Blogspot still dysfunctional...

There will be no paragraphs for you today either, it seems. I'm too tired to protest, however, because today I had to jog down several blocks in a downhill direction and then walk back. I did jog a block and a half on my way back, uphill, but then I faced a complex series of overhead walkways one of our mayors had built over a major street intersection. They are wonderful for pedestrians of all stripes--nice shade in the summer from the lovely trees, runners and strollers are safe from the Nascar escapees disguised as ordinary drivers--but the darned things are an effort to climb when you are already gasping for air. But okay, today's training is under my belt, and I'm afraid to say anything else because, well, damn it, there are no paragraphs!!

Class struggle and another Blogspot meltdown..

Actually, I do know about paragraphs, but this website doesn't. There was no way on earth to make it put in the paragraphs on yesterday's entry, so one must simply bear with us. Who knows what it will do with this entry. The website has developed a Hal-like mind of its own which I find disturbing. From around five o'clock to seven a.m., most of the runners on the jogging path tend to be training for half marathons, marathons, or triathlons. No wimps, these! All the trainers are there, the people who help you stretch, the stationary bikes, and other forms of voluntary torture. Around 8 o'clock, however, the jogging path becomes so populated that running becomes a contact sport. I had to go out about 8:10, and the decibel level was unbelievable: groups of men and women walking along and talking at a shout (to be heard over all the other people), dog-walkers sharing inside tips on breeds and how delightful his or her dog is (when anyone knows my standard poodle is tops), and other sundry individuals adding to the noise by panting loudly or dragging their shoes along the pavement. Today was break-through day for me, however. I managed to jog almost the entire distance allotted to me in my half hour. This included a slalom effect as I tried to avoid crashing into others or ricochetting off baby strollers. It even included, amazingly for me, three sprints as I crossed streets in an effort to avoid being mowed down by the traffic, although I still studiously avoid that slightly raised yellow paint on the crosswalks. And yes, everything hurts, but nothing hurts while I jog, and more importantly--I can't emphasize this enough--my knees don't hurt!

The Stampede

Know how your mind seems to run through numerous scenarios in a fraction of a second when something untoward occurs? And you know how really off the wall some of those explanations of what is happening can be. I became a victim of this during my morning jog. Perhaps because I was distracted by wondering if I would survive the jog after four days of total inactivity and a migraine that was pounding through my head, I wasn't paying a great deal of attention to my surroundings--except for the swarms of mosquitoes that I tried to fight off by waving my arms windmill fashion as I jogged. The sight must have been unsettling because others on the path gave me a wide berth. But suddenly I heard behind me the pounding sound of a large herd of animals. In that fraction of a second of complete fright, my mind provided me with a couple of possibilities, both very bad. I thought maybe the horses at the riding club several blocks away had gotten loose and were galloping toward me; I was within seconds of being trampled to a mere stain on the pavement. It was obvious the animals were heavy ones from the sound of the pounding, so perhaps, if they weren't horses, there had been a terrible mishap at the zoo several miles away and some kind of prey herd was dashing away from a big cat, also loose. People with more experience running wouldn't have had this scare. I was passed by a very large herd of, well, runners--who in fact were running, and going at it with a vengeance. The wind they were producing caught me up and took several minutes off my time, and then I managed to glide along in their slipstream for at least a block. It's obvious there is some race coming up and these folks have entered it, maybe even a triathlon event. All I can say is, go for it. Best of all, by the time I finished today's geriatric jog, my migraine was practically gone.

Can housewifery be considered cross-training?

You just can't use the same muscles over and over again and expect to be injury-free forever. Thus the emphasis on cross-training if you are a runner (oh, I love how that sounds, "a runner", although what I've done so far can barely be considered much more than a slow jog). There is no way I am going to find the time to swim (just looking at water makes me short of breath, and all I can do well is the side stroke) or do weights, and if you ride a bike around here you take your life in your hands. And, having hit the streets and felt the high of being outdoors, the idea of a stationary bike or an elliptical machine seems more like waterboarding.

But wait a minute. How about housewifery? This morning I folded dozens of chairs and stored them in a closet; the lifting alone must count for something. I went to the store with my shopping bags and, having carefully balanced my load, I hauled them down two flights of stairs while wearing sandals with tiny high heels. I defy any man to do that without permanently damaging his knees or buttocks! There was bending and stretching--making up two beds--and more bending and stretching when my dishwasher detergent malfunctioned and left all my dishes covered with a kind of mineral salt film. After loading and unloading the rebellious machine, I had to scrub every item hard to get the danged stuff off. Then, to top off this workout, I slipped on a wet spot on the floor (still in my sandals) and did the splits with only minor injury.

What the rest of the day holds is anyone's guess, but if the Karate Kid could train for tae kwon do by washing windows or cars and doing chores around his karate master's home, housewifery is surely enough cross-training for my modest running goals. Okay, okay, maybe some structured weight training instead of that trip to the supermarket. You never know when the coming-down-the-stairs-with-shopping-bags-while-wearing-sandals-with-tiny-heels might combine with a wet spot on the stairs, and we'd have a new Olympic sport combining the thrill of the gymnastic parallel bars, the heavyweight barbell toss, and inadvertent poll vaulting.

Do Not Mix

Some things shouldn't be combined, ever. One of them is staying up late at a party, and fibromyalgia.

Yesterday there was a party at my house to celebrate the birthdays of my husband and my youngest son. The have the same birthday, in fact. Our marvelous weather was holding, and we sat outdoors singing, playing the guitar, listening to a couple who sing and play a computerized keyboard, eating too much, and watching the grandkids dash around the back yard. I had set up a big tent and was thinking about camping out with the four oldest grandkids, but for some obscure reason, I had the idea they would get tired about nine-thirty, maybe ten at the latest, and we could grab our pillows and slip into our sleeping bags for a night's rest. Where do I get this stuff?

At eleven-thirty, the grandkids were going full blower, even though a couple of them seemed to be on automatic. The party, too, was going full blower--everything, in fact, except me. We had ordered food, a waiter helped with everything from drinks to washing dishes, and a dash of excitement was added to the proceedings because earlier in the day my little grand-daughter, Sofía (4 years old), had swallowed a small disc-shaped battery and a tiny magnet. Let's face it, we will never know why. A trip to the hospital and some X-rays showed the two items safely stuck together and traveling through the intestinal tract, so a laxative was administered and orders for her only to ingest liquids. She was also ensconced in a diaper so nothing would get by unobserved.

Have you ever been to a get-together of over twenty people, each one periodically leaping up to the check the diaper of a small child? It began to seem like some kind of game show, as if the treasure-hunters who came up with the missing battery and magnet were going to win big. I told my son in no uncertain terms that once Sofía managed to poop, the subsequent mining for the missing items was his job, and his alone. His wife, an event planner who had a big wedding to honcho up last night, was out of range. That left only him. I've already done my time and now the torch passes to others.

The party forged on without me because I simply couldn't remain standing another minute. Not to be outdone, a different grandchild deciding to vomit. I declared the camping excursion cancelled and went to bed. Although I didn't have one single alcoholic drink, my body has also declared all events cancelled, but today my trainer Adrián told me only to walk briskly for 35 minutes. Ha! I think not.

On Wednesday I am going to Mexico City, and my main concern is how much conditioning I'm going to lose in the four days there. I can remember the addictive preocupation about the same theme in my former life as an aerobics fanatic. But running is worse--I feel so good after I go out, my state of mind is so upbeat, and I am so entertained while jogging, that a minor state of anticipatory mourning has set in. Yes, yes, it's ridiculous, but you out there who run will understand.

Push, push, push...

This morning's jog held little in the way of overheard conversation, except for a man who passed me (everyone passes me) who was saying that maybe the reason he felt so bad yesterday was because he hadn't had anything to eat all morning.

"Watson, quick, man, the game's afoot and it's weak from lack of food!"

"Good God, Holmes, surely you don't mean...?"

"Yes, and the disguise is fiendish. He's managed to add inches to his height, dye his hair, change his voice, but we know why he ate nothing yesterday morning! With that, he's given himself away...that, and the fact that he's still wearing that adult diaper..."

Giving birth to an improved cardiopulmonary conditioning is like having a baby; you keep telling yourself to push, but unlike childbirth, you aren't sure what the outcome is going to be. After plugging along and seeing my heart monitor barely register a vital sign, I wondered if I would ever, ever manage to get beyond my jog-this-block, walk-the-next-one mode. Would I ever be able to do it without struggling? Would I eventually breeze through without watching the clock or speeding up just to reach the end of the block so I could rest?

Then, after all that musing as I plodded along, it dawned on me that something had changed: I wasn't going as slow as I was yesterday. I even had the energy to try different ways of jogging--short, fast steps, or slower, longer strides. In a fit of frustration, I picked my feet up and actually ran the last third of a block--shooting my heart rate up to 153 but feeling absolutely wonderful. It was then I noticed that I had lost track of the time and had gone ten minutes past my 30 minute session. Hope springs eternal!! And when this birthing process is over with, I won't have to stay up nights for weeks on end feeding a colicky baby!

Advil days

In a short while, it's out to the jogging path for me. Again, my knees do not hurt! But at the moment, I'm waiting for my Advil to kick in. Okay, this theory that jogging would flood me with endorphins doesn't seem to be happening, but my women's running book states that it takes a few weeks for one's body to adjust the these new demands. Until then, "...a few aches and pains are normal.."

Well, my fibromyalgia has decided to respond to that remark by indicating which body parts are, let us say, aching and paining as they adjust to new demands, and these random parts seem unrelated to jogging, folks. Following is a brief list of said aches and pains:

My back, between my shoulder blades.
The right side of my neck.
My lower back.
Both hips.
Temporarily, the balls of my feet (only for a few minutes) and the underside of a single toe which is not injured in any way--it just decided to join the party.
And last but not least, my teeth.

I'm used to this, and my legs do not hurt! It's the rest of me that seems to be about to fall apart, but that business about the teeth really has me stymied. Am I gritting my teeth with the effort of finishing my jogging program each day? No, that can't be, my mouth is wide open in order to get as much air as possible into my lungs. It's my jaws that should be aching as I stretch them beyond human endurance trying to get oxygen.

The only thing I can figure out is that they are the final resting place of the jolt as each foot hits the ground during my jog. This is absurd--are we going to need running shoes that claim to protect your teeth??? Well, whatever the reason, we are just going to put up a headstone on my molars because final resting place or not, my teeth had better get used to the ride. So there.

Oddities on the jogging path...

Since I had to wait until eleven o'clock to jog today, a whole new group of people infested the park. It was hotter, and my half hour seemed like most of the day. When will I ever improve?

In reality, my mind goes into overdrive while I jog, which is one reason most people don't need music or other entertainments while running. It's just too damned fun watching other people, also.

I passed a guy strolling along, cell phone pressed to his ear. I heard a snatch of conversation:

"No, man, I haven't been able to get off pot, I've got a terrible case of diarrhea and all I do is flush!"

My imagination ran rife:

"Watson, what do you make of the case?"

"Well, Holmes, we know one thing for a fact: the subject is not on the can because he is strolling down the jogging path."

"Exactly, Watson! There are, then, a number of possibilities, and our job is to discover which one is the truth behind this case."

Holmes begins to ennumerate on his fingers:

"One, the subject is lying to his boss because for some reason he didn't go to work today. Two, he is quoting someone else and the bit of conversation overheard refers not to the subject, but to a mysterious, unfortunate third party. Or three, and here I want you to screw your attention to the sticking point, the subject is wearing Depends."

My mind didn't go on with this fantasy because a couple, arm in arm, passed me going in the opposite direction. I know why they were arm in arm: the woman would have been hard pressed to hold herself upright otherwise. She had on her feet a pair of shoes advertised on television and apparently they are selling like hotcakes. They look sort of like a combination of tennis shoes and a tugboat. According to the ad, these marvels of modern science make your walking the equivalent of a workout in the gym: they will eliminate cellulite from your elephantine thighs, lift your buttocks, turn your abdomen into a washboard, and lift your boobs. They require almost as little effort as the amazing BioShaker, a small platform you sit, stand, or lean on and which shakes the living daylights out of you--producing, oddly enough, cellulite-free thighs, washboards abs, and lifted buttocks and boobs.

The shoes are so rocking chair-like as to defy gravity, and some of the people who model the shoes on television--except for one older woman who seems to be receiving no benefit whatsoever from the shoes except for a very strange stride--spend hours at a gym doing ab crunches. But hey, it doesn't matter. If they get a couple out of the house and into the park, walking along arm in arm, that may be worth the price of the shoes. It sure as heck makes my jog a lot more fun.

Days 5 and 6

Having upgraded my browser, several places ceased and desisted, one of them being this one, but we are now back on track.



Apparently Adrián is training several people who are planning on entering a triathalon--running, swimming, and bicycling in a single event. One of the people is Hernán, my informal son who used to come to the house when he was a mere teenager of 14 or 15 and eat all the hotdogs I had in the fridge, making me wonder if he was being fed at home. He also went with us to Austin and entered the half marathon with Rodrigo, back in February.



These things are killers. I'm not sure in what order the torture occurs, but I think first is some kind of ghastly footrace, followed by a long swim, and topped with a bike race. T had several special bike stands lined up on our corner of the park, and the future sufferers placed their bikes on the stand (making them stationary bikes) and then rode hell for leather to, well, nowhere. Hernán got to ride on the street, but he later commented that his heart was in his throat the whole time.



And he has a point. Drivers here come in two versions: predatory or lobotomized. Either one can kill you, one type on purpose and the other because it can barely grasp the concept of lanes and turn signals. Monterrey has absolutely no pedestrian culture whatsoever--there are no bike lanes that are safe, there are huge expanses of pavement where no pedestrian facilities exist. I refer to things as basic as sidewalks. There are elevated crosswalks over major traffic arteries, but they are few and far between. I'm not saying the pedestrians aren't bordering on idiocy as well, since I've seen women carrying small children cross six lanes of whizzing traffic, climbing over the cement divider on the median, with an elevated pedestrian crossing within 20 yards of where they are.





Our mayor has decided to establish bike lanes on a permanent basis, some of which will be exclusively for bikes and not shared with traffic; others will be painted in alongside ordinary traffic, and good luck on that one. There the problem is not the bike lanes but the drivers--you can't share anything with the kinds of drivers we have here and expect to live.

I'm not worried about Hernán, however; every time he's gone out, his bike has had a flat tire. Oh, yeah, he knows how to fix that little problem now, but it gives him a few moments of safety as he gets up onto a sidewalk to work on it. Apparently he and my son Rodrigo, also plagued with flat bike tires, are going to drive way the heck over to the other side of town to ride in a huge park that has traffic-less bike lanes. It warms my heart to know that all those thumb tacks I scattered around the boys' bike lanes have done their job!

Day 3

It isn't really day 3; a 5K was held in the park, so the rest of us had to find something else to do in order to avoid being trampled. The field was so numerous that my daughter-in-law couldn't even enter the race because she waited too long to register. My husband and I drove back from the countryside late this afternoon, hours and hours after the event, and I swear I saw a couple of stragglers still trying to get to the finish line--which of course had been packed up and put back in the closet until the next event. Maybe that's why these competitors are still out there, and if this is so, then they will be gasping along until some time in May, poor devils.



So today was cross-training day: horseback riding. That is about as "cross" as you can get, since you just sit there trying to hang on while the horse does the work, but hey, it's still isometric work for your muscles.



You may have noticed that English writers are extremely coy about any kind of emotion-related statement. This was brought home to me as I managed to force myself into my riding pants this morning. Yes, it all sounds disjointed, but it just so happens that the last time I was in Barnes&Noble, I was thrilled to find a new mystery by P.D. James, a veritable master of the King's English, so I snapped up the book, dashed back to the house, and started to read. Right off the bat, something seemed dreadfully wrong. Had P.D. James suffered a stroke? Was the book ghost-written? Had she become a U.S. citizen?



Several more pages and it was now obvious the woman had either dumbed down or was trying to write like, well, an American. As I turned the book over and read the remarks on the back cover, all was made clear: the author was English, all right, but he was Peter James, not P.D. James. Out of pique I finished the book, and let me tell you, you don't want to read it. If I wanted typos, bad grammar, and really silly idiomatic expressions, heck, I could get that in my own backyard and cheaper to boot.



Again I digress. It's becoming a habit. As I was saying, an English author, contemplating her shape in riding pants, would carefully--nay, even phobically--creep up on her observations as if she were going to have to provide government certification justifying her conclusions and the resulting positive feelings:


"I cannot say that it was not without a certain subtle sense of satisfaction that I garnered visual, albeit wholly subjective, evidence as to a reduction in adipose tissue, contradictory though the terms 'evidence' and 'subjective' may seem at first glance."



The American translation, and the point of today's diary entry, is:

"Hot damn!!!!! My butt's smaller!!!!!!"

Day 2

Okay, today was a lot better than yesterday; managed to jog .9 K (please note the decimal indication there, I am NOT referring to nine kilometers) before having to walk. Finally got my feet to understand they had to propel me along the path on their own. A more relaxed jog, however, brought a few other things to my attention.


The reason hitting the streets is less boring than a treadmill is because there are other people to see, maybe even say "Good morning!" to, and you don't have to buy every season of Law and Order to make it through your training. But there are drawbacks: among other things, you find out you have to lift your feet high enough to clear the paint at the crosswalks. There is nothing worse than the sound of expensive running shoes scraping along pavement.

And the area I could have sworn was flat as the proverbial pancake turns out to have slight inclines here and there, maybe no big deal unless you are used to the really flat treadmill. Even if you increase the incline of the treadmill, it can't compare to the irregular ups and downs of a jogging path.

None of this is really important except that if you trip on that crosswalk paint, all those people you said "Good morning!" to are going to see you crash and burn. Many would immediately try to put out the blaze and haul you up, only to notice then how overweight you are. You would surely harbor the black suspicion that several of them are probably suffering internal injuries in an effort to stifle the laughter, because you know you damned well would be if you watched someone else trip over paint.

Running gear is highly informal, so that, at least, is one worry you can dispense with at the get-go. But there are other, more harrowing, worries. Let's just call these worries "issues related to digestive processes". Make sure you pronounce that last word as "process-eees" as is so fashionable today. It used to be you could go ahead and say the word in three simple syllables, but that didn't sound official enough to qualify you as some kind of intellectual guru, a member of the process-eees, brain-laden in-crowd.

But I digress. It becomes obvious on an early morning jog that last night's supper of molletes--a bolillo cut in half, spread with refried beans, Chihuahua cheese, melted under the broiler and topped with avocado and a head-exploding hot salsa--may not have been the wisest of selections. You know how all those people who are in a marathon keep turning their heads to look around? Know how you thought it was to find out who was gaining on them? No, that is not the reason. Let's just say they are concerned that the vapor trail they cannot avoid leaving may be noted by other runners and the blame placed exactly where it belongs. And there is absolutely no strategic advantage to the vapor trail, either, because it won't propel you forward any faster and rarely overcomes another runner to the degree that he or she slows down. To the contrary, other runners often show a burst of sprint-like behavior in order to get upwind of you.

There is this belief that marathoners should have a heavy supper of pasta in order to provide them with plenty of carbs for next's days efforts, but that is only part of the story. Pasta is a simple carb that provokes almost no digestive residue. I think the custom started just to protect all the runners who don't have times good enough to provide them with a place at the front of the pack at starting time, not to mention the hordes of people on the sidelines cheering them on. It reduces the line of fire, so to speak.

A more reasonable jogging pace also allows you notice what hurts and how much. When you are gasping for air, all other considerations fall by wayside, or by the running path. Is that crackling sound my housekeys swinging from my fist? My earrings crashing into the side of my head? Does it emanate from my joints??? What are these diverse pangs, that peculiar sensation in my back? Is it because my sports bra could hold up the Sidney Opera House or is powerful enough to strangle King Kong, or could be used to slingshot the space shuttle into orbit? Who knows. As long as it doesn't snap while I'm jogging and seriously injure another runner, I don't care. I'll pretend nothing hurts and forge ahead; my knees are still holding up.

Diary of a Mad Housewife

11 March. After weeks and weeks of plodding along on a treadmill, as advised by my trainer, my new Polar heart-rate monitor showed that I wasn't even hitting an aerobic training rate without sprinting. Sprinting??? For God's sake.

So today I hit the streets with a plan: I would warm up with a brisk ten-minute walk, then jog for a block and walk for a block, alternating to complete a bit over two kilometers or 30 minutes, whichever came first. Ha! I hadn't counted on a time warp.

The so-called blocks in the park near my house are very, very long because the running path curves again and again in order to prolong the agony. After my first jogged block, I realized I couldn't phone for an ambulance because I didn't have my cell phone, and I didn't have enough breath to call out to other joggers for help.

After the second jogged block, my leg muscles were trembling, and by then I had noticed the time warp: the blocks I walked lasted, oh, maybe ten seconds. But when I jogged, the block seemed to stretch on and on, to infinity and beyond. My running book says that in order to calibrate the effort needed to advance, without winding up in the hospital, you should jog until you are really noticing the work, then go for 30 more seconds. Ha, again!

Then something magical happened on block 4. Finally I managed to slow down, replicate my foot placement from the treadmill (you have no idea how comfy it is to have the machine move the surface along under your feet!), and suddenly I could breathe. I managed to finish the couple of kilometers, work up a sweat, stretch, and walk home. It is with great pride that I tell you my knees do not hurt. It is necessary to mention this because aching knees are the bane of every runner. On the other hand, every other body part is killing me, so bring on the Advil.

More tomorrow. Adrián, my trainer, will be in the park on Tuesday morning. We have one year to get me in shape for the Austin 5K.