, but at least I never experienced anything as horrible as this guy.

That’s your powersong?

I think maybe this guy should buy a pair of Reeboks and try the whole “run easy” thing.  :)

(I don’t have a Nike+, but their running commercials are pretty good. But of course not as good as the old Adidas ads: Runners, yeah we’re different.)

running through the rain

It has not rained on me most of the summer. I more than made up for that fact yesterday.

When I left to go running it was only drizzling a little. The sky was a pretty dark shade of gray to the west, though, and the radar was covered in green. ((Runners are obsessive weather watchers.)) So it looked inevitable that I was going to get wet.

And, of course, about 4 miles from home it started to pour. The rain came down in sheets. A few times lightning flashed overhead and thunder rumbled like distant artillery. My clothes were so wet when I got home that I had to wring them out. I could literally pour the water out of my shoes.

Since it was warm I didn’t really mind running in the rain. That said, it is rare for me to come back from a run quite that wet.

monstrous fine

I am rethinking my prior post where I confessed to devouring an entire bag of potato chips. After all, I do not want to go down in history like Irvin McDowell. ((Given my luck, all I would be remembered for is my ability to eat potato chips. Perish the thought.)) A subordinate officer recalled of this rather large Union general:

At dinner he was such a Gargantuan feeder and so absorbed in the dishes before him that he had but little time for conversation. While he drank neither wine nor spirits, he fairly gobbled the larger part of every dish within reach, and wound up with an entire watermelon, which he said was “monstrous fine!”

When Sherman was planing to engage in “total war” against the Confederacy, don’t you just have to wonder if he at least considered just setting a hungry McDowell loose in the Confederate heartland to eat until his heart’s content?

Certainly, that would have quickly starved the Confederacy into submission. ((McDowell’s appetite was so impressive, I even named my favorite angelfish after him. That fish could EASILY eat any other fish under the table. Unfortunately, telling the gender of angelfish is not easy; one day, Irvin laid eggs and became Irvina.))

I’m a Robert E. Lee

Mike over at Civil War Herald had a link to a quiz where you find out which Civil War general you are most like. I scored as a Robert E. Lee.

Honorable and courageous, you’ve made a career of winning great battles against overwhelming odds. You, um, might want to stay the heck out of Pennsylvania…

Its a fun little quiz. See who you are. Mike was a Nathan Bedford Forrest.

suggested blog titles (all still available!)

In the interest of promoting unique and interesting Civil War blog titles, a few suggestions, all free for the taking. You don’t even have to credit me!

1. The Porcupine Bristles (credit to A.P. Hill who self-described himself a porkypine)

2. Border Ruffian Rumblings (a good title for you out even beyond the Trans-Missisissippi)

3. Virginia Creepings

4. I Writs Mits Siegel

5. The Ewell Log (jump on it now — you know a title this good won’t last long)

the groccery list

In the kitchen we have a pad of paper stuck to the refrigerator door that serves as the family groccery list. When we run out of some food item or when the last of an item is opened for consumption, it is supposed to go on the list so that my parents can go out and buy more of it. This way we don’t run out of staples like ketchup.  Can you imagine a world without KETCHUP!?

Some items seem to be perpetually on the list, i.e. ice cream (which is, by the way, about the only food that doesn’t taste like pond scum to me right now).

[ For some reason, chemo seems to make one's mouth sometimes taste really bad. This makes eating when you're nauseated all the more difficult and challenging. ]

I like how when I write things on the list, my parents make them magically appear. There are SOME good things about living with your folks, you know? Hey, I’d like to be independent too, but this isn’t, obviously, really the right or best time to leave the nest. We’ve always had a grocery list, but now things seem to appear quicker.

Anyway, my dad is really good about getting things off that list and into my hands. I want turkey, dad dutifully goes and gets me turkey. I want hot fudge to eat out of the jar, dad goes and gets me hot fudge and then pretends not to notice that I eat it out of the jar. And like I said, my parents are real good at keeping the house stocked with plenty of ice cream. Eating is tough on chemo. My folks do a good job of trying to keep stuff I like or at least can tolerate around in good amounts.

The whole mechanism of I put it on the list, I get it, is so good I decided I would really give the list a run for its money.

So last month, I added “Better treatment for Hodgkin’s Disease” to the list. It stayed on the list, uncrossed out. Eggs were placed on the list and then crossed out. So was ketchup. And so were hamburger buns. But “Better treatment for HD” remained. Finally, the list got to the bottom and was torn off. My mother briefly mentioned the “better treatment” request and seemed sad she couldn’t find it at the grocery store. As of today, no one has brought me home anything better than stinking ABVD chemo.

I am not yet willing to give up on the magical list. So this month I decided I am instead trying for “Faster cure for Hodgkin’s Disease.”

Maybe you can’t get that at the store, but maybe someone could send subconscious vibes to Dr. S. Cure Jenny faster, Cure Jenny faster.

(By some strange trick of the calender, I get treated three times in the month of June for Hodgkin’s Disease. That’s three chemos too many if you ask me.)

Like a fighter pilot

Done with half of cycle 5. Its been pretty much the usual: nausea, heartburn (acid reflux), and a headache. With the added shortness of breath problem.

I am now on predinsone for the shortness of breath. Its a steroid that is supposed to help with the lung inflammation. It briefly made me seem ravenously hungry today, but that was quickly replaced by the more usual post treatment blah feeling. I couldn’t take this picture myself today so I had a friend snap it.

As you can count on my “Hodgkin’s Disease” wall (ever present bottle of water slid in there too, sorry), I’m now done with 9 treatments. Someone at chemo asked me how many treatments I had done; was I on my second or third? When I said I was on my ninth, their eyes nearly popped out and they asked me how many I had left. Three, I said, if I could get my oncologist to agree to six cycles of ABVD, otherwise I am going for another 7.

I can’t imagine doing seven more treatments.  That’s why although my oncologist will never bite on doing less chemo, I’m still going to ask.  I need to think there’s a shred of hope that we could do just six cycles, if just psychologically.

I posted the results of my latest chest x-ray.

Once I feel better, I plan to go back to the monument series. I haven’t been doing much of anything lately because I get winded so easily.