The invasion of the fur trimmed coats...

I keep getting worse and worse as a blogger. This is why I gave it up the first time. I just couldn't get in the habit of regularly posting. Ah well, I remembered, so here I am...more details that you probably don't care about from my life. Care to join? Yes? You're crazy, and crazy bored, but oh well, here we go...
First, the running front (always the most important, since this is theoretically a running blog). I successfully ran every day for about a week and a half, was feeling good, like things might actually be turning around. Then I couldn't run for a few days, and found that my foot was feeling remarkably better. So I have once again taken the bench, and am not running. At first, my foot felt like it might make it all the way to fully healed. This last week or so though I've noticed the discomfort creeping back. So I don't know what to do really. When I'm back from the ski trip, I will start running again. Because I'm tired of twiddling my thumbs. If I'm going to run, I need to run. If not, I need to move on.
Next...well, guess I could say something about the crazy Christmas EMS shift. Don't know if it has been put forth in this blog, or if you know (do I even know you?), but I am an EMT with HCESD-1 in one of my other lives. I took the Christmas Day day shift (that makes sense, I promise) and then was asked to also take the Christmas Eve night shift. So instead of the normal 6am to 6am 24 hour shift, I ended up doing a backwards 6pm to 6pm 24 hour shift. It was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It SHOULD have been a quiet shift, becuase everyone SHOULD have been eating turkey or ham dinner, and going to bed in breathless anticipation of the presents that they would get the next morning. But no. There were assaults, there were shootings, there were stabbings, domestic arguments, car wrecks, attempted suicides....my truck didn't answer all of those calls, but that is a sampling of what was happening. It was crazy, I got no sleep that night, and still had quite a few calls during the day. As my partner on the night shift said, "the natives are restless." Apparently Christmas is an excuse for one ethnic group to get drunk, another to blow shit up, and a third to shoot each other. I leave it to you to figure out which is which. Such are the stereotypes where I work.
I was going to share details, but I'm not supposed to talk about calls with people, and I don't know what level of detail would be acceptable, and what level would get me in hot water should anyone find this blog. So I'll leave it alone. Suffice to say people can survive some pretty impressive things. And people call EMS for the stupidest reasons.
What else? I'm not at home, so I can't look at my calendar to mentally go back and try to figure out what happened since I last wrote. Not sure I'll try....
Which brings me to the title. As I write this I sit in Montana, where my family goes for the annual ski trip. This year is particularly good, as we are joined by family from the east coast, whom i have seen so few times that I can count them on one hand. But somehow we always pick up right where we left off, and its fantastic. Suffice to say family-wise, it is an excellent trip.
The snow was supposed to be good, but I found it to be choppy and inconsistent. More importantly, our little hidey-hole of a resort, supposedly only known to the locals, has been discovered. This is evident not only by the drastically enlarged lift lines, (HA HA, enlarged....points if you get the "HA HA" reference) but also by the fact that you can see so many people here this year are the rich snobby fashion skiers and snowboarders. The clue in my opinion is the fur-trimmed coats. They are obnoxious. Only slightly worse are the full two-piece snow suits. Not snow suits in the sense of one-piece heavy duty mountaineering outfits, but "suit" as in the top and bottom are made to match, and are clearly more concerned with fashion than function. Worst of all, these folks tend to gum up the lift lines and the runs, because they are not particularly good at anything related to skiing or snowboarding. They just get in the way, and imagine that they look good doing it.
Ah well. Someone has to do it...
I'm pretty sure I had some other deep intellectual anecdote, but I can't remember it.
Lucky you.

Sleep...

It is getting to the point that spate of little sleep will cause me to literally forget things. Maybe not so much forget as the linkages between thoughts dissolve...I call my brother in the evening, forgetting that I had already called him earlier in the afternoon about the same thing. It is disconcerting. Such realizations should jolt me into a more regular sleep pattern. Unfortunately, it does not...
Another run tonight, which brings me to something like four days out of the last six. This is outstanding. Tonight was forty minutes at modest 7:00 mile pace, last night was only three miles but at a faster 6:20-6:30 pace. But while its great to be running again, and while I'm not feeling any real problems in my legs, I'm not all that excited about it. And while 7:00 minute miles aren't hard, it doesn't feel good. Its odd, I don't feel stiff exactly, I don't hurt exactly, I don't feel slow exactly, but its almost like a shadow of a workout. There's effort involved, like I'm moving rusty parts around. Of course that sounds obvious, anyone is rusty after two months or so out, but that still isn't an apt description. I blame the lack of sleep.
Always always more sleep...

Speaking of forgetting things, it is an absolute abomination that I said my weekend with my brother and sister was "low key." There was nothing low key about watching the Texas A&M deliver a very convincing win over varsity and the texas university longhorns at Kyle Field for Mike's senior year. (If you don't understand why its texas university and not University of Texas, then you are obviously not related to an Aggie.) It was a great game, made even better by the fact that I was there with my brother (and sister) to see it happen.

On another tangent, I now have a new bike, and rode to work on Monday. I'm trying to get into the habit of riding to work regularly. I could use the exercise to jumpstart my running, and frankly, I'm tired of dealing with Houston drivers...if you have ever driven here and have a modicum of confidence behind the wheel, you know what I'm talking about.

Running again

I'll never make it as a blogger. The impulse to write simply doesn't come regularly enough. And writing and blogging, like running, only really gets off the ground with a lot of consistent effort. Oh well.
I went to Washington DC and Philadelphia to watch my ex-girlfriend Sarah run her first marathon. Three miles used to be nearly impossible for her. Now she has run further than I ever have in my life. Its an odd reversal. I also saw two of my cousins while in DC. I can count the number of times I have seen them on one hand, and yet every time I see them we pick up right where we left off. Family is a wonderful thing. AJ, who is the eldest and closest to my age, suggested I move out there. Funny thing is, he was only half joking. I must say, as much as I miss the Northwest, I am tempted. Arlington seemed nice, and DC, for all the flaws I keep hearing about, is practically the center of activism in this country. Not that I'm interested in activism, but it does make for a vibrant undertone among the young adults there. Its almost like New York City, but fresher, and a little more institutionalized, what with all the towering monuments and such.
The next weekend my sister came to visit me and my brother for Thanksgiving. A rather low key visit, since as we get older my siblings and I seem to be relatively content to simply hang out; watch TV together, drive around to wherever we're going, with my brother maybe play a computer game or talk technology (which is funny to say because we're both a lot less geeky than we used to be)...point being, we don't do much. Family is family. I'm guessing it will mean more as we grow older, and the intervals between seeing each other become longer and longer.
The weekend after that, this past weekend, I went on a long-needed trip to see my grandparents in Kansas City. My aunt and uncle and cousins are also there, and I went to see them as well, but it was mostly to see Grandma Mickey and Grandpa Nic. Grandpa is now 87 years old, and while he seems to have hardly changed since when I was little, 87 is nothing to sneeze at. And Grandma has blown out a knee, and now swoops to one side when she walks, with a brace hiding under her clothes, and a cane by her side, even in the house. So far, I have been lucky as far as death goes, with only a very few distant relatives dying, and even those were ones I barely knew if at all, either because of distance or how young I was when they died. It is a strange thing to contemplate the death of my grandparents, especially since it is one of the many things in life I will not be able to comprehend at all until it happens. Its like looking through a one way mirror almost, but I'm on the wrong side. So I do what I can. My brother is planning on going up soon, and probably would have gone with me if I had let him know I was going sooner. I'll try to tag along with him when he goes.
If you're still reading, I'm impressed.
On to running. It has been something like two months since I have run seriously. Some sort of tightness that isn't exactly pain in my right hip always stops me. Some sort of residual effect of the plantar fasciitis in my right foot. In any case, Sarah asked me (or did I volunteer?) to run part of the last third of the marathon with her. I ended up running for more than an hour, and about six miles, albeit at about ten-minute pace. But I didn't stop, and I didn't hurt. In fact, my achilles bothered me much more than my hip or my foot. For various reasons, I haven't run since. But I gave it another whirl two nights ago. Forty minutes and about six miles at something like seven minute pace, with some tightness in my right hamstring, but nothing in my hip and little in my foot. And my foot hasn't felt any worse the last two days.

So maybe, just maybe, I'm back on the path of running.

I should be more excited.

Maybe I just need more sleep. What else is new?