“The Best Shape of My Life”

One of my favorite sports cliches is the aging veteran who arrives in camp to start the season talking about how he has rededicated himself to training, adopted a whole new routine, finished rehabbing that injury that derailed things last season, and is excited to prove that he still deserves that contract because he is “in the best shape of my life!” Invariably, this player put up a few strong games/weeks before tweaking a hamstring or rolling and ankle and then begins a long slow move back toward the mean. This is (usually) not because the guy was lying about his conditioning or doesn’t want to prove the doubters wrong—- it’s because he’s an aging veteran, and that means he’s old.

I have been more dedicated toward training for this running trip than for any running project I’ve done in a decade. Not only have I been running religiously, I’ve also been cross training, stretching regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables than usual. Also, I’m coming up on four years of continuous sobriety, which is a big improvement from the way I was treating my liver and other organs when I was doing serious training in the past. In many ways, I am in the best shape of my life. But, if I had to run a 5k against the version of myself from 10 years ago, I would lose badly, even though that guy never stretched and drank in excess of 10 beers a day more often than not. I’m an aging veteran— it takes a lot more work to get myself to the same level of fitness, I’m much more prone to injury than I used to be, and it takes me longer to recover than it ever did in the past.

But the good news is, I’m aware of that. In fact, that’s why I’m doing things like stretching and eating acai bowls for breakfast. Two days ago I ran a brisk six miles and felt great, but yesterday I did a three mile recovery job and felt sluggish on the run and the rest of the day. Tomorrow, I have a seven mile trail run planned over some intense hills. So today, I sat around and put my feet up. I know that I need to listen to my body, because if I don’t I’ll get hurt, and once I get hurt it might be weeks or even months before I’m back where I need to be. It’s a little depressing to think that I’ll (hopefully) be able to write this exact same post in another 10 years, talking about how 45 year old me could kick 55 year old me’s ass even though I take much better care of myself. But unless you’re going to go the whole RFK jr TRT route, that’s an inescapable part of the whole process of life. And in the meantime, just because you’re an aging veteran, it doesn’t mean you can’t still make some valuable contributions to the team.

If you’re new here and read this far, please take a look around the rest of the website to learn what I’m training for and how you can help. If you’d like to contribute to my fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network, please hit the “Donate” button up at the top of this page and make a small contribution. Thanks!

One Month To Go!

In one month, I’ll be leaving town to go on this trip! I started this website about 6 months ago, and at the time everything about the project was pretty academic— my leg was still in a walking boot, there was snow on the ground, and the gofundme was sitting at zero dollars raised. But now, I’m back in running shape, it’s a beautiful late Spring day outside, and we’ve managed to raise over a thousand dollars. I’m registered for all 5 half marathons that I’ll be running and I have campgrounds and AirBnBs booked all along my cross country route. I still need to get a new crate for Mason and a big box of back packer meals, but otherwise I have all the gear we will need. It’s all coming together!

Yesterday, I ran a steady 6 miles on the Nickle Plate Trail and was pain free from all the various injuries I’ve been recovering from— the initial broken foot, my chronic hip issue, and the sprained ankle I suffered back at the beginning of April. Today, I jogged a light 3 mile recovery run, again pain free. I’ve been forcing myself to do at least 10 minutes of stretching a day, which has been a big help. I don’t know why it’s so hard to motivate myself to do it, but whenever I string together more than a week of stretching its impossible to argue with the results. And now that school has wrapped up for the year, I will be able to focus a lot more of my time and mental energy on getting ready for the trip.

I’m making it a goal to write at least a little bit in this blog every day this month, which explains why this entry is going to be a little short and disjointed. I think it will be a good mental exercise for myself though, and good preparation for the writing I intend to do once I’m on the road. So, I’ll be back tomorrow, hopefully with more to say. In the mean time, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t donated to the project yet, please consider hitting the “Donate” button up at the top of the page and making even a small contribution. Thanks!

Post Triathlon Thoughts

Well, I ran my first ever triathlon this past weekend and lived to talk about it. This was a pretty modest Sprint tri— 400 meter swim, 15 mile bike ride, and a 3 mile run— and I can confidently say I won’t be doing an Ironman any time soon, but I’m still proud of the accomplishment. More importantly, I feel pretty good about my fitness right now in terms of preparation for my running road trip this summer. I am close to fully recovered from my sprained ankle, and my conditioning level feels close to where I was before my foot injury last fall. If you’d like to learn more about what I’m training for and how you can get involved, please check out the rest of the website, but here are some specific reactions to my first tri.

The Swim: This was the part of the competition I was most nervous about. I’ve never been an especially strong swimmer, in no small part because I never learned to swim well or for very long with my face in the water. I was able to get into the YMCA pool a few times before the race, but hadn’t done any open water swimming. I was genuinely worried I might not be able to finish the swim, or that I might literally be the last person out of the water. I was also pretty worried about the water temperature and how I might react— early in the week, the water was only in the low 60s, which seemed like it might really impact my performance. And I was worried that the swim would tire me out to the point that I would really struggle in the other events.

In reality, the swim was definitely my weakest of the three events, but my biggest fears proved to be unfounded. We had a few hot days right before the competition, which raised the water temperature about 10 degrees up into the low 70s— it was really pretty comfortable for swimming. I was slow and spent most of the swim getting passed by other people, but I finished it and was not dead last getting out of the water, so we’re calling it a win. When I first hit the water I got a little carried away and started to swim way too fast, which had me pretty exhausted with a long way to go. However, after about 100 meters there was a point where the water was shallow enough that you could put your feet down and touch bottom, which allowed me to catch my breath, refocus, and attack the rest of the swim in a more methodical, measured way. I saw someone else get pulled out because they were struggling, which made me feel pretty good about my lack of drowning.

The Bike: This ended up being the most frustrating part of the experience, just because I’m too competitive for my own good and I was at a pretty significant technological disadvantage here. I do not own an expensive road bike— my bike, which I’ve had for years, is a modest, hybrid mountain/road bike, with only seven gears and some pretty fat tires. I knew this meant I would be going up against riders on better bikes, but I didn’t appreciate just how much faster those bikes would be until I was actually out on the course. I was pushing myself pretty hard and making good time relative to the training I was done, but I was consistently getting passed by people who I assume have poured a lot of their earnings as an orthodontist into very expensive tri bikes. Since the it was a two lap course, all of the leaders lapped me on my first loop, which was not a fun experience.

But, I went into it knowing that I wasn’t trying to win, and it was a beautiful day for a bike ride. I did pass some people on their expensive bikes and I was a long way from dead last, but the bigger takeaway is probably that I continue to get too caught up in the competition of it all, which makes it harder for me to enjoy the feeling of pushing myself and enjoying my own modest athleticism, which really should be the point.

The Run: I’m not a swimmer or a competitive biker, but I do consider myself a runner. I was most confident about this leg of the race, but also concerned that I might be too tired at this point to run the way I know I’m capable of. But once I got off the bike and started running, I actually felt strong a settled into a pace that I was very happy with. I ended up running what would have been a pretty good 5k for me in general, let alone after I’d already done about 90 minutes of cardio, and I don’t think I got passed by any other runners (this was an easy goal to accomplish since I was so far back in the pack at that point). I had made a point of doing several training blocks where I biked for a while and then ran, which was important because it is just an odd feeling to suddenly start using those same muscles in a different way— my stride didn’t feel right and I was sore in weird ways while I ran, but I knew that would be the case and pushed through it. As I had hoped, the run was my strongest leg of the tri.

When I finished, I felt strong, like I could have kept going. I was pretty tired for the next several days, but with no weird soreness or apparent injuries. I’ve learned that the point of training is partly to increase your ability to perform, but its more significant role is increasing your ability to recover. The fact that I wasn’t stumbling around the house on dead legs for days after the event tells me that my overall fitness level is getting to be pretty good. I don’t think I’m going to do any more triathlons— the swim just isn’t my thing, and I can’t see myself investing in a genuinely competitive bike— but it was a fun thing to focus my training on and a good bench mark for where I’m at.

If you’re new here, I’m doing all of this to train for a road trip this summer where I’ll be running 5 half marathons in 5 states during the month of July. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. If you want to help out, please hit the Donate Now button up at the top of the page. Even small contributions help a lot. Thanks so much!

Updates

Apparently I haven’t written on this blog for the better part of a month! Whoops! I’ve been absent from this space for 3 reasons—- work has been very busy recently, not a lot of interesting stuff has happened outside of work, and fundraising on the project has really slowed down. But I want to check back in because things are still going well—- I’ve recovered (almost entirely) from my sprained ankle and (fully) from pneumonia, I’m feeling increasingly confident about my fitness for the triathlon next week, and, with less than two months to go, most of the preparations are done for the trip. Here are some updates on all that in a little more detail:

1. My ankle still hurts, but it isn’t restricting my ability to run and, if anything, it usually feels better after I exercise on it for a few days. Now that the weather is really getting into Spring mode, I’ve been stepping my mileage back up and am approaching the level of fitness I was at prior to my broken foot back in October. I’m a lot more confident on that foot now, and a lot more confident that I can continue to push myself without reinjuring anything. So, hooray!

2. I’m about a week and half away from running my first ever (sprint) triathlon. Partly out of necessity after injuring my ankle and partly to train for the race, I’ve been doing a lot of biking over the last few weeks and I feel pretty good about the segment of the tri. I’ll be competing in the “fat tire” division since I don’t have a racing bike, but I’ve got my road bike in good shape mechanically and have built up a pretty good sense of how it feels racing on it, what gears to use on what kind of slope, etc. The swimming… well, swimming was always going to be my weakest leg of the triathlon. We joined the Y here in town as a family, and I’ve been trying to get in the pool as often as I can, but all I’m really going to try to accomplish in the swim is not die. If I can avoid exhausting myself on the swim it will be a victory, and then I’ll be able to concentrate on the bike and run. My biggest concern right now is that it is going to be a cool morning swimming in some cold water, but I’ve been cold before, I should be good to make it happen.

3. The trip is increasingly locked and loaded! If you’re new here, this July I’m going to be going on a month long roadtrip around the Northwest US, running half marathons in 5 states over 5 weeks. I’ve got my campsites booked for the whole roadtrip—- state parks in Missouri and Kansas on the way out, days spent in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier National Parks, Columbia River Gorge on the way back, etc. I’ve purchased most of the gear I’ll need, including a satellite communicator for when I’m out of service at the parks, and I’ve got AirBnBs booked for the race days so I’ll have a place to shower and leave Mason, my dog, during the races. It’s all happening!

The only bummer for me right now is that fundraising has basically stopped for about a month now. For those that don’t know, this project is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. I’ve raised over a thousand dollars, but my goal is 5 grand and the last donation to the GoFundMe was back at the beginning of March. I think this is a really important and impactful charity to donate to because the benefits are so direct and tangible—- the money donated is used to buy diapers and other supplies, which are then given to families who need them where they serve and obvious need. If you can help out, please hit the Donate button at the top of this page or follow this link to the GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/manage/help-paul-and-mason-run-for-families-in-need Even small contributions help a lot. Thanks!

Lucky

5 days after spraining my ankle on a trail run, the swelling started increasing instead of going down and the pain started getting worse, so I decided that hope is not a strategy and it was time to get an x-ray. So, I headed off to the ortho urgent care last night and got some pictures taken. The good news is that nothing is broken! Probably! One thing I’ve definitely learned over the last 6 months is that orthopedic medicine is more of an art than a science—- just like with my stress “fracture” last fall, apparently assessing whether or not I have a “capsular avulsion fracture” is a matter of interpretation. But, since they had x-rays on file from my experience in October, they were able to do some comparison and decided that the small shadow the PA was concerned about was probably just part of my anatomy and not evidence that I had sprained a ligament hard enough to pull a small piece of bone off. So, that’s cool. The bad news is that it is a pretty significant sprain and I will be doing more rest/ice/compression/elevation than running for at least the next few days and the 10k I am registered for on Saturday is very much in doubt. All of which got me thinking about luck.

It’s pretty easy for me to argue that I’ve had a bad run of luck over the last 6 months. I’ve had three significant setbacks in my training—- the stress fracture in October/November, pneumonia in March, and now this ankle sprain at the beginning of April. This has overlapped with the general breakdown of society and the economy that seems to be in progress nationally, and significant state level attacks on my profession. Once I lay those points out, I could quickly start lining up other small setbacks sprinkled across that time and assert that I have just had a really bad run of things. But I don’t think that tells the whole story or is a necessarily fair conclusion, which leads me to one of my students competing at the first Zoom-based National Speech and Debate Tournament in June of 2020.

You may remember that Spring/Summer of 2020 was a pretty rough time for, you know, humanity. There was a pandemic, lockdowns, mask mandates at Target that seemed to ruin some people on the internet’s lives… it was a whole thing. I was coaching speech and debate at the time, and our State tournament was scheduled for the Saturday after Tom Hanks got sick, Rudy Gobert touched all those microphones, and everything started to shut down. So, the day before the tournament, which we had been preparing for for a full year and had very strong hopes of winning, everything got cancelled. Our national tournament, which was supposed to be in New Mexico, got moved to this new technology called Zoom and, therefore, students’ basements. It was not a great experience for the seniors on my team in particular.

One of those seniors had a specifically bad experience at the online tournament—- she couldn’t get her technology to work at the beginning of her first round of competition and had to forfeit the round, effectively ending any hope she had of breaking into the elimination stage of the meet. She was devastated by this and elected to withdraw from competition, ending her speech and debate career on a particularly awful note. This was a student who seemed to have a constant run of bad luck— earlier that season, before COVID was a thing, her performance at the state debate tournament was badly compromised when I judge gave her a stern lecture about a small etiquette violation before her first round started, which completely flustered her and led in part to her losing that debate. This was a student who couldn’t seem to catch a break.

But, is that the whole story? Working backward through the story I just told you, she didn’t lose the debate round because she got in trouble with the judge, she lost the debate round because she let that throw her off her game and her performance suffered—- or maybe she was the weaker debater and would have lost that round anyway and the judge confrontation became an easy way for her to tell the story. And she really had broken a small bit of debate etiquette that she should have known about. And she had multiple other rounds of competition at that tournament that she easily could have won had she regained her focus. Similarly, the reason her technology didn’t work in that first Zoom round was largely outside of her control, but she had also made the decision not to participate in the voluntary technology test the day before, and she made the decision to quit on the whole tournament after that first round forfeit— yes, that ended her chances of making the elimination rounds, but everyone involved knew that she wasn’t going to end up as national champion that year anyway, she just made a conscious choice to end her season on that negative note. Yes, it was very sad and unlucky that her senior season was derailed by the COVID pandemic, but there were of course more significant problems caused by the pandemic than the need to move a high school speech tournament to an online format. In fact, that move saved her a few thousand dollars that would have been spent on the trip to New Mexico— that trip would have been fun, but there are plenty of fun and memorable uses that you can put a thousand dollars to, most of which don’t involve spending a week in the desert in a convention center with a bunch of high school teachers and parents.

I read an article a while back about a study on the phenomenon of luck. The people running the experiment surveyed the participants about whether or not they considered themselves to be “lucky” and then put them through a series of trials. The “lucky” people had demonstrably more success. But, this was not the result of some ineffable force that surrounded them. In several scenarios, this was because the “lucky” people were better at observing the world around them— they noticed signs on the wall or messages in the testing material that told them they could stop working and go get $20 from a location. They were also more willing to work through or around adversity. Luck favored the prepared, the observant, and those who were willing to work past setbacks.

Which brings us back to my run of luck over the last 6 months. Yes, I sprained my ankle and have had to miss a few races. But, I sprained my ankle because I was overextending myself on a trail run over dangerous terrain and wasn’t looking down at where I was stepping. And, I sprained it but didn’t break it. And, I will still be able to run the major events I am training for. Yes, I got pneumonia and was pretty sick for a few weeks. But I got pneumonia because I had a gross chest cold and didn’t let myself rest and recover properly so. And yes, it was pneumonia, but I was able to treat it with antibiotics from home instead of a hospital, only missed a few days of work, and was back running by the third week, all of which makes me lucky compared to many other sick people around the country. Similarly, the stress fracture was bad and all the more frustrating because it was probably misdiagnosed, but it was the result of knowing overtraining and wasn’t exactly career threatening. As for the breakdown of society and the economy, well, that’s always happening somewhere from someone’s perspective, and most of the time, for most of the people, it has worked out OK. And if we allow that things are particularly bad right now from many metrics, we also need to allow that my family and I are pretty well positioned to weather the storm compared to many other demographics of people around the country. And no one today would want to trade their problems with someone whose town was being sacked by the Mongols, ravaged by the black death, or in the middle of no-man’s land during World War One.

So, I will ice my ankle, try to walk the dog in a few days, and see about jogging the 10k on Saturday if I’m not in pain. I’ll stay on top of the news and act when I can, but I won’t stay up all night doom scrolling. And I’ll try to keep a focus on the many positive things that are happening every day instead of working to compile a list of the negatives. Wish me luck!

If you’ve made it this far, please consider clicking the Donate Now button up at the top of the page and making even a small contribution to my fundraising project. I’m going to run 5 half marathons this July as part of a 5 state road trip, and the whole thing is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. Thanks!

Sprained Ankles and the Inexorable Passing of Time

Let’s compare and contrast two times I’ve sprained my ankle, once when I was 22 and again when I was 44. First, when I was 22 years old, I had a job as an assistant director at a summer camp. This was the summer after my first year teaching— which was very difficult and stressful. My first day at camp, before any campers and only a few of the staff had even arrived, I was up on a first story roof of one of the buildings finishing a project. When I was finished, because there were people watching, I decided I would jump off the roof instead of going back through a second story window the way I had gotten up there. This didn’t just mean hopping down off the 8 foot high roof, it also meant I needed to jump out another 8 feet or so to clear a short fence around the building. This would have been an excellent way for me to break my leg on the landing, or maybe catch my foot on the fence on the way by, tumble, and land on my head doing god knows what damage, but things worked out relatively alright. I landed not quite as gracefully as intended and rolled over one of my ankles, but was otherwise OK, jumped to my feet, and acted like that was exactly what I meant to do. When I woke up the next morning, though, I discovered that my ankle had swelled up like a grapefruit and was stiff and painful to walk on. This was devastating— my anxiety immediately told me that I would probably have to quit the job since I couldn’t go up and down stairs and that I would have to live in the knowledge that it was all because I did something stupid to show off. However, because I was 22, I spent about an hour walking around on it, gradually loosening up the joint, and was back to normal by noon, suffering no lingering effects. A healthy person in their early twenties has a lot in common with Wolverine from the X-Men.

The second time I sprained the same ankle happened just a few days ago. Now 44 years old, I was out for a run on the trails at Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park here in Indiana. I had just missed over a week of running because of a bout with walking pneumonia, which had caused some set backs in my efforts to rebuild my fitness after missing almost two months of running recovering from a broken foot, and I was finally feeling like myself again. But, towards the end of the run, I had a moment where I was looking ahead at the trail instead of down at my feet and I tripped over a root and fell down hard. I’ve lost my footing trail running before and it usually takes a comical amount of time— I start to fall and run three or four steps trying to slow down and catch my balance, finally sliding down in the leaves and then hopping back up to keep going. This time, the fall seemed instantaneous— one second I was upright and running, the next I was in a pile on the ground trying to figure out what had happened. It took a few minutes for me to get my bearings back and get back on my feet— I bent my sunglasses and lost track of my headphones, and Mason the dog, who was running with me, didn’t run off to find a helpful park ranger but instead thought we were playing a game and kept jumping on me, all of which took time for me to sort out. When I finally got to my feet, I saw that I had skinned up of my knees pretty bad and was bleeding down my leg, but otherwise was in one piece. And my initial response was exhilaration. Again, I had just spent a week mostly confined to a couch fighting off an illness, and in the not too distant past I had been confined to a walking boot and crutches. As I started running again (I was about a mile from my car), it felt so good to have my body take that hit and keep going, and made me feel like a stronger, healthier version of myself. It was great.

But the next morning, I woke up at 2 AM in quite a bit of pain from my ankle. It was swollen and stiff and painful to move. I was supposed to run a 5k that morning and told myself I would get a few more hours of sleep after taking some ibuprofen and see how it felt, but after a sleepless hour went by it was pretty clear that there would be nothing gained by me pushing this ankle around a race course. I still wanted my race shirt, though, so I was determined to get down to the race check in and pick up my packet. I had to accept the reality of my situation, though, which meant I needed to find my crutches down in the basement if I was going to get across the parking lot. So, I drove down to the race, limped across to check in on crutches, got some weird looks from the other runners because it was pretty clear I wasn’t there to race, picked up my shirt, and headed home.

Instead of walking off this injury, I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to ice and elevate and constantly reminding myself not to push it too far. It seems like it will be at least a few days before I can do any running, but the good news is that I’m supposed to be training for this triathlon anyway, so its time to get in some biking. It felt refreshing to feel like my younger self again when I got up, bloody after my fall, and kept running, but the fact is I’m not that anymore, and just because I’m frustrated about time lost in a boot or the sick bed doesn’t mean I can push through an injury that might end up putting me right back in the boot.

If that 5k had been my training goal, maybe I would have gone out there and limped around the course just to say I’d done it, but it’s not. If you’re new here, this blog is documenting my journey training to run 5 half marathons in 4 weeks this July as part of a multistate road trip. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network— please consider hitting that Donate button up at the top of the page and making even a small contribution. Thanks!

Running In the Time of Pneumonia

I’ve been sick with a persistent cough for about a month now, but last Monday it turned into pneumonia. I learned this from my doctor, but I could have learned it by rereading the blog post I wrote about Dracula a few hours before I went to the doctor, which clearly shows me losing control of my faculties. I was completely out of commission Tuesday-Thursday of last week, and since then I’ve been yo-yoing back and forth between feeling like I am just about healthy and feeling like I’m getting sick again and am going to end up in the ER. But yesterday, I went back to the doctor and had a second chest x-ray, which showed that the antibiotics I’ve been taking have successfully cleared up the infection, so I have empirical evidence that I am recovering nicely. The cough is still hanging around, though, and every night I have to chose between the real threat that I might wake up coughing in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep for hours, or taking the prescription strength, hydrocodone based cough syrup they gave me and then still being groggy and have asleep through noon the next day. Good times.

But, the good news is I’ve been cleared by my doc to start running again. Last week I was struggling to walk the dog around the neighborhood, and when my cough got worse over the weekend I was worried that running would make it worse, so I didn’t try. I have official approval to pick back up, so I’m going to hit the road this afternoon and put in a few miles. I was supposed to run a 10K next Saturday, but I decided today to drop down to the 5k instead since I’ve missed over a week of training and my lungs are on shaky footing right now. Depending on how things go, though, I might pick up a different 10k the following weekend so I can really start working on getting my mileage up. We can add “walking pneumonia” to the list of bummers for the year, but we can also add it to the list of things that haven’t derailed my running project. Onward!

Walking Pneumonia (Sadly no Boogie Woogie Flu)

About 3 weeks ago, everyone in my house came down with some version of a day-care vectored head cold. My wife and the boys all got runny noses and stuffy sinuses and I, as is my wont, developed a cough. Everyone else got over it, and I…stayed sick. I spent a good two weeks having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night because of coughing fits until I finally broke down and went to the doctor. They gave me some heavy duty cough medicine and a steroid and sent me on my way. About a week after that, I was almost out of the medicine and the cough was as bad as ever— worse, in fact, since on Monday of this week I could barely get through a sentence in class without coughing. So, I went back to the doctor, and this time the diagnosed me with walking pneumonia and loaded me up on antibiotics. And I spent the next three solid days basically incapacitated at home on the couch. My cough has been steadily improving since I started the meds, to the point that today (Thursday) it is barely even noticeable, but I’ve been light headed and fatigued most of the time. I’m planning on going back to work tomorrow, but I’m going to give myself pretty light duty until I feel like I’ve finished this thing off.

Needless to say, my training has been temporarily derailed by all this. When I was struggling with the original cough, I kept running as much as I could (it is a source of some disagreement around the house as to how much my running contributed to my cold getting worse), but since the pneumonia kicked in I haven’t even thought about lacing up my shoes. The past two days, I took Mason for a 15 minute walk around the neighborhood. Yesterday, it almost killed me; today, I didn’t cough much at all, but it still felt like all the exercise I could handle. I’m a little anxious about losing fitness during this, but one of the big lessons I’m trying to process on this blog is that I need to learn my limitations and operate within them. If I don’t wait until my body is healed, then training through this will only make it worse. And, in the meantime, the little pulls and strains and stress injuries I’ve been accumulating get a chance to heal up. So, there’s that. Anyway it’s about time for me to head back to the couch, talk to you next time!

Achievement: The Barkley Marathons, Dracula and Elon Musk

1. I was home sick from school the other day, so instead of getting in a run as part of my training program, I watched a movie about running to help get me into the right mental space. Specifically, I watched “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young,” the documentary about the titular Barkley Marathons. The Barkley Marathons is a famous(ish) ultra marathon event which requires competitors to run 100 miles in less than 60 hours through some of the most difficult mountain country in Tennessee. The course is unmarked and frequently off of maintained trails. It’s routine for there to be years in which no runners finish, which the race director considers a success. The documentary happened to cover a year in which three people finished the race, which almost never happens. It follows two of them in particular, and the way the filmmakers developed their character helped me think about competition and achievement, two of the biggest themes I’m working on in this blog. One of the two runners shows up frustrated with his performance at this race in an earlier year. He establishes at the beginning of the movie that his goal is to challenge the overall course record, and that he will consider the race a failure if he doesn’t complete all 5 loops of the race in a respectable time. The other runner has adopted a life of seeking out challenges and adventures after a death in his family made him question the validity of working all your life to secure a future you might never be able to enjoy. The first runner drives himself relentlessly through the competition, barely pausing to eat and drink in between his five 20 mile loops. He does indeed smash the overall course record by several hours. The second runner struggles throughout. We see a sequence of him lying down in a creek halfway under a bridge, clearly exhausted. There is a particularly harrowing sequence where he needs to rely on the help of other runners who have already dropped out of the race to lance and dress some very painful blisters. And he finishes the course as well, literally minutes before the 60 hour cutoff time. Almost everyone in the world will live there entire lives without ever hearing of the Barkley marathons, and of the few that know about it, fewer still know much about the performances of individual athletes at it, and even fewer still care about the course record or the performance of individual athletes or the course record. So, the performances of the two runners featured in the movie— one setting the record and the other just barely finishing before the cutoff— only matter in that they have meaning for those two athletes themselves. My sympathies, and I think those of the filmmakers, were much more with the second runner than the first.

2. One interesting paradox of athletics is that performance enhancing drugs seem to be more common in events with less money and less celebrity involved. While sports like baseball, football, and basketball have had PED scandals of one type or another, they are nothing compared to the crises that events like track and field or cycling have gone through. This is probably partly because running and cycling are almost entirely dependent on athleticism and fitness, without the team elements and strategy of other games. But the explanation I’ve heard from the athletes themselves is that there is more cheating in those sports because the only thing that matters is the achievement itself. They aren’t competing for millions of dollars, or trying to become national celebrities, or hoping to make the move into movies or something. They are competing entirely because they want to win, and thus cheating becomes an appealing choice for many of them. People will sacrifice the meaning of the thing they are attempting to achieve if it means other people are more likely to be impressed by it.

3. In the Barkley Marathons movie, the race director tells the interviewer that almost everyone who has finished the entire 100 mile course has an advanced degree of some kind, and most of the people that compete have completed significant post-doctoral studies. His explanation for this is that completing something like the Barkley requires an intense amount of planning and dedication. You have to set goals, and then you have to consistently work through setbacks to achieve those goals. You have to make sacrifices, and you have to make choices that won’t get rewarded. There is a specific kind of temperament that is very useful if you want to become a doctor, but is also the tool necessary to do something like run for 60 hours through heavily forested mountains in the dark in a race that no one is paying attention to.

4. We spend a lot of time talking about billionaires these days, and a common refrain I see from people on social media is, “If I ever had that much money, you would never here from me again. I’d go live on an island somewhere.” This comes up because it seems like our many billionaires are incapable of making that decision. No amount of wealth, power, or achievement seems to scratch the itch for public acknowledgement, so it needs to be temporarily sated by even bigger achievements in new fields, or by social media popularity, or by dismantling the US government. I have two possible explanations for why this is— one is that it takes a very particular personality type to become a billionaire, an unhealthy personality type that requires constant validation and that can never be satisfied. The other is that none of us would be capable of taking our billions off to a private island somewhere if we suddenly earned them. The need to have other people compliment us on Twitter is universal, and no one would actually walk away. I like to think the answer is the former, but as evidence of the latter consider that most people living a middle class existence in America really could, in fact, go live on an island somewhere. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have the means to go live a modest life on a beach in some forgotten country. In fact, when I visited Thailand a while back I met multiple expats who had done just that— pulled the plug on an early retirement of sorts in their 40s and gone to live somewhere cheap where they could stretch their savings and maybe some kind of modest teacher income out until they died. But almost no one actually does that.

5. All of which brings me to Dracula. I attended a lecture several years ago about Victorian Gothic Literature. The speaker’s analysis was that in the Victorian Age, England was the undisputed most powerful and important country on the planet, but the most popular art of the time period was about their insecurity about hanging on to all that power. Dracula specifically, and most gothic literature generally, depicts emasculated Englishmen losing their women to virile men from Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a book about an elemental force from a forgotten part of the world that is unimpressed by the trappings and affectations of modernity and uses a kind of spirituality to imprison people’s minds and sap their strength, literally bleeding them dry. This theme is hit even harder in the recent remake of Nosferatu, which seems particularly designed for a modern American audience with its fears of plagues of immigrants washing up on shore, destabilizing society, and revealing the self impressed men who think they know everything as paper tigers. Power and success don’t bring a sense of calm self assuredness, they just bring the fear of losing that power and discovering that the success is unearned.

Anyway, I’m currently training to run 5 half marathons as part of a road trip across 5 states during the month of July this summer. I hope I’m doing it because I want the challenge and opportunity for self discovery, but it’s a distinct possibility that I’m doing it because I want to prove something about how strong and impressive I am. I don’t think I’ll really know the truth until I’m finished— will I feel a profound sense of self actualization and inner peace? Or will I feel like this is evidence that I could do something even MORE impressive next time if I just try a little harder, and then that will finally be enough. Time will tell.

The project is also a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. If you’d like to help out, I’d appreciate it if you clicked the Donate button up at the top of this page and kicked in a few bucks. Thanks!

So Now I’m Running a Triathlon

Yesterday, a colleague sent me an email asking if I wanted a complimentary entry to a sprint triathlon in May. He had some passes to give away and had heard I was interested in endurance sports. I did not wake up that morning planning on entering a triathlon and, truth be told, if you had walked up to me and asked if I ever wanted to do a triathlon I would have probably said no. I obviously enjoy running, but while I find cycling to be a perfectly pleasant way to get from point A to point B I’ve never had much interest in doing it competitively, and although I’m a competent swimmer in the “don’t drown if the boat sinks in view of shore on a calm day” kind of way, it is not a pretty sight. But, when I got the email, I found myself replying and asking what the requirements were for the type of bike we needed to supply. This is a tried and true method I use to get myself to do things I probably shouldn’t— I’m not going to actually eat a bunch of cookies, I’m just going to go look in the pantry to see how many cookies we have; I’m not actually going to take a personal day tomorrow, I’ll just put it into the website now so the sub gets assigned and I can cancel it later if I start feeling more motivated. I’m an expert at leading myself along in small stages until I’ve got a full head of steam going toward making a bad decision and it feels too late to turn things around. So, I started a conversation about what was involved in the race, and that led to me checking out the website to see what the course looked like, and then I felt like I might as well sign up for it after all. So, in about 8 weeks, I’m doing a sprint triathlon.

There are, in fact, several reasons why I think this is a good idea. It will be good cross training for my half marathon road trip this summer. And participating in something like this will give me some good opportunities to publicize the fundraising elements of my half marathon road trip (in fact, if you ended up here because you wanted to read about triathlons, you should know that this website is part of a fundraising campaign I’m doing for the National Diaper Bank Network by running 5 half marathons in five states this July. Check out the rest of the website for more details!). But honestly, I feel like I’m in a phase where if I don’t constantly challenge my brain with productive problems, the unproductive problems are going to completely swamp me. Worrying about the fact that I’m going to do this tri is gives me a problem I can actually work on. Expending energy and time thinking about this and preparing will in fact lead to some kind of result. The same cannot be said for reading the news over and over again and arguing with people on the internet about Chuck Schumer or something. Any application of my anxiety that will actually produce a measurable result is a good application of my anxiety. So, let’s get anxious about swimming!

I feel like I should emphasize that this is a SPRINT triathlon, not some kind of Ironman nonsense. Its going to be an 800 yard swim, 15 miles on the bike, and a 3 mile run. And I’ll also emphasize that when I say “train,” I basically mean keep building up my running mileage, maybe with some biking thrown in. I don’t have access to a pool right now, and joining a gym for a few months because I’m taking advantage of a free triathlon entry doesn’t seem cost effective. But it does give me some added incentive to get heart rate up every day, and to be careful about my diet for the next few months. But as for today, I’m home sick and can’t train at all— I caught a day care bug from my kids last week and didn’t give myself enough rest to recover so it has turned into something more frustrating. So today, I’m not getting any mileage in and am instead devoting my energy to watching movies (The Substance, Death of Stalin) and writing the blog. If you’ve made it this far and would like to get involved with my fundraising campaign, please hit the Donate button at the top of the page— even small contributions help. Thanks!

Updates, Celebrations, Thanks!

I’ve been using this blog to do a lot of philosophical musing recently, but today’s just going to be updates on my training and planning for the trip. More philosophical musings next week, I promise.

1. THANK YOU to everyone who has donated to this project. A few days ago, we passed the $1k mark, which is amazing. I really appreciate everyone who has been able to donate even a small amount to help. My overall goal remains $5k, but we’ve got a few months to raise that yet. If you’re new here, I’m training to run 5 half marathons in July as part of a road trip from Indiana to Washington state and back. This is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. If you’d like to help out, please click the “Donate” button up at the top of the page.

2. I wrote last week about a nagging hip injury that was limiting my ability to train. I rested for three days and started forcing myself to stretch every day, and things seemed to have resolved themselves there. I have such a hard time motivating myself to stretch, which seems stupid because it is so easy and obviously beneficial, but it always feels like a chore. I’ve been stretching after runs instead of before, which seems to help, and the results have been great. I’ve also added another layer of injury prevention by trying to get my diet healthier— if I can lose a little weight that will take pressure of my joints, and if I have more energy when I run it should make me less likely to get stress injuries when my form breaks down. I’m not going vegan, but I’ve been eating smoothie bowls at breakfast and bananas for snacks, and that seems to be helping.

3. I did six miles at a 10 minute mile pace on Monday and felt pretty good the whole way. I want to get my long runs up to at least 10 miles a week before I go on the trip, so I think I’m in great shape there.

4. The winter weather has broken! We’ve had highs in the 70s most of this week, which is a welcome change from the single digit temps we were seeing only a few weeks ago. As part of my continued efforts to control my anxiety (see my earlier philosophical musings posts) I’m not going to sit around worrying about climate change and just allow myself to enjoy the sunshine. The only problem with the warm weather is that it starts to slow Mason down— he was really in his element running through the snow when the temp was in the teens. But, running with him is still much better than running by myself, and he keeps me from overextending/exerting myself.

So, lots of good news on the project! Again, thanks to everyone who has donated. More updates and/or philosophical musings soon!

The Job Will Not Save You

I’m pretty confident that this is my favorite clip on YouTube. Well, actually, maybe it’s this. Or this. But that first one, the clip from HBO’s The Wire, with the detectives arguing about the meaning the find in their job— that’s the one that speaks to me the most. In that scene, Detective McNulty is arguing that their unit is one of, if not the, best units in the entire Baltimore Police Department. Detective Freamon doesn’t contradict him, but instead challenges his unstated premise— that being “the best” detectives is a thing that can give your life meaning and purpose. “The job,” Freamon argues, “will not save you.” You need to have something else, something on your own terms, separate from external validation, that makes things worth while.

I spent 14 years as a Speech and Debate coach here in Indiana, 13 of them at one of the largest and most competitive programs in the state. I was an assistant coach for the first 7 years and then ran the program for the last 7. We saw a lot of success over that time and I like to think I made an impact on a lot of students. I also invested a lot in trying to maintain and built the program at my school by hiring assistants, training and managing parent volunteers, coordinating with faculty and administration, and developing websites and other technology tools. I organized trips to national tournaments out of state and hosted some of the biggest in-state tournaments every season. It was a huge investment of time and effort and represented a big part of my identity, personally and professionally. And then, two years ago, I quit. This was mostly because I needed to be able to devote more time to my growing family, but, to be honest, I wouldn’t have stepped down if I hadn’t been burned out on many of the things I just described. It was time.

This past weekend, I agreed to judge at the state speech tournament, my first speech event since I stepped down two years ago. I wasn’t sure how I would feel being back at a tournament that I used to manage and that my students used to excel at. I thought I might rediscover my passion for the activity and decide to get involved again, or I might be angry that things had changed or the team had fallen off in my absence, or happy to be surrounded by old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. Instead, I just felt out of place. Things had moved on, changed, and evolved without me. There were people who were happy to see me, but they were also busy working at the tournament. There were new people who had stepped into roles that I used to fill and were making them their own. I could have probably carried on as the head coach at my school, hosting state tournaments for another 7, or 14, or 20 years. But at some point, the same thing would have happened— things would move on without me, and, at some point, my impact on the activity would no longer be felt at all. The job did not, and would not, save me.

Think about the other two clips I posted up above. One is my favorite acting moment of all time— Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the greatest film actors in history, at the peak of his game, overflowing with charisma, humor, and menace all at the same time. But Hoffman died over 10 years ago of a drug overdose at the age 47. The job did not save him, and his success did not “fill him up” as Lester Freamon could have told him in wouldn’t. Or the other clip I posted, the last out of the 2016 World Series, when the Cubs broke their curse and won for the first time in over 100 years. I have a poster of that moment up in my classroom, but, when I look at it now, I see something different than what I experienced when I watched it live. The players featured on my poster are Kris Bryant, who seemingly surefire Hall of Fame career was destroyed by injuries; David Ross, who was fired as Cubs manager after a few lackluster seasons; Ben Zobrist, who went through an incredibly embarrassing and public divorce; and Addison Russell, who was accused by multiple mothers of his children of domestic abuse and ended up leaving the country to see his baseball career disintegrate in Korea. That one moment of absolute success and unqualified adoration from millions of fans did not go on to define any of those guys. I don’t have any idea how happy or self satisfied any of them are or are not, but, clearly, the job did not save them either.

One of my favorite books of the last 5 years is 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The central premise of the book is that life is very short (4,000 weeks if you are pretty lucky, including many that already passed when you were a child a quite a few that you might get when you are too old or infirm to do much with) and that, unavoidably, you will miss out of the opportunity to do almost everything, and whatever you do chose to do with your time will probably stop mattering after you’re gone. If you devote your life to experiencing all life has to offer and have the ability to pursue that, like Richard Branson, you won’t come anywhere close to climbing all the mountains, playing all the sports, learning all the languages, mastering the different art forms, etc. And if you dedicate your life to greater purpose and fulfillment, raise a loving family, and make meaningful contributions to charitable causes, well, you end up just as dead as everybody else, and before too long all of those things will get swallowed up by the cosmic background radiation that is the passage of time. When I write it down like that, it might seem really depressing, but for me at least the idea has been very freeing. I won’t do all the things, and whatever “score” I run up— money, speech and debate state titles, thank you notes from students, hugs from my kids, thought provoking movies seen, etc— only matters insofar as I’m able to make it have temporary meaning in the moment to me and to people I actually care about. It’s not just that the job won’t save you. Nothing will, in that you’re never going to reach the moment where everything is what you want it to be a a big “Congratulations” or “Game Over” banner flashes across the screen.

Anyway this blog is about a charitable running project I’m training for. This July, I’m going to run 5 half marathons in 5 different states as part of a road trip out to the Pacific Ocean and back. I’m hoping it will be a wonderful, life affirming, paradigm shifting experience that reveals something about myself, the country I call home, and so on and so on. But whether or not it is, when I get home, I’m still going to have to take the trash out, I’ll watch the Bears lose more football games than they win, and before too long I’ll start looking around for another race to train for. I’m doing the project as a fundraiser of the National Diaper Bank Network, and I’m confident that the money I raise will do some immediate, measurable good for people who need help. But it’s not going to end poverty or diaper need— diapers are probably a good metaphor for what I’m talking about here because the need for them is by definition inexhaustible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing the project. Lester Freamon’s argument is that you have to find something that matters to you and make it meaningful for you, outside of any external recognition or achievement. And that’s what I’m hoping to get out of this project. If you’ve read this far, I’d really appreciate it if you made even a small contribution to the project using the big Donate button at the top of the page. Thanks!

Limitations

One of my main strategies for success in life has always been to act like I knew what I was talking about and that I had the skills to do a thing, and then just try to do it. To be clear, this has not always worked out and has gotten me into a trouble a few times, but, on balance, approaching situations with the unearned self confidence of a heterosexual middle aged white male has worked more often than not. But training for this project, at my age, and especially after my injury last fall, is forcing me to try to recognize my limitations and work within them. Case in point: I’m currently dealing with a little bit of a hip problem, and I’m going to need to back off training for a little while until it heals up. Like Shakira, my hips don’t lie. I will need to listen to them.

My usual approach to things like injury prevention has been to ignore them. I rarely stretch, I don’t think to much about my diet as an athlete, and I usually ignore the little aches, pains, and pulls that are universal among runners. That sounds pretty dumb when I write it out like that, but, in my defense, it basically worked as a strategy for around 30 years of running. My stress fracture last fall was the first real injury I ever had as a runner—- real as in I had to get treatment for it and I had to stop training. That was about 3 months ago, and now my hip is hurting, and it is some serious work to convince myself to recognize my limitations and back off of training.

The hip thing started about 10 years ago, when I was training for a marathon (just like I was when I broke my foot last fall). I had really made that marathon a significant goal for myself. I had lost close the 30 pounds and had trained for months. I was running mile repeats/intervals as speed workouts, I was counting calories, I was focused on breaking 4 hours. And then my hip got all goofy. I got a diagnosis of “piriformis syndrome” and had to shut everything down for a week or so, and then gradually ramp back into my training. I didn’t break 4 hours but I did PR in the marathon. My hip hurt while I was running it, but I ignored it. It hurt afterward, so I stopped running for a while (and gained back about half the weight I had lost almost right away). And, as I got back into training, I accepted the hip pain as a new normal and worked around it as best I could. Over time, it got better. My strategy of basically powering through the injury had worked (?).

And then this past weekend I ran a competitive 5k— step one as I stairstep up to being able to run a half marathon at race pace— and that same hip seized up on me pretty good. And, falling back on my tried and true strategy, I ignored it and ran again on Sunday and Tuesday of this week. And then it hurt so bad that I couldn’t sleep on that side. And I looked at the calendar and saw that I’ve only got 4 months until I leave on my running roadtrip, and there’s no way I can accommodate another 6 week shut down. So I’m stretching every day, and taking hot baths with salts in the water, and icing, and not running. At least until it feels better. I am really, really trying to recognize my limitations.

A while back, I read something about “reverse brain storming” or “reverse problem solving.” The idea is that you brainstorm out all the things you would do if you were actively interested in NOT achieving your goal, and then avoid those things. The thinking is that success is achieved more often not through embracing a brilliant idea, but by avoiding the stupid ones. So, if I DIDN’T want to complete my 5 half marathon road trip this July, what would I do? Well, one thing to do would be to ignore signals from my body and run through significant pain until I get too injured to go on the trip. Just avoiding that is a whole lot easier than designing a brilliant training plan, and has a higher chance of success. And on the other hand,
”back off on my training because of a potential injury” honestly wouldn’t make it onto my reverse brainstorm list at all— after all, my goal is to complete these races, not to win them or get signed to a sponsorship. I can run them in less than ideal physical shape, but I can’t run them in a walking boot.

Anyway. If you’re new here, this is a blog documenting my thoughts and experiences while I train to run 5 half marathons across 5 states in July. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. You can learn a lot more about it on the other pages on this website. If you’d like to contribute, please consider clicking the big “Donate” button at the top of this page. Even small contributions help a lot. Thanks!

5 Observations On My First 5K in 5 Months

I have actual progress to report! I started this blog to document how things are going as I train to run 5 half marathons this July and bounce back from a significant injury last Fall. However, there just hasn’t been that much to document for a while now since I’ve just been gradually building my mileage back up and being pretty miserable running in the cold and the snow. But! This past Saturday, I ran a competitive 5k! And it went well! That was my first race since October, a few weeks before my stress fracture was diagnosed. Here are 5 thoughts on the race, and racing in general:

1. In general, running races is something I enjoy a lot after I’m finished actually doing it, but that makes me pretty miserable during the actual act. This is even more true for running in the cold. We had 60 degree weather here earlier in the week, but the bottom dropped back out on Friday and the temp at race time was around 25 with a pretty gnarly North wind beating down on us. But it was dry and the sun was shining, so I’ll take it. I don’t like running races in the cold, but I’m always proud of the fact that I did it. It doesn’t feel like I’ve actually gone through a winter if I don’t run at least one race under those conditions, so I’m glad I was finally able to check the box.

2. This was the last ride for my running tights. When I was getting dressed Saturday morning, I noticed that the inseam of my tights was starting to have second thoughts about things, so, after the race, I tossed them. I will deal with finding a new pair in November. It will be shorts weather soon, and, until then, I can bridge the gap with sweatpants as needed. Farewell, noble tights, you served me well.

3. Mason, my Australian Cattle Dog, ran the race with me. He is definitely in better running condition than me right now and probably could have finished even faster if I’d had a little more left in the tank over the last half mile. Back in October, when I was in marathon shape and temps were still getting up into the 70s, I had to leave him at home on my longer runs because he couldn’t keep up. But for now, I’m holding my running partner back a bit. He didn’t mind, thought.

4. Why oh why oh why do people run with little speakers blasting music? Do they not own headphones? I have never been so confident to imagine that every stranger around me would enjoy listening to whatever music I had picked out. I guess I’m envious of that kind of self assurance, but, all the same, I might need to shove someone into a drainage ditch the next time the pass me blasting “Highway to the Danger Zone” out of tinny Bluetooth speakers.

5. Mason and I were the fastest dog/human pair at the race (an unofficial category without any prizes), and I finished way ahead of the walkers, but I was comfortably out of the running for any kind of overall or age group recognition. They gave out finishers’ medals, but I don’t even display medals from halfs that I’ve run, so the 5k ones usually go into the trash. And they were out of my size in shirts, so I had to go XL and ended up with a nice new pajama shirt. Nevertheless, it feels great to run a race. Running is a solitary pursuit, and I’m a solitary kind of person, but being a part of a big group all doing the same thing is an essential human need. And, calling it like it is, racing against other people, even if it’s just part of a battle for 45th place that the other person is unaware we are engaged in, feels good. I ran about a minute ahead of my fast mile pace from the past few months of training, and I spent the rest of the day feeling like I’d accomplished something. Running races is fun.

Next up, I’m going to run a 10k in April and then a half somewhere local in either May or June. Two days post race and everything feels fine injury-wise, so I’m feeling good about all the rehab running I did over the last two months. I should be in good shape to do my 5 state/5 half marathon road trip out to Seattle and back in July. If you’re new here, the whole thing is a fundraiser I’m doing for the National Diaper Bank Network. If you’d like to make even a small contribution to the project, please hit the “Donate” button up at the top of the page. Thanks so much!

Better Living Through Chemistry

I have a clear memory from when I was in junior high school, so probably twelve or thirteen years old, and I overheard my mom tell my aunt that my grandpa was taking “antidepressants.” My honest reaction in the moment was pure envy. My mind reeled at the idea that there was medication you could take that would make you feel less terrible all the time. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain that I was feeling depressed, but looking back at it I clearly was. I had few friends and the ones I did were as likely to pick on me as some of the more outwardly hostile kids at school. My grades had collapsed and I had gone from a kid who did fine running to good in school to one who routinely failed classes because I didn’t bother to turn in the work. I had trouble sleeping and I didn’t find a lot of joy in things. And I had no idea that those things were uncommon, or that they weren’t necessarily evidence of personal failings or weakness. I thought that everyone else was just doing a better job than I was, and I needed to figure out how to do that too. But when I heard that there was a pill that you could take to feel better, man, I wanted it.

But this was the early 90s. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with any kind of mental health issues for another twenty five years. Medication and counseling that could help me with my issues were in the far distant future. Instead, I struggled through it. I felt bad a lot of the time. I discovered the psychological benefits of exercise. I thought about suicide. I discovered the joy of being on stage and performing. I struggled to maintain real friendships. I left junior high and went to a bigger high school where it was easier to find a niche and/or get lost in the crowd. Most significantly, a few years later, I went to college and discovered drinking, which became my primary method of coping with my social anxiety, my depression, and my struggle to understand other people. For close to twenty years, that’s how I dealt with things.

I finally found my way into counseling when I was in my mid thirties and the pressure of my job and my growing family was getting overwhelming. Doctors prescribed me medicine, which helped me function, getting me to the point where, another few years down the line, I found myself walking into AA and sobriety. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I’d had access to those resources when I was young and really struggling. Even access to the vocabulary to describe what I was feeling and that it wasn’t “normal” would have helped tremendously. Some people would argue that I’m stronger because of what I went through. I reject that out of hand. I’m strong because I work hard, set ambitious goals, and reflect on my mistakes. Being anxious and depressed just made me miserable, and if there was a way to have avoided it I would take it ten times out of ten.

I’m thinking about this today for two reasons. First, last week I had a physical and my doctor and I agreed to change up the meds I’m using for my anxiety. I think we’ve hit on a winning formula. I’ve spent the last week feeling like I’m living life with a cheat code. Things that used to bother me and sit with me all day still bother me, but it’s easier for me to pivot my brain off of them and onto things I would rather be focusing on. The anxiety is still there, but it is much easier to see it for what it is and compartmentalize it. If this is how “normal” people feel all of the time, then I’ve spent a lot of my life playing the game in weighted boots. It’s possible that my old friend homeostasis will balance out the new meds before long and leave me feeling exactly the way I did before, but it’s also possible that I might be experiencing a new normal. Which would be great.

But of course, the other reason I’m thinking about this today is that the US government is very likely to start striking an antagonistic posture toward antidepressants, which has me a little terrified. There are a lot of things the government is doing right now that make me feel like the world is falling apart, but taking the anxiety meds is one of the main things I need to deal with what just happened in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky, or the shutdown of global malaria treatments, or the mass firing of… you get the point. I assume RFK would tell me that I need to find healthy solutions to my issues, but my ability to do things like get consistent exposure to sunlight, sleep eight hours a night, avoid processed foods, exercise for at least 30 minutes a day, and so on is pretty compromised by living where I do and doing what I do. I am in fact a huge believer in the healing power of exercise— it is why I’m doing this whole project— and in talk therapy, and healthy eating, and all of that. But taking medication along with all of that still helps put me on even footing with a world of people who don’t experience life the way I do. I really hope they don’t take that away.

In the meantime, I will continue to do what I do. If you’re new here, this blog is part of my project to run 5 half marathons in 5 states this July. I’m doing it as a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. I’m hoping that a combination of exercise and purposeful activity will help me navigate the slings and arrows the news and the world keeps throwing at me. If you’d like to get involved, please consider making even a small donation using the link at the top of this page. Thanks so much!

Endurance

I heard someone talking about raising kids the other day. He said that new parents assume that the newborn phase must be the hardest part, and if they can just get through that thing will get easier. Then, they get into the toddler phase, and assume that THAT must be the hardest part, and if they can just get through it, then things will get easier. Etc etc. This guy’s argument was that the teenager phase was actually the hardest part, and that you never actually reach a point as a parent where it suddenly gets easier. My boys are 6 and 3, so I can’t speak to the teenager part yet, but I have some doubts about this argument already. Easily the hardest part of the last six years was when our younger son was a newborn and our older son was 3. I know that’s the hardest part because it’s the only time that I had legitimate doubts about my ability to get through it. I have very clear memories of standing by the kitchen sink at 1 in the morning mixing up a pitcher of formula and trying to figure out how I was possibly going to survive the experience. I was confident that I would, since so many other people have in the past (one of the crazy things about parenting is it is simultaneously the most miraculous, unequivocal, bizarre things you can do, but at the same time it is one of the most common, universal, ordinary experiences of humanity) but I honestly had no idea how I was going to make it. But you know what? I did.

I’ve had similar experiences in some of the long distance races I’ve run. I’ve stood in the starting corrals before a marathon and found myself wondering how I could possibly run all this way and endure the pain that I knew was coming. And yet, I did it. One of the more surreal experiences of running a marathon is that you run 6 miles— a distance that would impress almost anyone and that many people will never run in their entire lives— and you still have another 20 miles to go, which is a cartoon, made up sounding distance. And yet, people do it, every day, all around the world.

I quit drinking around three and a half years ago, and when I started out, I had no idea how I was going to do it. The concept of an entire second half of my life without alcohol just seemed absurd. For years, I had struggled to complete a “Dry January” or hold myself to some kind of “only on the weekends” policy, and now I was going to never drink again? And yet, so far, I’ve done it. I did it the same way I ran marathons and managed to get through sleep training a newborn while dealing with a threenager. One day at a time, like the book says. You just focus on getting through this one day without drinking, or running to that next lamppost, or staying alert through one more day of work after another sleepless night, and then all of a sudden you look up and you’ve put some actual distance behind you. At some point, you look up and you’ve hit a goal. And then, most importantly, once you’ve done that, now you know—- actually know—- that these things aren’t impossible.

I’m thinking about this today because I was looking back over my last 3 blog posts and they kind of look like a slow decent into nihilism. I’m pretty upset about the state of things in my country right now, and, like a lot of people, I’m struggling to process just how big some of the changes that are happening are and how impossible it seems to imagine a path through to a better future. But I’m actually pretty confident that we are going to make it through, in the same way we get through everything else that is painful, overwhelming, and exhausting. One day at a time, one moment at a time. Keep track of progress, recognize that we’re already a little closer to the end than we were a few weeks ago, and do the next right thing. Like every other difficult, miserable thing I’ve endured in my life, I’m pretty confident that one day I’ll be able to look back on this as something challenging that happened in the past and now is over.

It’s currently 8 degrees outside, and I just went for a three mile training run. I didn’t really want to do it, but I made myself get out there and keep moving, one foot in front of the other until it was done. And now I’m warm and comfortable after a hot shower, writing my blog. I completed my winter night jog and now it is in the past. I endured it. In fact, now I have that experience to look back on as motivation. Some day this summer when I’m running a half marathon, I’ll be able to remind myself that I got out and ran in the cold so that I would be ready to finish this stupid race, so let’s not quit today buddy.

Let me stipulate that this isn’t true for everyone. I’m experiencing the pain of the current moment in the abstract and as anxiety about the future. I read news stories about things that are happening and worry about what happen to me or my kids at some vague point in the future. I haven’t been fired, no one turned off funding for life saving medicine I need, I’m not in increased danger of hate crimes or discrimination. I recognize that. But this is also a blog about my personal experience, so that’s what you’re getting here.

Anyway. If you’re new here, I’m writing this blog about my experiences training to run 5 half marathons across 5 states in July of this year. The project is a fundraiser for the National Diaper Bank Network. If you’ve made it this far, please consider hitting the “Donate” button up at the top and making even a small contribution. Thanks!

Therapy

I’m starting to think that everything I do is turning into an effort to keep myself from losing my mind. I wrote earlier this week about the fight or flight response that ‘all the things’ is triggering in me, so I won’t rehash all of that here, but suffice it to say that I had the following conversation with my department chair this morning:

Department Chair: Look, I know you don’t want to do this, but the Superintendent wants us to, so you need to get it done.

Me: They pardoned Eric Adams! Nothing means anything anymore! Why am I out here following the rules like a sucker!

So, I’m not feeling great. I spend the entire day looking for strategies to try to keep myself on stable ground. Here’s a list of everything I do that I now think of entirely in mental health terms:

• Run

• Spend time with my kids

• Spend time with my wife

• Solve NY Times crossword puzzles

• Build a jigsaw puzzle

• Post on social media

• Listen to music (instead of listening to podcasts)

• Listen to audiobooks (instead of listening to podcasts)

• Box breathing (4 count in, hold for 4, 4 count out)

• Take medication

• Write this blog

• Publicize my charitable fundraising project (I’m raising money for the National Diaper Bank Network, you can read all about it on this website, maybe donate a buck or two!)

• Tell myself not to post inflamatory things about the news on social media

• Tell myself not to send inflamatory text messages to people I disagree with politically

• Work hard at my job

• Stop taking my job so seriously

• Work on my summer plans (I’m going to run 5 half marathons in 4 weeks across 5 states. You can learn more about it on the website!)

• Focus on living in the moment

Those are all things I used to do just because I enjoyed them. But now, they all feel like an effort to distract myself from what my brain wants me to think about all the time (threats to global security, threats to the constitution, threats to my career, threats to my kids’ futures, etc). Every time I do any of the things on that list, I do so with the conscious, intentional hope that doing this will make me feel better for a little while, that this is a healthy way to manage my stress, etc. I don’t do anything just because it seems like a good idea. I’m not convinced this is sustainable, and I don’t know what to do about it. Let me know in the comments if you’ve got any ideas.

Traumatized

I’m 44 years old, and I’ve never felt this way before. For at least the last week, just living in the world kicks my flight or fight response into action, and I walk around all day feeling like I’m under threat and desperately need to take action. But there’s nothing I can do and instead I just have to keep putting gas in my car and answering emails like the world isn’t trying to kill me. It sucks. I understand where that feeling is coming from, but figuring out what to do about it is proving to be a much bigger challenge.

I’ve done my best to keep this blog/project apolitical, and so even in this post I’ll stop short of telling you who I think you should vote for or arguing that you should change your mind. A big part of the audience I’m trying to reach with this project includes people who disagree with me politically, which is why I’m raising money for the National Diaper Bank Network— I picked that charity because I assumed that, regardless of ideology, no one would be opposed to helping children and families in need. I may have been proven wrong about that, but I’ll get in to that later. This post will get into my personal ideological stances about a few things, which you are welcome to disagree with, but I’m hoping you’ll read on in an effort to understand where I’m coming from, even if you think I’m wrong.

My intense, visceral reaction to the news of the day started when I heard about the overnight destruction of USAID. I don’t think its unfair to call it that given that Elon Musk bragged on Twitter that, over the course of a weekend, he had “put [it] through the woodchipper.” I won’t pretend that I knew all that much about USAID prior to its dismantling, but I was immediately concerned about any government program being unilaterally wiped out in the middle of a Friday night. And when I read more about it, I was immediately more upset. I had heard of PEPFAR before, the program founded by President George W. Bush to combat the global spread of AIDS. I knew that PEPFAR has done an enormous amount of good on that front and is widely admired, but I didn’t know all the specifics. But then I read this article from Wired that included the detail from an humanitarian worker that, since funding through USAID to PEPFAR was cut off, 300 babies now had AIDS that wouldn’t have otherwise. This detail made me feel physically ill— the idea that someone basically found a button that would give 300 babies an incurable disease, pressed it, and then bragged about it online made me feel like I had been punched in the stomach. I reached out to a friend of mine who is a big Musk supporter to ask his opinion about it, and he responded that he was just happy someone was trying to do something to balance the budget. The idea that an intelligent person who I respect thinks Musk is acting altruistically, that a conservative Republican, the party the professes endless admiration for strict readings of the constitution, was happy about a shadow organization getting access to government buildings in the middle of the night and playing with the computers, and that someone who has genuinely convinced me of his humble religious conviction could speak so callously about children with AIDS simply didn’t compute in my brain. I spent several days just trying to reconcile it, and I think that was the real beginning of the feeling for me that the whole world was being pulled out from under my feet.

A few days later, this stress became more personal as it became apparent that one of the next target of Musk et al would be the Department of Education. Ending the Department of Education has long been a conservative goal— I first became aware of this during Rick Perry’s “oops” moment at a primary debate back in 2012, when he couldn’t remember all of the cabinet departments he planned to eliminate but DID remember that one of them was education— but it had never struck me as a realistic possibility until the last week. Dissolving the department of education would result in all control of education, including funding, to the states. One of the main things the DOE does it provide support for students with special needs— my wife is a special ed teacher, and I have no idea what will happen to her program when the DOE goes away. One of the other main roles of the DOE is to protect the civil rights of students who belong to protected minority groups. Given the political climate in my state, I have real concerns about the safety of some of my students right now and, on a more personal level, I have no idea my protections my own boys (6 and 3 right now) might need as they grow and develop a sense of themselves.

At the same time that this was happening at the Federal level, at the State level, my governor has proposed a budget that would eliminate millions of dollars in funding for public schools. This would have serious, immediate, painful impacts at my school. It would lead to larger class sizes, decreased programs and opportunities for students, and probably a reduction in staff (a polite way of saying people I respect will lose their jobs). And this is happening with the DOE nominally still in place— if all decisions about school funding go to the states, and my state has many lawmakers interested in supporting private schools, including my high performing school district, which just avoided a serious effort to create a charter school with public money, and we are already looking a budget that would cut millions from every school district in the state, what is likely to happen to my career and my students?

So, I’ve been walking around for days with all the parts of my brain that evolved to keep my safe from sabertooth tigers going full blast. I feel like I am under attack and there is nothing I can do about it, and that people I care about are in danger and there is no way I can help them. I feel like things are spiraling out of control faster than anyone can deal with. A friend of mine maintains that, since there is a strong argument that it is unconstitutional for “DOGE” to do what it’s doing, judges will start issuing restraining orders and reversing their actions. But it seems to me that the whole point of Musk moving the way he is is to make that a moot point. USAID is done, “fed through the wood chipper.” Now that a judge has found that to be illegal and told them they shouldn’t have done it, the toothpaste is out of the tube/the bell can’t be unrung/etc. And I have no idea what is going to happen next. All of this made more sense to me when I read this Pro Publica article about Russell Vaught, erstwhile Project 2025 leader and current Office of Management and Budget director, making speeches where he explained that his explicit goal was to make public sector employees feel “traumatized". He was talking about people at the EPA, but that’s how I feel as a public school teacher right now. When I looked at Mike Braun’s picture in the news with the headline about cutting millions from school budgets, my response was an immediate “I can’t keep doing this!” In this red state, it has been a solid 10 years of changes and threats of changes to public education, and every election brings with it the possibility of my career being upended in terrifying ways. I can’t keep feeling this way— I’ve been pushed to the point where I can’t keep fighting.

When I came home from work on Friday, I told my wife that I was ready to start planning a move to a blue state. That isn’t a decision to make lightly— this has been my home for almost my entire life, and I resent other people making it so inhospitable that I have to leave. Moving would mean leaving behind my dad and my wife’s parents. It would mean leaving the school that I’ve worked at for 15 years, where I’ve earned the respect of colleagues, administrators, and students, in order to start the whole thing over again in an entirely new place. It would mean leaving the house that we’ve made a home, taking the boys away from their schools, all of that. But I can’t continue feeling this way— I just can’t. So, we talked about it for a few days, made a list of pros and cons, etc, and decided to leave everything alone for a month and see what things look like in March. We aren’t going to find new teaching jobs in California or Colorado right now anyway, so we might as well let things play a little while longer and see if they are as bad as I think. Talking this through made me realize how much my sudden desire to move was connected to that same “flight or flight” response I mentioned at the beginning of the post. I can’t do anything about the threats I’m perceiving, but my amygdala insists I do something, so I end up looking at Oregon houses on Zillow. And suffering from terrible heartburn. And not sleeping. It’s not great.

Here are some things I’m doing to try and combat those symptoms and feelings. I’m putting restrictions on my news and social media consumption- I just took a 24 hour reprieve from both, and, when I checked back in, things had continued as they had been without me. I think that staying on top of the news is a way for me to feel more in control— if I understand everything that is going on, and share it to my social media followers, I am somehow fixing it (but I’m not). I’m trying to do more things with friends, so I went to a cigar bar with a teacher friend last night and watched minor league hockey while puffing a Padron. And I’m running, training for this project.

One of the main things I’ve learned about mental health over the last few years is that it an unrealistic goal to say you’re going to “cure” your issues. I don’t think that if I start playing more Mariokart with my son instead of reading the news, I will suddenly no longer be an anxious person. But I will create more unanxious minutes, and if I string together enough of those minutes, eventually things will improve. Oh, and I take SSRIs. Multiple SSRIs.

My charitable project for the National Diaper Bank Network is one of the main things that I’ve been able to stay focused on in these difficult times. If you’ve made it this far, please consider clicking the big “Donate” button at the top of the page and making even a small contribution. Thanks so much!

On Anger

I’ve been watching old seasons of the TV show Battle Bots on Max with my 6 year old. I tell people it’s because he likes to watch it, but the reality is, most of the time it’s because I want to watch robots break pieces off of each other while people yell and scream. All the appeal of prize fighting with none of the CTE. Anyway, as we’ve been working our way through the seasons we recently hit the COVID/2020 season. Suddenly there were no spectators, people were in small clusters and separated by big pieces of lucite, they were learning how to conduct interviews over Zoom in real time, and everyone was wearing masks. It did not bring back happy memories to suddenly be thrust back into that world. But one thing I found interesting about, looking back dispassionately from 2025, is that suddenly, everyone on the show was angry. There weren’t any (televised) arguments about masks/distancing/etc, but in the COVID season contestants were abruptly arguing with the judges, the commentators, and their opponents in a way that they hadn’t in any of the previous seasons. Stressful times amp up anger and it needs an outlet.

My wife and I have observed, and worked on, the fact that we tend to argue with each other more when we are stressed about other issues—- the kids are acting up, money is tight, other family members have difficult needs. We can’t yell at the bank, or the three year old, or grandma, so we end up yelling at each other (and, again, then talking about it and working on it so we don’t keep doing that in the future). Anger at things outside of our control wants to find an outlet in things that we can control, whether or not that is fair.

I’ve been thinking about that over the last two weeks as various new political realities unfold across America. I’ll keep my own politics out of this blog since that’s not what this project is about, and since it would be very easy to backtrack from this blog to my employer, but I think regardless of political persuasion we can agree that things have been stressful for the last few weeks. Earlier this week, I was in a real spiral about the abrupt cutting of funding to USAID— you are welcome to whatever political opinion you want to have about the justification for that, but hopefully we can agree that it is bad that people that were receiving healthcare and nutrition suddenly aren’t. Specifically, I read an article about the fact that, in the few days after funding was cut to PEPFAR, a minimum of 300 babies now had AIDS that would otherwise not have. This made me angry. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do with that anger that could do anything about the situation. I responded by getting in a big argument with a friend of mine who is a big supporter of Elon Musk, to the point that I’m not sure our friendship, which I valued, is repairable. I’m not sure if I there was anything gained from this argument, but I am very confident that our argument will have no impact on USAID funding or babies with AIDS.

You can of course see this same phenomenon over and over again in just the last few years. Many people were very very angry about COVID restrictions and, since you can’t yell at a virus, some of them ended up channeling that anger into attacks on Target employees. Many people were very very angry about civilian deaths in Gaza over the last year and, since Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t care what they think, they took it out on university property (in a few anecdotal cases). Looking back at it dispassionately, what is the net benefit of all that anger?

So, what is the solution? Here are some things that I’ve found help me (imperfectly of course, since I was yelling at people about Elon Musk just a few days ago). I find some small thing I can do that contributes in some kind of meaningful way to solving the problem—- I set up a few small monthly donations to organizations that I think are doing some good about things. I don’t believe those donations are going to make everything be the way I want it to be, but when I feel overwhelmed I can look at my bank statement and know that I supplied a few billable minutes for some paralegal somewhere that might be a part of making things a little better. I then make an effort to get myself out of the online spaces that contribute to my anger. Yesterday, I went with a friend to see the movie Companion (two stars, not life changing but a perfectly good use of two hours on a Wednesday evening) instead of doomscrolling. And if I can’t get myself out of those online spaces, I try to engage in conversations there that will help people instead of contributing to their anger—- I spend a lot of time posting about moments of positivity, and when I did find myself sucked into an online argument about the state of things today, I did everything I could to keep it focused on civics (what our representatives can actually do about things) instead of ideology (what we wish our representatives can do/what we should yell at our representatives about their inability to do).

And I exercise. On Tuesday, after I had already invested 20 minutes in doomscrolling and didn’t see a way to stop if I kept sitting on the couch, I told my wife I was going for a run, grabbed the dog, and took off for a few miles in the February drizzle. This complicated getting the kids their dinner and probably won’t make a difference in terms of my marathon fitness in a few months, but it helped me in that moment a lot more than texting articles to my Musk fan friend would have. At the end of that run, I felt genuinely better and more connected to the immediate world around me, and that feeling stuck with me for the rest of the day.

That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing with this project. If you’re new here, I’m training to run 5 half marathons in 4 weeks this July on a roadtrip across the country, and I’m doing that to raise money for the National Diaper Bank Network. This project gets me motivated to exercise almost every day, and it gives me a sense that I’m doing something that will have a small, measurable impact.. If you’ve made it this far and you’d like to be a part of things, it would be great if you clicked the “Donate” button at the top of this page and kicked in even a few bucks. If you don’t want to help my project, I’d encourage you to find one that you do want to get involved in and find some small way to contribute. I promise you, you’ll feel better later!

It’s February 2nd! It’s Groundhogs Day!— Updates and Turning Points

For a long time, I’ve maintained that Groundhog Day, February 2nd, might be my favorite day of the year. Let me explain. First, the Harold Ramis movie is in my top 5 movies of all time, and I’ve made a ritual of rewatching every year, sometimes live-tweeting along my favorite lines (this was, admittedly, more fun back before I quit drinking). But I also think of Groundhog Day as being the turning point in the year, when we go from winter being even more dark and depressing day after day as we move away from Christmas into things gradually improving, weather getting better, days getting noticeably longer, and Spring Break starting to appear bigger and bigger on the calendar. The year bottoms out sometime around the end of January and then goes on a run of steady improvement that peaks somewhere around the 4th of July.

I started this project because things were at a pretty dark time for me personally, and I wanted something positive to hold onto and take some ownership of (for those that don’t know, I’m planning on running 5 half marathons in 5 states in July, and I’m doing it to raise money for the National Diaper Bank Network). It is now about three months since I started drawing up plans for my trip, and having this as something to work on has given me something to focus on and a place to see gradual improvement, which has helped me out as things around me seem to get even worse. I was starting to feel discouraged a week or two ago, but donations are suddenly starting to pick up speed, and I feel like, maybe, groundhog day is the turning point. Here are some updates about why I’m feeling optimistic:

-Over the last week, donations to the project have come close to doubling. That’s money set aside for me to donate to the National Diaper Bank Network, an organization that I know converts every dollar they receive into genuine good for people who need it. And its also money set to help fuel the project, which is great because…

-I’ve invested a lot of personal capital into the project already. I am now registered to run all 5 races— Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, and Idaho, I’ve booked most of my campgrounds—- Yellowstone and Grand Teton all set, waiting on Glacier to open up their booking, and I’ve reserved the AirBnBs I’ll need on the race days so I have a safe place for my dog to hangout on race days. I’m splitting donations to the project between into equal portions for the Diaper Bank and for overhead on the trip, and now that a few more donations have come in I’m covering a bit less on the old credit card.

-My training is coming along nicely. I was basically starting at zero at the beginning of December after nearly two months in a walking boot. For at least the first month, I was in pain and really limited as I gradually worked my way back into things. For the last month, I’ve started to see results, but my ability to get out and run was really limited by weeks of snow and cold. We’re getting a burst of temperate weather now, though, which coincides nicely with me starting to feel like I’m 100% my old self when I’m out running. I did almost 5 miles at Fort Ben today, and I was pain free and able to hold a respectable pace. With a few months still to train, I feel confident that I will be back at full half marathon fitness before I leave.

-Engagement on the various social media accounts I created for the project is starting to pick up. Most of the support I’ve received to this point has been from friends and family, but the Instagram and Bluesky accounts I created specifically for this have started to get more attention. This is great because I haven’t had much running content to post there. The runs I’ve done have almost all been in gray, overcast, wintery Indiana, and if people are interested in that then I know I can get people engaged when I’m able to post from the Rocky Mountains. I can keep the fundraiser going all the way through the end of July, and once I cover my planned budget then 100% of every donated dollar goes to the Diaper Bank. Facebook has gotten my project started, but if I can get a toehold on Instagram I can hopefully really blow it out this summer.

-I started this project because I was feeling pretty depressed and helpless, and I don’t feel that way any more. My injury coincided with some very bleak national and international news, and that was all very hard on me because I couldn’t rely on exercise as a stress relief to help me process it. It’s easy for the news to make me feel overwhelmed, and now that I can run again and I seeing results on this project, I’m increasingly insulated against that feeling. When I scroll through social media, I see many many people repeating that they have all this anger and frustration and nothing to do with it. The hard reality is, there really isn’t anything we can do to change the big picture in the short term. Some very limited opportunities present themselves from time to time, but the reality is things continue moving without our say so almost all the time. But anyone can make changes and take actions in their own small part of the world that can produce a measurable, beneficial impact. For me, exercising and raising money are two of those things. Thanks for helping me to do them!