Running Path Oddities

Yesterday was rheumatologist day, a routine visit which takes place every couple of months (the man is a stickler for monitoring fibromyalgia), and I made the mistake of going to get blood drawn straight from the running path. Apparently exercise alters the results, and it did, but fortunately my doctor--being an exercise fan himself--took it into account. This guy, I may have mentioned before, used to run but had to change to bicycling when his orthopedist found he had a loose vertebra that tends to slip around.

Since the good doc lives in mortal fear of the notoriously bad drivers in our area, he took up the mountain bike, much to the horror of his wife. The gal has a point: what is the improvement over running when you risk crashing and breaking bones? In fact, this year the doc broke his collar bone falling off his mountain bike when he hit a patch of ice coming downhill.

"It's like I told my wife," he stated, "a broken bone heals, but an injured heart is another matter entirely."

I say all this because it might help explain his instructions to me. At the moment my fibromyalgia pain has decided to settle in my back right between my shoulder blades, so yesterday I got put through the wringer: had to touch my toes (with no warm-up!), twist this way and that, and then get pounded on hard enough to get toppled over if the man hadn't been holding me upright at the same time. Man, he hit every single fibro pain point.

Then, after prescribing a muscle relaxant, he told me--and I quote--"to increase your usual training by one kilometer". This after I told him it was all I could do to finish 5K trotting and walking since summer hit.

"Are you daft? Half the time I finish on my hands and knees as it is!" I protested.

"Oh, you'll get used to it, then you can increase up to ten K."

The man has taken leave of his senses, but after hearing about his adventures on his mountain bike, we find all the earmarks of a fanatic. I can understand and identify fully: as far as I'm concerned, a horse is better than travel, fine food, and sex. Of course, when I talk about me, I prefer to think I'm passionate in my interests, but when my rheumatologist ups my training by a kilometer, he is a some kind of nut.

I was thinking about all this as I did today's 5K at a forced march--this was a light training day. There was no way I was going to add a kilometer, at least not yet. As I marched along (sweating as much as if I had been running), I noticed that the grass bordering the path seemed covered with some kind of pointy black objects, some of which stood straight upright, others lying down. When I put on my glasses, I saw that the objects were long feathers. It was amazing. We have tons of starlings that make a huge racket in the trees that line the park, and it looked like they had gotten into some kind of massive battle that involved pulling out each other's tail feathers. I say tail feathers because for several days now, I've seen starlings in my back yard minus precisely these feathers. I began to look at the starlings I could see on the ground, and several of them looked oddly stunted in the rear. It must be hell flying with no rudder, but the bigger mystery is, what the dickens is going on here?

Things are out of whack. Starlings losing tail feathers, my jacaranda tree is blooming (this only occurs in springtime), doves crashing into our windows. It feels like the ominous build-up in a Stephen King novel!