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Sep 20, 2010

March of Dimes Night Moves 5K Results

September 20, 2010 By

After the BlogHer 5K, I knew I needed to sign up for another 5K to keep me motivated or I’d simply stop exercising like I did a year ago.

I signed up for the March of Dimes Night Moves 5K for a few reasons. First, it benefits March of Dimes, a charity I have always supported. Second, it was at night, and since I work third shift I tend to do better running on a nocturnal schedule.

A few weeks ago I suffered a back injury that made it difficult to run for a little while. My training slowed as a result and I continued to be stuck at 25 minutes of running max. Last week I did manage one 28 minute run, but only to avoid social interactions. So I knew going into this race that it was nearly certain I’d be walking for part of it. My motto was “Just don’t finish last.”

Friday night the area around Front Street was packed with people, and I immediately felt excited when I walked into the plaza and saw the crowd. After I picked up my shirt and goody bag, I changed into my shirt and began stretching for the race.

Pre-race posing

Shortly after that, Brooke found me. She left a comment here last week saying she would be running this 5K as well, and I told her I hoped she would come find me. Thankfully she did and I quickly made a new blog pal! We talked about how neither of us had run a full 5K, and decided we’d run together. I warned her I was slow and gave her full permission to leave me in the dust if I started walking. (To be fair, she gave me the same permission, but I thought it doubtful that she would be slower than me.)

We cheered on the 5-mile racers as they started before the 5K runners, and then took our place in the pack. The run started on a hill – going up, of course – but the crowd was buzzing with excitement and as we started running I watched as other people darted around us. I was determined to keep it slow and steady, though, and not overdo it at the beginning. Brooke was kind enough to slow down and stay with me.

Everything felt great for the first mile or so. I fell into a good breathing pattern, and even managed to pass a few people who were already walking.

The second mile was harder, though. I started to reach the threshold of my running limits, and felt that sharp ache in my side. I tried altering my breathing to force it to go away, and it would help for awhile, but then it came back again. I could now start to hear my breathing over my music. My right shoulder started to hurt, too. The urge to walk was becoming stronger, but Brooke was still running, so I was determined to stay with her.

The last mile – especially the last half mile – was pain, pure and simple. My side hurt, my shoulder hurt, my lungs burned, and I felt like I was going to throw up. When we made the final turn towards the finish line, I wondered if I could make it or not. On one hand, I could see the finish line way up ahead, so it seemed silly to stop running now when I was so close. On the other hand, panic was beginning to set in and I wondered if I’d black out before I made it to the finish line. I could easily hear my breathing over the music now, which meant people a quarter mile away could likely hear it as well. I sounded like I was drowning in my own mucous.

With the finish line only a few blocks away, I made my mind up to finish this damn race running. Of course, that then meant I had to convince my body to go along with what my mind decided. I’m sure I was grunting at this point as I had to mentally force my feet to keep moving, force my arms to keep swinging, and force my body to move forward. I know I was swearing at myself to keep going.

And then at 41 minutes and 4 seconds, I crossed the finish line. Running. I didn’t plan this accomplishment – I thought myself several weeks away from graduating from the couch to 5K program. Yet there it was: I ran an entire 5K.

How did I feel after the run? Mostly happy that it was over, honestly. I had to sit down and suck in some air for a little while to feel OK again, and my legs still felt wobbly for the rest of the night.

Me & Brooke, post-race. I’m impressed I’m standing.

I woke up the next day feeling like I’d been hit by a car. Everything hurt – especially my back and sides. I guess my next goal will be to work on relaxing while running so I’m not so tense.

Big thanks to Brooke for running with me – I strongly doubt I would’ve kept running without seeing her still running beside me.

Up next? Well, I want to keep working on my distance, as I doubt I’ll be able to repeat that 5K in my own neighborhood with no one running next to me and no race to participate in. So I’ll go back to C25K and keep slowly working up my time. I might start working some intervals back in as well, trying to increase my speed just a wee bit.

And I’ve already selected my next 5K – the Fright Night 5K in October. Nothing like running through a haunted graveyard and woods at night to keep you moving! 

Believe me, folks – if I can do this, you can, too. I used to be the lump on the couch, the woman circling the parking lot for 10 minutes to get the slightly closer parking spot. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

Filed Under: c25k, running, success Tagged With: ,


Sep 16, 2010

You Know Your Kid Likes Her New Preschool When…

September 16, 2010 By

…she is comfortable enough with her surroundings to settle in on one of the couches for a quick nap:

(photo – and sweatshirt/blanket, I’d guess – courtesy of her teacher)

Mira started her new preschool last week. Her teacher, the much loved teacher that Cordy had for special-needs preschool, has won over the second born as much as she did the first. Mira is absolutely thrilled to go to her afternoon preschool class and comes home each day with stories of all of the cool new things she did that we don’t let her do. (Like use scissors.)

But having a full day of school – with morning preschool at one location and afternoon preschool at another location – is affecting her nap schedule. She doesn’t have the ability to nap in the afternoons now, leaving her a grumpy mess by dinnertime. The situation above hopefully won’t be a trend, and she’ll either adjust or learn to sleep when being transported between schools.

Ask Mira if she’d rather nap or go to school, though, and she’ll quickly tell you she’d rather be at school. My little one insists on growing up as fast as possible despite my efforts to stop her.

Yet when I come home in the mornings, she still makes me “I missed you” cards (even though she slept while I was at work) and sometimes cries when it’s time for daddy to take her to school. It breaks my heart, but it also confirms for me that no matter how fast she tries to grow up, she still can’t avoid being my baby.

Filed Under: growing up, Mira, school


Sep 15, 2010

The 5K Looming Ahead of Me

September 15, 2010 By

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the 25 minute mark in running. Ever since BlogHer I’ve managed to run a full 25 minutes straight only a couple of times, and other times my legs have given out at the 22 or 23 minute instead. It’s been frustrating.

But Monday night, I set out to do a 25 minute run again, and a funny thing happened: I ran for 28 minutes – the next step on Couch to 5K. I’d like to say I did it due to great stamina and mental conditioning, but the truth is far more humble and a little funny.

As I looked at my iPhone and realized I had less than a minute left to run, I noticed two of my neighbors walking up ahead of me, going the same direction I was. At 20 seconds left, a quick calculation in my head made me realize that if I went into my cool down walk right at 25 minutes, I’d be stopping roughly at the same spot they were at. Which would mean I’d likely have to talk to them. We don’t get along all that well, and I really wasn’t in the mood to talk, anyway.

So I kept running. I ran right past them, my huffing and puffing a perfectly good excuse to not say hello or even acknowledge them as I focused on putting one foot in front of the other. I had to make sure I got far enough away before slowing to a walk – to keep it from looking obvious – so I gritted my teeth through the pain in my side and finished 28 minutes of running.

Social awkwardness: who knew it was such a great motivator?

This Friday I’ll be running in the March of Dimes Night Moves 5K. My hope was to run this one entirely, but I know I’m not quite ready for that yet, so I plan to run as much as possible and be proud just to finish. Well, that’s the plan, but I’m worried that I’ll come away disappointed if I don’t put in a certain level of performance, too.

As much as I want to run an entire 5K, I know that my body is still adjusting to the idea of being a runner. It will happen, though, and I’m hoping that the excitement of being at a 5K race again will push me to go a little further without walking.

Hey, I did 28 minutes straight, right? Maybe I just need to imagine the people in front of me are my neighbors who might want to have an awkward talk?

Filed Under: c25k, motivation, running Tagged With:


Sep 15, 2010

Ninety and Still Going

September 15, 2010 By

My grandmother (my mom’s mom) has had a long and full life of ups and downs. She was born to a farm family, and from the stories she was told, she was lucky she was a happy, easy-going baby. She spent her earliest days left on a bed, her mother too busy watching the other children and doing the chores that needed done on a farm to spend a lot of time with the tiny baby who stayed so quiet.

She grew up in the Great Depression, and remembers going to the only store in her tiny village, trading what little their farm produced in exchange for flour, sugar, and other necessities for a family to survive. They reused everything and made do with what little they had. She also met my grandfather in that small farming community.

During World War II, she joined the WAVES, the female support staff of the US Navy, while my grandfather served as a fighter pilot in the Canadian Royal Air Force, and then in the US Air Force once the US joined the war.

After the war, they married and returned to their small rural Ohio community where they raised livestock as well as three daughters. Even in the 1950’s, she still had no indoor plumbing, getting her water from a well outside the house. Cooking a chicken for dinner involved grabbing a chicken from the yard, cutting its head off, and then plucking it and preparing it for dinner.

Eventually they moved to a house in the nearby village – with indoor plumbing – and my grandmother became a secretary while my grandfather went into law enforcement and eventually become the sheriff of the county. They pushed their daughters to further their education, to become women who would make a difference in the world, with one earning an MBA and another her PhD. The third earned only an Associates degree, but she gave them a different and just as precious gift: a granddaughter.

Then, in 1976, just months before I was to be born, my grandmother lost her husband to a heart attack. She’s been alone ever since.

And yet she hasn’t been alone. For a short while my mother and I lived with her. And even after my mom was able to afford her own place, we were only two towns away from that tiny village and visited often. Her other daughters have remained close, too. In the past six years, she’s seen her two great-granddaughters born, and where she remained more distant in my upbringing, she’s increasingly warm towards my girls and enjoys watching their silliness.

She has traveled the world with her daughters and her friends, enjoyed her hobbies, and maintained a level of independence that baffles even me. Her life experience has given her a hard exterior – she’s a happy person, but she sees no point in being overly emotional. Depression and exuberance are equally useless to her. She believes in a strong work ethic and the simple morals of being honest and good to people.

This spring, my grandmother had a stroke, and suddenly the family was hit with the realization that this woman of steel was mortal. Amazingly, she bounced back from the stroke, fighting her way through rehab in order to get back to her own house again. She gave up the two-story house in that tiny village a few years ago, now living in the single-story house I grew up in so that my mother is closer to her. This is a good thing, as the stroke has left her weaker, more tired. But she still insists on living by herself, independently.

Today, my grandmother turned ninety years old. 9-0. At ninety years old, she still lives alone, drives her own car, and makes her own meals. She’s been a widow for 34 years now – longer than the time she was married to my grandfather. And while she sometimes repeats the same story over and over, forgetting that she’s told us before and we already understand the message in it, her mind is mostly clear and sharp despite ninety years worth of experiences crowding the space.

I don’t know how much longer she’ll be with us. My grandmother is slowing down, looking more frail every day. And while we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye (my teenage years were rough on both of us), I do respect the tremendous amount of knowledge and experience she has. I only hope I can take advantage of the time we have left to preserve more of her stories, her history, so my daughters can someday know more about the woman they call G-G.

Happy birthday, grandma. You made it to ninety, just like you said you would at your eightieth birthday party.

Filed Under: daily life, family time, love, memories


Sep 13, 2010

Sickness, Dollars and Sense

September 13, 2010 By

Saturday night was a long night. I trudged up to bed around midnight, my body and brain fighting to figure out if it was really nearly lunchtime or bedtime. (Third shift work schedules really screw with your biorhythms.) No sooner had my eyes closed and I was on the verge of sleep, I heard crying coming from Mira’s room. I went in and she was clutching her belly, crying “My bewwy huwts!!!”

Figuring it was probably just gas, I rubbed her belly and back, but she then asked if she could come into my room. Aaron had fallen asleep on the couch, so I agreed and brought her in. She lay in bed with me for about ten minutes before deciding she felt better and went back to her room. I again tried to focus on the inside of my eyelids and aimed for sleep.

An hour later, a repeat performance. This time I got her up and had her try using the potty. (Did I mention we’re potty training? No? Well, we’re POTTY TRAINING! A whole year and a half earlier than Cordy, thank goodness!) Again it didn’t seem to help much, and she eventually went back to bed.

Two hours later, the crying startled me awake. This time it sounded more urgent. I went into her room to see her sitting in a corner of her bed, pointing to the center and saying, “I made a mess! I sowwy! I soooo sowwy!” As my eyes adjusted to the light, and my nose adjusted to the assault on it, I realized she had vomited and was covered in it herself. Poor kid – she’s sick and all she can do is think I’m mad at her for making a mess. You’d think I was a clean freak.

I carefully lifted her out of bed, making sure to avoid her stuffed pink polar bear (which she made sure to tell me that she was careful to NOT get vomit on her prized stuffed animal!), stripped her down and put her in the bath. While she soaked, I cleaned up the mess, remade her bed, and got the washer started. Then I cleaned her up, got her dressed and put her to bed. Mira seemed to feel better after that, and I hoped it was over.

Sunday was a typical day for her. She ate just fine, even though we were cautious at first, she played, and she continued to say, “My bewwy doesn’t huwt now!” Sure, I was exhausted from barely sleeping all night, but she seemed better, so I couldn’t complain too much. It was probably just a virus passing through quickly.

Then Sunday night, right at bedtime, it started again: “My bewwy reawwy hurwts!” At this point, I thought Mira was faking it, having figured out yet another way to stall at bedtime and get some extra attention. Aaron – being better slept than me and therefore in a more generous mood – let her rest on the couch and she promptly fell asleep. Faker, I decided.

Aaron carried her back to bed, and I relaxed in my chair to enjoy a little guilty pleasure I call the MTV VMA’s before I had to go to work. But no sooner than Justin Bieber jumped up on stage, the wailing voice of a little girl could be heard from upstairs. (Yeah, Mira, I’m more of a Lady Gaga fan, too.) Aaron went to check on her and soon came downstairs with a pathetic little barnacle clinging to him. She was again crying that her belly hurt.

Aaron tried to put her on the couch again, but this time she didn’t fall asleep. She tossed and turned and wiggled, occasionally wailing in pain. At this point, I was starting to think it wasn’t an act. But it made no sense – how could she be so sick the night before, then perfect all day long, and now very sick again? That little voice of motherly worry started to build in my mind.

I barely saw Taylor Swift’s performance, because by that point the wailing had reached a fever pitch. Aaron tried to pull Mira into his lap on the floor, but she pushed him away and stumbled over to where I was sitting in the recliner. No longer the stoic doubter, I accepted her into my lap and let her curl herself into me, even knowing I only had five minutes or so until I had to leave for work. She continued to cry, and I asked her to show me where her belly hurt. She placed a chubby hand over her entire belly-button area.

I gently pushed on her belly, trying to remember what to feel for in a three year old, but my nursing skills were falling short. She wailed as I touched her abdomen, constantly shifting around in an attempt to find some relief from whatever was hurting her.

In those moments, as I tried to distract her by pointing out Lady Gaga was on stage accepting an award, real worry invaded my mind. What if this wasn’t just a bug? What if she was really sick?

We don’t have health insurance at the moment. My job is a contractor position and Aaron was laid off in May. My agency’s health plan was nearly half of my salary for a $4000 deductible, and COBRA cost even more. I make too much to be covered on any state insurance plan for children, and the private market? Yeah, well, let’s just say they don’t want to cover our family. I don’t even have paid sick time. If I need to miss a day, I don’t get paid for it. We are the ones “stuck in the middle” making too much to qualify for any help and too little to not worry about the costs.

So in that moment, as I became my own personal WebMD and pondered if Mira had a blockage or if her appendix might burst at any moment, I was also forced to calculate in my head if it was worth taking her to the hospital if she didn’t get better. At what point would the risks outweigh the hefty financial hit we’d face? Just the ER charge alone would be crippling, without even considering costs of any tests or x-rays.

At that point, Mira’s wails took on a new pitch, drowning out the TV entirely, and as I clutched her tight, with Aaron kneeling next to the chair and rubbing her back, I felt the tears in my eyes. Her health was coming down to money. I felt like I was being forced to decide how sick she had to be before we could risk going broke. And I wanted to scream right along with her, wail at how idiotic and unfair our health insurance system is, and sob that any parent should be forced to think like this, to feel this helpless in the shadow of illness and dollar bills balancing on an enormous scale.

And right then Mira vomited all over me. Twice. The silence was shocking to us all.

That sweet little girl then took one look at me, completely covered in more vomit than I thought possible to come out of such a small person, and said, “Mommy, I so sowwy I got you messy. You still wuv me?”

For the moment all of my fears and worries were gone as I stroked her hair and assured her that of course I still loved her and everything was OK. She still didn’t feel well, but the crying had stopped as she was suddenly more concerned about me. (And seriously, I’m really not obsessed with being neat. Sure, I don’t like being covered in vomit, but I doubt anyone does.)

Mira still isn’t well, but I’m less worried about appendicitis now and back to my original theory that it’s a virus. And so we continue to wait it out, hoping she gets better soon and we can avoid a costly trip to the doctor or the ER. I’m still mad at the system, though. Angry that we can’t have affordable health insurance because I chose to take a job I love over something I wouldn’t enjoy as much, because Aaron is unemployed, because we have a host of pre-existing conditions that would deny us private insurance.

We’re average Americans. We have a house, we make a middle-class income, we pay our taxes, and we’re trying to get ahead to provide for our daughters. But we’re also forced to worry that the next stomachache that comes along might be more serious. That stomachache could bankrupt us, could take away that house we call home, and that chance at getting ahead we so desperately want and work hard towards. I know we’re not the only ones in this situation, either.

I’m not an economist (nor do I play one on TV), and I didn’t start this post with the intention of going all ranty, but as a mother I can’t understand why anyone would think that basic universal health care is wrong. At this point I’d even be willing to settle for universal children’s health care. No mother wants a price to be placed on her child’s health – so why would you then choose to put a price on the health of someone else’s child?

Maybe the world would be a better place if mothers were running it.

Filed Under: being a mom, big issues, Mira, money Tagged With: