I thought I was feeling pain on Saturday. That was our ten mile run. All I could think was, Ohhhhhh, my knees.....my ankles....my lower stomach muscles...ouch. I tried to give myself a break for being such a wuss - that's almost half a marathon!! Or, at least, that's what I'm telling myself to make it seem more manageable. I only ran once all week last week because I was trying to give my plantar fasciitis-ridden foot some time off so it didn't rip in two and leave me crippled and in need of surgery. Turns out, the reason you have to run everyday during the week is to keep your body used to getting pounded so that when you do the long runs, to keep your body used to getting pounded even more, you don't get injured. That now makes sense. I wouldn't have said I was injured, per se, but walking was terribly difficult all day Saturday. I rubbed some Muscle Massage Gel on my knees and felt pretty much okay...until today.
I suppose part of the problem might be that I'm bartending nowadays. It certainly doesn't leave me with a lot of time to sit with my feet up (not that I'm complaining, I would die if I had to sit behind a desk all day, but there is something to be said for being on your feet less than 10 hours at a time), and my "knee problems" have always been exacerbated by working in restaurants (was it worth an eternity of unremarkable knee discomfort to have those 12 months of life as a middle school cheerleader, starting me, I'm sure, on the way to early arthritis? Really? Was it? Yeah, maybe. I mean, that is how I got friends for the first time. And got invited to parties. And had a boy ask me out that my best friend didn't order semi-against his will. Ah, puberty. Anyhoo...), so my current employment is not exactly helping me heal. Work is just making me hover at a stabilized level of pain, though. Running, a necessary daily task, seems to activate the crushing, disabling left knee horror. I don't quite know what to do about this, other than spend the latter 3/4 of my workouts running like Forrest Gump before his braces came off, swinging my leg around in a circular motion from the hip without bending my knee - very attractive, I assure you. I have an email out to my coach detailing my ailments. I'm hoping she's responded with some reassuring, just-push-through-and-it-will-feel-better sort of missive. I suspect I may be too optimistic.
But, then again, what do I really need my knees for in the long run? Especially since they have such glorious prosthetics now. And ESPECIALLY since I'm not doing this for me or the health of my joints. This morning I had to go run up and down the parking garage near my house 6 times (in case you're thinking that sounds fairly easy, join the club. And, oh, by the way, you would be mistaken). After the first (yes, FIRST) one I thought I was going to quit after number two. But I managed to give myself a stern talking-to in my head that convinced me to go for number three. Okay, halfway...DYING (and by the way, if you're reading this and didn't live in Houston today, you should know that it was about 400% humidity, which canceled out the "mild" 80 degrees), and ready to call it quits. Right at that moment, a guy going into his work called out to me loud enough to get me to pull out my headphones. Last time that happened it was followed with a sleazy comment and a wink, so I was definitely on my guard.
Him: "Which one are you running?"
Me: "Full (ohhhhh, he must be a running enthusiast! That's okay, then)."
Him: "You're running for my son."
Wow. I had forgotten I was wearing my Team in Training shirt. Needless to say, I didn't think about my knee again for quite awhile. So, yes, I am running for man-in-parking-garage's son. And for man-in-parking-garage. And for my father-in-law who is having his esophagus taken out in surgery tomorrow because he is fighting esophageal cancer. And for Andy Allen. And Jesus Torres. And Amy Oliver, who I never met but whose story I have heard and am moved by through my friend Cherrie. And James' sister, Elizabeth Loyd. And my grandpa. And all the other millions of people out there who are fighting blood cancers, and all the other cancers, and their families, and their doctors, and the kids in high school right now doing well in biology and thinking, "I want to be pre-med." I am honored to be running for them.
To find out more about Team in Training or to donate to the cause, go to:
http://pages.teamintraining.org/txg/houston10/aclack
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Crazy generosity
I don't think I've ever used the word "humbled" this many times in a two day period, but it's the only word I can think of that describes how I feel. Maybe I should consult dictionary.com.
Synonyms:
1. unpretending, unpretentious. 2. submissive, meek. 3. unassuming, plain, common, poor. 4. polite. 6. mortify, shame, abash. 7. subdue, crush, break. Humble, degrade, humiliate suggest lowering or causing to seem lower. To humble is to bring down the pride of another or to reduce him or her to a state of abasement: to humble an arrogant enemy. To degrade is to demote in rank or standing, or to reduce to a low level in dignity: to degrade an officer; to degrade oneself by lying. To humiliate is to make others feel or appear inadequate or unworthy, esp. in some public setting: to humiliate a sensitive person.
Ok, I feel common? No, let's stick with humbled. To be honest, before yesterday I was much more worried about raising the minimum amount required to participate with Team in Training than I was about actually running the marathon. I mean, that's hard, but you just do what they tell you and sooner or later you've done it. Raising $2400, on the other hand....that number can seem quite overwhelming. Again, that was before yesterday, and before I saw my friends and family and people I barely know come together and donate almost $600 in three days! I met my halfway point deadline, but, more importantly, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society now has $600 more to work with than they did on Monday morning to research new drugs and treatments that make blood cancers more and more manageable. I could spend pages talking about all the amazing things LLS is doing with the money you guys have given, but you can read it straight from them at www.teamintraining.org and/or www.lls.org.
Of course, I now have 2 1/2 months to raise another $1180 (MINIMUM - I'm upping my goal to $3500, which leaves me with another $2280 to go), but I want people to feel like they are getting something and being appreciated for their donation efforts, so we are having tons of events to raise money and show our donors a good time. Coming up October 20, we are having a California Pizza Kitchen FUNdraiser....here's how it works. Comment on the blog to let me know you are participating and I will email you a flier with my name on it. You print it, take it to any one of the three Houston CPK's (www.cpk.com) anytime on October 20, and they donate 20% of whatever you and your party eat or drink to LLS. How cool is that?!??! A million thanks to CPK and Arturo Betancourt, the GM at the River Oaks store, for setting this up. Later that week, Friday October 23, from 4-7pm, Sambuca downtown (www.sambucarestaurant.com) is generously letting us host a happy hour there. You come, pay $10 to get in (which all goes to LLS), get a free drink, some free food, and then half price drinks and apps all the way to 7pm! Lastly, Sunday November 8, we are having an Arbonne party (www.autumnclack.myarbonne.com), where 35% of all products sold at retail get donated directly to LLS!! You get to do your Christmas shopping without hitting the Galleria AND you get to do a good thing!! Pre-orders count as well if you can't make it to Kelsey's apartment where we are hosting it. Oh, and December 17 I will be gift wrapping for donations at the Barnes and Noble on Holcombe - come laugh and point!!!
So mark your calendars, everyone! I hope to get to see you at some of these events...I promise they will be fun!!
Oh, and for those of you who have been losing sleep over the status of my "foot injury," it seems to be magically healing itself. Still hurts a little, but I just wrap the crud out of it whenever I'm working, and apparently the fascia just grows itself back to the heel bone like it's supposed to - hurrah!!
Leave a comment so I know I'm not just talking to myself! :) Thanks!!
Synonyms:
1. unpretending, unpretentious. 2. submissive, meek. 3. unassuming, plain, common, poor. 4. polite. 6. mortify, shame, abash. 7. subdue, crush, break. Humble, degrade, humiliate suggest lowering or causing to seem lower. To humble is to bring down the pride of another or to reduce him or her to a state of abasement: to humble an arrogant enemy. To degrade is to demote in rank or standing, or to reduce to a low level in dignity: to degrade an officer; to degrade oneself by lying. To humiliate is to make others feel or appear inadequate or unworthy, esp. in some public setting: to humiliate a sensitive person.
Ok, I feel common? No, let's stick with humbled. To be honest, before yesterday I was much more worried about raising the minimum amount required to participate with Team in Training than I was about actually running the marathon. I mean, that's hard, but you just do what they tell you and sooner or later you've done it. Raising $2400, on the other hand....that number can seem quite overwhelming. Again, that was before yesterday, and before I saw my friends and family and people I barely know come together and donate almost $600 in three days! I met my halfway point deadline, but, more importantly, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society now has $600 more to work with than they did on Monday morning to research new drugs and treatments that make blood cancers more and more manageable. I could spend pages talking about all the amazing things LLS is doing with the money you guys have given, but you can read it straight from them at www.teamintraining.org and/or www.lls.org.
Of course, I now have 2 1/2 months to raise another $1180 (MINIMUM - I'm upping my goal to $3500, which leaves me with another $2280 to go), but I want people to feel like they are getting something and being appreciated for their donation efforts, so we are having tons of events to raise money and show our donors a good time. Coming up October 20, we are having a California Pizza Kitchen FUNdraiser....here's how it works. Comment on the blog to let me know you are participating and I will email you a flier with my name on it. You print it, take it to any one of the three Houston CPK's (www.cpk.com) anytime on October 20, and they donate 20% of whatever you and your party eat or drink to LLS. How cool is that?!??! A million thanks to CPK and Arturo Betancourt, the GM at the River Oaks store, for setting this up. Later that week, Friday October 23, from 4-7pm, Sambuca downtown (www.sambucarestaurant.com) is generously letting us host a happy hour there. You come, pay $10 to get in (which all goes to LLS), get a free drink, some free food, and then half price drinks and apps all the way to 7pm! Lastly, Sunday November 8, we are having an Arbonne party (www.autumnclack.myarbonne.com), where 35% of all products sold at retail get donated directly to LLS!! You get to do your Christmas shopping without hitting the Galleria AND you get to do a good thing!! Pre-orders count as well if you can't make it to Kelsey's apartment where we are hosting it. Oh, and December 17 I will be gift wrapping for donations at the Barnes and Noble on Holcombe - come laugh and point!!!
So mark your calendars, everyone! I hope to get to see you at some of these events...I promise they will be fun!!
Oh, and for those of you who have been losing sleep over the status of my "foot injury," it seems to be magically healing itself. Still hurts a little, but I just wrap the crud out of it whenever I'm working, and apparently the fascia just grows itself back to the heel bone like it's supposed to - hurrah!!
Leave a comment so I know I'm not just talking to myself! :) Thanks!!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Plantar Huh??
So, here I am two months into my training and fundraising for the Team in Training Houston Marathon, and I'm finally starting a blog. I blog to myself as I run, narrating my agony (or victory, if it's a good day) in my head, and it's making me start to feel a little crazy. And it's bad for my health. I could get hit by a car. Or a man with a bat. Two weekends ago we had our 8 mile run, and when I got back to the park, I realized I had dropped my keys somewhere when I pulled out my refueling chews from my fancy new running pouch (yes, I now resemble a marsupial when I run. Instead of joeys, I carry Blueberry Pomegranate refueling snack Gu, whose texture is very accurately described by the name, much like Nickelodeon's Gak, for those of you who were young in the early 90s, and mp3 players). When my wonderful mentor Kelsey drove me back over the route, not only could I not remember where I pulled out my pouch, which side of the street I was on, sidewalk or not, I didn't even recognize most of the houses we drove past. That lack of awareness surely cannot be safe, and I blame my inner-monologue induced trance for it. Hence, the blog. Now I can tell everyone all about my fun with running after I finish and save my running time for looking out for cars and attackers.
I would like to start out by saying...I love running. Yes, I said it out loud. I know I said I hated running, I know I said I could never do it, try as I might, I KNOW I said that exercise doesn't agree with my body many, many, many times, but I have to admit, I was wrong. Yeah, sometimes it hurts, sometimes I don't feel like it, yeah, I'm REALLY slow (me and the girl WALKING the marathon are usually neck and neck), but generally, I feel pretty good during and after. It's almost like yoga. It gives me time just for me. And my pants fit better. Like, a lot better. Like, oh, that's where my body's been hiding all those years!! That's what muscles look like!!! And, since I'm constantly starving, I just eat pizza all day every day and it doesn't seem to matter!! I'll take a little cleavage chafing and plantar fasciitis anyday for that.
What's plantar fasciitis? you may be asking. Until yesterday, it was one of those runner phrases that everyone tossed around and I pretended to understand. Now it's starting to look like I shouldn't have missed the injury prevention clinic last week. After working a double waiting tables on Thursday, I started to feel like a metal rod was being shoved up through my heel. I chalked it up to being on my feet for 10 hours and continued on my merry way. Since it was feeling not so much better by Saturday night, I started asking my runner friends and they all said it sounded like, you guessed it, plantar fasciitis. So I googled said diagnosis (thank god google is smart enough to figure out what you're asking, since I had no clue how to spell that), and it turns out it's just a little case of the muscles in the arch of your feet (the fascia, go figure) being slowly ripped away from the heel bone. Oh, okay, no biggie. Most common and useful treatment is to stretch and stay off your feet. Yeah, I'm a waitress and training for a marathon - that's gonna happen.
But never fear, my friends. It doesn't hurt very badly, so that probably means it's just inflamed, not torn. And I put ice on it. That fixes everything, right? I definitely don't want to end up unable to run, but I'm reminded of why I'm doing this, why we're all doing this. There are people every single day who get up and deal with life with cancer. And you can bet it sucks a lot more than a little foot pain. I'm sure people in chemo would love to have the chance to have foot pain be their only problem. There are pills that cancer patients have to take that probably hurt worse to swallow than my foot hurts. There are people who have lost loved ones that face a pain everyday that would shame my foot "ouchie." Just last month, we lost an Honored Teammate, Jesus Torres, an active 24 year old that had gone into remission twice since his diagnosis three years ago. He had just had his birthday, was so excited to work with us at Team in Training to help eradicate blood cancers, and was full of optimism and life. I know his family wishes they could think about foot pain instead of the hole that is now in their life. And then there's Andy, a 5-year-old crazy redhead who has been in chemo since he was 2! He's in remission now, and loves to come give us a dose of energy and happiness after we run, but he has already dealt with more pain in his little life than I have ever known. So, does my foot hurt? Yes. Is it going to stop me from raising as much money as I can to fight cancer and help make the treatments less and less painful and more and more effective until finally cancer is no more? Hell, no!!
If you want to join me, post a comment to give me a little encouragement to keep going! Follow me (or subscribe to my blog, whatever it's called, I'm new at all this) for updates and let me know you're sending out positive thoughts! Or click on the link below to go to my page and donate...every teeny little bit helps, and even if you can just afford $1, that is one dollar closer to knocking this thing out and if everyone gave something, it would be huge!!
http://pages.teamintraining.org/txg/houston10/aclack
Thank you all so far who have donated and/or sent words of encouragement...it's what keeps me going when I really don't think I can take one more step. This is for you. It's for all of us.
Autumn
I would like to start out by saying...I love running. Yes, I said it out loud. I know I said I hated running, I know I said I could never do it, try as I might, I KNOW I said that exercise doesn't agree with my body many, many, many times, but I have to admit, I was wrong. Yeah, sometimes it hurts, sometimes I don't feel like it, yeah, I'm REALLY slow (me and the girl WALKING the marathon are usually neck and neck), but generally, I feel pretty good during and after. It's almost like yoga. It gives me time just for me. And my pants fit better. Like, a lot better. Like, oh, that's where my body's been hiding all those years!! That's what muscles look like!!! And, since I'm constantly starving, I just eat pizza all day every day and it doesn't seem to matter!! I'll take a little cleavage chafing and plantar fasciitis anyday for that.
What's plantar fasciitis? you may be asking. Until yesterday, it was one of those runner phrases that everyone tossed around and I pretended to understand. Now it's starting to look like I shouldn't have missed the injury prevention clinic last week. After working a double waiting tables on Thursday, I started to feel like a metal rod was being shoved up through my heel. I chalked it up to being on my feet for 10 hours and continued on my merry way. Since it was feeling not so much better by Saturday night, I started asking my runner friends and they all said it sounded like, you guessed it, plantar fasciitis. So I googled said diagnosis (thank god google is smart enough to figure out what you're asking, since I had no clue how to spell that), and it turns out it's just a little case of the muscles in the arch of your feet (the fascia, go figure) being slowly ripped away from the heel bone. Oh, okay, no biggie. Most common and useful treatment is to stretch and stay off your feet. Yeah, I'm a waitress and training for a marathon - that's gonna happen.
But never fear, my friends. It doesn't hurt very badly, so that probably means it's just inflamed, not torn. And I put ice on it. That fixes everything, right? I definitely don't want to end up unable to run, but I'm reminded of why I'm doing this, why we're all doing this. There are people every single day who get up and deal with life with cancer. And you can bet it sucks a lot more than a little foot pain. I'm sure people in chemo would love to have the chance to have foot pain be their only problem. There are pills that cancer patients have to take that probably hurt worse to swallow than my foot hurts. There are people who have lost loved ones that face a pain everyday that would shame my foot "ouchie." Just last month, we lost an Honored Teammate, Jesus Torres, an active 24 year old that had gone into remission twice since his diagnosis three years ago. He had just had his birthday, was so excited to work with us at Team in Training to help eradicate blood cancers, and was full of optimism and life. I know his family wishes they could think about foot pain instead of the hole that is now in their life. And then there's Andy, a 5-year-old crazy redhead who has been in chemo since he was 2! He's in remission now, and loves to come give us a dose of energy and happiness after we run, but he has already dealt with more pain in his little life than I have ever known. So, does my foot hurt? Yes. Is it going to stop me from raising as much money as I can to fight cancer and help make the treatments less and less painful and more and more effective until finally cancer is no more? Hell, no!!
If you want to join me, post a comment to give me a little encouragement to keep going! Follow me (or subscribe to my blog, whatever it's called, I'm new at all this) for updates and let me know you're sending out positive thoughts! Or click on the link below to go to my page and donate...every teeny little bit helps, and even if you can just afford $1, that is one dollar closer to knocking this thing out and if everyone gave something, it would be huge!!
http://pages.teamintraining.org/txg/houston10/aclack
Thank you all so far who have donated and/or sent words of encouragement...it's what keeps me going when I really don't think I can take one more step. This is for you. It's for all of us.
Autumn
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