back to running! (?)

After my last post and my concerns over the knee pain, I decided to pass on further running until I'd had the chance to meet with a doctor and consult on my options. A very nice doctor at Sitka Medical Center advised me to take advantage of the miracles of modern neoprene and was willing to write me a scrip for physical therapy as well. I haven't been able to arrange the therapy appointment yet (looking after kids, traveling for a week, and not having a solid hour for an initial appointment at a convenient time have conspired...), but I did get to the local pharmacy to pick up a pair of knee braces.

I was diagnosed with Patella Tracking Disorder, which basically means that when my thigh muscles contract, my kneecap is pulled to the outer side of my joint and it creates stress on the tendons and cartilage inside. This is pretty common in people who aren't in great shape, but still damned unpleasant. I'm using neoprene braces with kneecap holes, but biasing the hole to the inside of my knee in order to push the patella to where it's supposed to stay. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the braces to stay exactly where I want them to be, but today's run seemed to vindicate their use. My left knee has no pain or discomfort and my right has only minimal discomfort, some of which may have to do with torquing it on the uneven surfaces I hit a few times.

The run: I ran out Halibut Point Rd about 1.5 miles (just shy of Harbor Mountain Rd) and probably took it way too fast. My leg muscles were initially stiff from the tightness of the braces and this may be part of why I started so quickly. I was focused on my legs and discovered about halfway through that I'd created some tension in my upper arm that was causing stiffness in my left shoulder. Some quick arm shakes and really relaxing it worked that out fast. Near the end, my lungs were starting to get angry with me, but I experienced the least foot* and leg pain I've felt yet and also got a bit of runner's high!

Details:
2.9ish miles on flat, hard surfaces
27:30 (about a 9:30 mile pace, which wasn't bad for me at this point)


*Vibram KSOs with Injinji NuWool hiking socks gave a great cushion on this run.

no more running?

So, I intended to do a 5K last night. As the day progressed, it became less and less likely that I'd do so and then it just didn't happen.

I woke up with burning calves. I could only hobble around the house, but I thought it was hilarious. I'd run a course with some hills the day before and this was expected. Burning calves are a sign that unused muscles are waking up.

When we got ready to leave the house, I got to the five steps from our porch to the ground and discovered a far bigger problem. In the past, I've experienced varying degrees of knee pain from different activities. In general, when my knees take a repeated beating over time, they let me know about it. Near the end of a 40 mile hike a few years ago, I found myself only able to step up and down with one leg because the other knee was so upset with me. Well, yesterday, my left knee felt like someone had stabbed it.

The pain has mostly gone now (more than 24 hours after my last run), but it was intense, right between the patella and the femur. It's on the inside of my knee, and feels like it's in the cartilage (I could be wrong about that, but it's definitely not bone and I'm pretty sure it isn't tendon pain). With a large family history of bad joints (both parents and a grandparent have had at least one joint replacement, two of them have had more than two replacements, and my sister is a matter of time) my next step is to get a full physical and then a reference to someone in the physical therapy field who can help me move ahead from here. I'm happy to use a knee brace for support and protection, but I refuse to use painkillers. Joint pain is not something that I want to cover up or ignore - it's there to warn me about something serious and important and I need to know.

My days of running on hard surfaces are probably over, which is unfortunate because though there are plenty of trails around here, they aren't as well-lit as the streets, have far more large omnivores with which to contend, and aren't located close enough to the house for me to access them without a bit of effort.

I just hope I can run again.

run 2

Tried some hills today. I ran part of the route that will be used for tomorrow night's Only Fools Run at Midnight charity 5K and managed to survive.

3.27 miles, 34:59. VFFs did great in damp conditions, but my legs were really feeling the workout. It's been nice so far to see that my lungs are keeping up with everything I'm asking of them.

It's been eleven and a half years since the last time I ran a competitive 5K and I'm considering doing one tomorrow night on only two days of "conditioning." I'm not sure if this is crazy or suicidal, but I've been having a blast with the actual running and my body felt like it was asking for a run tonight, so I'm gonna keep giving it what it asks for.

first run in Sitka

Having lived in Sitka for nearly a year, I went on my first run today. I'll be recording my future runs in this blog, so sorry if you don't want to read about this. There'll still be the same lack of posting on other subjects as before.

It occurred to me that my wife's references to my growing belly might be subtle hints that I could make myself more attractive to her. Combine that with a wedding coming up in a few weeks where I'll see my family and be sure to hear from my mother about how out of shape I am as well as a desire to not feel like a fat bastard, and here we are.

Turns out, Sitka is a great place to run. Beautiful scenery, clean sea air with enough humidity to not dry me out, and temperatures that feel great. I need to scope out the best places and times to run on trails without fear of bears, though, so that I can really get the best of it all (and not destroy my feet in my Vibrams).

First run: 9:30ish at night, just in time for the sun to start dipping, 27:40 and an as-yet-unknown number of miles. I'm guessing it was about 3, because I'm out of shape.

if you want to see pictures of me bald...

...or pictures of my wife bald, for that matter...

We're having our heads shaved to stand in solidarity with kids fighting cancer, but more importantly, to raise money to find cures.
Please support us with a donation to the St. Baldrick's Foundation. This volunteer-driven charity funds more in childhood cancer research grants than any organization except the U.S. government.

If you want to see pictures, you must donate!

reflections on my grandmother

It's near the end of Passover. It's near the end of Passover, and a week short of the one-year anniversary of my grandmother's death. How fitting that I was in the kitchen, making a meal when these reflections came to me.

My grandmother was a woman who wasn't good at doing anything small. When she gave gifts to her grandchildren, they were far too generous. When she yelled at my grandfather, everyone could hear it. When she made a big meal, it was huge. When she had an opinion, well, you get the idea.

One of the "last" memories I have of my grandmother goes back six years. In the Spring of 2005, I attended the last Passover seder I ever got to attend with her (and the last I've attended). With me and Kyle in from Michigan and my sister and a friend in from college as well as a cousin in from Cincinnati, it was a typical seder in the Gould household. As the conversation escalated into insanity and odder and odder topics were broached, the apex of the meal was reached with the exposure of several people's piercings at the table. My grandfather sat at his end of the table, shaking his head and chuckling (as is his wont). My grandmother, however, sat at her end, laughing a full-throated laugh and exulting in the spectacle over which she was presiding, completely in her element. If that's the memory that I carry of her the rest of my life, it'll be fine by me.

Incidentally, the only part of the seder that I actually remember in Hebrew? Baruch atah Adonai eloheynu melech ha-olam bo-ray p'ree ha-gafen. Feel free to run that through your translator of choice.

The era of the bandmaster is truly dead.

Why is there a single music classroom in this country not equipped with a dozen or more Macbooks with GarageBand loaded on them?

Anyone who knows me well at all will know that it's stating it lightly to say that I'm not a fan of Macs, but this software/hardware combination is revolutionizing the way that youth interact with music and it is devastating to see how many teachers and schools are missing out on taking advantage of this (me and mine included, at this point). I don't pretend to understand the potential of this program (I've never even used it), but I have clearly seen what it can do in the hands of willing students.

I'll come out and say it: there is no quicker road to music composition and arranging than putting a copy of GarageBand in a child's hands. For all that we talk about music classes (and art classes and creative writing classes and, and, and) being creative and helping students to embrace their right brains and learn to express themselves, there's not much creation or expression occurring in the average "creative" classroom. Students copy what they've been taught to copy or struggle their way through the basic theory and practice of making a mediocre product and eventually get to a point where they have a piece that can be performed or exhibited without everyone cringing. If a student can survive long enough without quitting the program, a really successful school may have a top-level course in AP Music Theory and Composition that is open to a limited number of students each year, forcing the teacher to beat off the hordes of students who obviously will flock to such an exciting and sexy course option.

On the other hand, what if students could produce a piece of music that sounded radio-worthy (or at least crappy-high-school-dance-worthy) within the first two weeks of joining their first music class? How many of those children would discover the joy of truly creating something new? How many of them would seriously consider careers in the creative arts? How many of them would begin to refine talents that would remain with them through high school and the rest of their lives? How many of them would see enough of a reward in music that they would embrace the work and discipline needed to create through more traditional means, even if that meant learning theory? Sound crazy? I see it every day with the students I work with who bring me their music on iPods and Macs, then sit at the drums or piano or guitar and try to figure out how to play what they just composed.

If these students, with no formal training, can create quality pieces of music in their free time, it's amazing to think what could be done with the assistance and guidance of a trained teacher. We don't need to be cultivating clarinets who we can later switch to oboe or bassoon or bass clarinet or saxophone in order to fill out the instrumentation of the band so that we can play some Gordon Jacob piece in a few years (cool as that would be). We need to be cultivating individual composers and creators who will feel the music so intrinsically that they will change the way we experience it in the future.

Public Service

There has been a spate of retirement announcements lately from various senators. Many of them have served in the Senate for well over a decade, and I can understand their fatigue and frustration with the way that the Senate has become such a negative place in the past decade. Done well, it's not an easy job under the best of circumstances.

I grew up with images of the Senate as an Old Boys' Club (as I'm sure most people did), where party lines were blurred and collegiality ruled. Senators referred to each other as "my esteemed colleague" or "my friend from the state of" and generally acted as though they really meant it. When it came time for them to do hard work and make tough decisions for the country, politics could enter the picture, but they'd always have a backdrop of mutual respect and be able to compromise or even change minds on difficult issues in the best interest of the citizenry (or, for jaded cynics, the best interest of the people paying the campaign bills). The fact that senators are elected to six-year terms helped keep them from being in a permanent campaign mode, and many of them made use of the fact that they weren't constantly in the headlines to do the work that they thought was right for at least the first three or four years of a term, even when they knew that it wouldn't resonate well with their electorate.

Of late, the illusions of camaraderie in the Senate have disappeared. While the honorific terms are still used, we know full well that many senators despise each other. Party-line votes have become so common that it's almost unnecessary for individual senators to show up for a roll call before observers know the exact vote tally. Procedural tactics have been misused to the point where the deliberative process (formerly what the Senate was renowned for) is almost nonexistent.

In this poisonous environment, I can't blame anyone for wanting to get out. The thought of spending millions of dollars and months of personal energy and effort in order to get a job that promises to be six years of headaches, second-guessing, frustration, and blame is enough deterrent that I can't imagine any sane person without aspirations to higher office investing those dollars, energy, or effort. For any senator who is aware that higher office isn't calling any time soon to resign seems to make sense.

But.

I know that I was jubilant at the thought of a Jon Kyl-free Senate. I can't imagine having my political and ethical leanings and not celebrating his announced retirement. The man represented everything that I despised about politics and the Senate in specific. But.

At a time when extremists are taking over seats in the Senate, the House, and in many governors' mansions (as well as state legislatures) and pushing agendas that have less to do with the general welfare and the public good than they do with ideological purity, I can't help but wonder if we should be questioning these recent resignations. These are people who know how the process can work. These are people who have seen what the Senate looks like when it does its job. These are people who can remember a time before the filibuster became a monster. These are people who have ties to lobbyists, sure, and to corporate America, sure, and who have allowed the process to get as dirty as it currently is, sure, but they also are people who knew what it was before they screwed it up. As nice as it is to think that fresh blood might clean away some of the mess, perhaps it would be more effective to have the old blood stick around with a new mission of restoring what has been lost.

Finally, I wonder about how responsible some of these retirements are. If you're Joe Lieberman and you know that your state will elect someone who will vote similarly to you, on average, maybe it's not a bad idea to step down when you can. If you're Jeff Bingaman and you know that your state may well elect someone completely unlike you, how responsible is it to retire at a time when party-line votes and filibusters define the daily operation of the chamber? After all, these senators are elected to be public servants. As important as personal health (physical and mental), family time, and whatever other considerations may be, what is more important than making sure that the people's business is conducted in the best possible manner by the people best able to do so? If you know that you can do the job and that resigning will open the position up to someone who cannot do it as well as you or who will do it in a way that runs counter to your personal beliefs, then you are not only being irresponsible, you are also violating the compact of trust created when the voters first elected you and you first took the Oath of Office.

cold-hearted?

Someone I used to work with died today. She wasn't very old and was pregnant with her second child. She and her husband had traveled across the country to attend his father's funeral when an aneurysm was detected in her brain, the pregnancy failed, and she died within about 24 hours. These are tragic and terrible things to have happen to anyone, especially to a young family like theirs.

Many people around me are very upset by this and I do not begrudge them that. Many of them knew her far better than I or are more capable of seeing themselves in this tragedy, I presume. I don't intend to seem unfeeling or uncaring, but I find it hard to muster up much of an emotional response.

I guess I feel and experience things differently than many. I knew and liked these people, but I didn't know them well and had never spoken to either outside the context of work (nor had I done so in several years). Surely knowing that we weren't that close on the monkeysphere excuses me from getting too upset, right?

Every time that devastation occurs, there are people who personalize things that aren't truly personal - if this woman had died in an era before Facebook, I probably never would have learned of her death and neither would a number of the others who are eulogizing her at present. The fact that I do know seems not to provoke a strong emotional response in me, though, despite the fact that so many others are broken up by this. I get upset and emotionally involved when things happen to those who are truly close to me, but I really don't have it in me to take this specific event personally.

I know that there have been people to call me unemotional or cold-hearted or similar things, but I resist those labels. Surely there is some positive (or at least neutral) label that can be given to people who are simply less likely to get emotionally-involved in the troubles of others. Isn't there?

overhaul needed

Though I am in Alaska now, recent events indicate to me that an overhaul of Arizona's usage of sheriffs is desperately needed. Between Joe Arpaio going off on one-man crusades against whatever he hates at the moment and Clarence Dupnik shooting his mouth off to the press and editorializing in the middle of the biggest crisis to hit Tucson in decades, these men are irresponsible and dangerous without oversight. I don't trust the people leading the state much, but there needs to be someone (or committee) in a position to censure or otherwise restrict these sheriffs. Having them only responsible to the electorate every couple of years doesn't seem to be working.