"Life is not a spectator sport." Jackie Robinson

     I ran the 2013 Austin Livestrong half marathon on 2-17-13.  It was a well-organized, fun, but hilly event with 20,000 marathon and half-marathon participants.  It started and finished at the Texas State Capitol Building.  It was a gorgeous morning, sunny and cool at the 7 AM start.  Many thanks to my Austin family, including grandkids, who all got up at 4 AM to get me to the start on time and to cheer me on.  Alex gave high fives to all the passing runners.


     HIGHLIGHTS:
          A spectator in a gorilla suit handing out bananas

          A group of college-age spectators all costumed as hot dogs

          A juggling runner (running juggler?) who was much faster than me

          At mile 9, the Livestrong cheering section with at least 100 yellow-shirted college aged kids waving signs, filling both sides of the road, vociferously cheering on the runners. It is wonderful to have crowds of people cheering for you.  I was wearing my Colorado Runner shirt, and got lots of "Go Colorado", so knew they were cheering for me. It was a big boost at a much-needed moment.

          It always makes me smile when I pass runners wearing "Fueled by Beef" t-shirts  (why do I smile?  the irony of a vegan passing meat-eaters)



     FAVORITE SIGNS ALONG THE COURSE:

          Sydney's and Alex's  "Go Grandma" signs

          "Worst parade ever"

          "Free hugs"

          "Your feet hurt because you are kicking so much butt."

          "FU Cancer"

     TIMES
          I finished in 2 hours 58 minutes, not as fast as I had hoped prior to getting injured 2 weeks ago, but I am very happy with it.  I came in 49th out of 82 women from 60-64 years of age.  I came in 4663 out of 5351 women of all ages.  I came in 8416 out of 9326 half marathoners of all ages and both sexes.  However you look at it, I was not last, and beat everyone who stayed home on the couch.

     I am really sore afterwards and am going to take time off from running to heal.  It was fun and I have a real sense of accomplishment.  The bling (finisher's medal) is beautiful.  I am definitely considering doing it again next year.  Anyone want to join me?

     Pics to come later.

"Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better." ---Samuel Beckett

     I'm still injured and poorly prepared, but I paid my entry fee so will give the "Livestrong Half Marathon" a go, even if I end up walking it all.  The worst that can happen is that I will time out and they will escort me off of the course.  At least I will have tried.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.  Next time I will do better, after taking some serious time off to heal.









     Here is a well written entry from Kristen Armstrong's "Mile Markers" blog.  Perspective is everything.

luxury

Pain can be a luxury, not a punishment.

By

Kristin Armstrong;

Image by

Gregg Segal

Published

February 14, 2013

My friend’s son’s funeral was last week, and several of his friends got up and spoke at the service. One of them said something I will never forget:

Pain is a luxury.

I have thought a lot of about pain before - that it’s horrible, or gut wrenching, or necessary for the harvest of growth, maturity, or endurance. I even love the quote, “Pain is weakness leaving your body.” I have thought about pain as something to get through, break through, and get over with. I have never in 41 years truly considered it a luxury. Until last week.

The young man stood up at the podium on the altar, with his collegiate blue sport coat, tie, and curly dark hair that swooped forward into his eyes. He leaned on a crutch, from a recent motorcycle accident, and steadied himself at the microphone. He said that sentence, pain is a luxury, and he paused. I’m not sure if the pause was for emphasis, or an attempt to corral his emotions so he could proceed. Either way, it leveled me. Something about a 21-year-old boy, trying to grapple with something so big and so hard, and in the same moment being able to fast forward and picture my own son, teetering on the precipice of manhood. All those emotions swirled and I looked off to the side instead of right at him as he spoke, knowing that if I looked for one more second I would break down. Instead I blinked and bit my lip.

Pain is a luxury. It’s a luxury, this young man described, to suffer the pain of heartbreak. Because, he said, it’s a luxury to love so deeply that you are able to hurt that bad. I wish I had known about this luxury concept years ago. Back in my sophomore year of high school when my boyfriend and I broke up (I did the breaking up and then the pining and wanting him back – after he started dating the prettiest senior in my entire school. Oh, the pain). Or when I said goodbye to my college boyfriend when life took us in different directions. Or at the end of my marriage when my heart was in splinters and shrapnel, and I bent in the dust to collect whatever I could salvage from the wreckage of our home. In those moments my pain felt more like a penalty than a luxury. But when that 21-year-old boy spoke, something yawned open in my heart and mind and I started to understand. Someone who has never loved or been loved, or wanted children and never had them, would likely suffer anything for the experience. That pain is indeed a luxury.

Childbirth, heartbreak, loss, letting go, empty nest, the physical pain of training or racing – all this pain is luxurious when you succumb to this mindset. Like pushing our bodies so hard that they later ache from the effort… people on the sidelines (ill, injured or unable), would probably love that luxury, at least once. That one sentence changed my thinking this week, infused my sense of gratitude, informed my beginning of Lent, gave my training fresh legs and renewed vigor, and cranked open my creaking, skittish heart to the new love in my life.

We cannot live without the luxury of pain. We cannot avoid it or live in the shadow created by fearing it. We cannot minimize our existence by numbing it, or marginalize our experience by living around it.

We must learn to welcome it, even embrace it, as a sure sign of a life well loved.

Happy Valentines Day.

http://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/luxury

Beautiful.

Teach every child about food.

Here is Jamie Oliver's TED award talk about teaching every child about food.  It is well done and everyone should watch.

 

(email subscribers, please go to my blog to watch)

Two hearts beat as one.

     Here is a UC Davis study showing that two hearts do beat as one, if the two hearts belong to lovers.  This is appropriate news for Valentine's Day, although it may not be news to lovers. (http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10494)
(http://sportsgeezer.com/2013/two-hearts-in-love-really-do-beat-together/)

Lovers' hearts beat in sync, UC Davis study says

February 8, 2013

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UC Davis Psychologist Jonathan Helm and a student set up machinery to study heart rates and respiration in romantic couples. (Emilio Ferrer/UC Davis photo)

When modern-day crooner Trey Songz sings, “Cause girl, my heart beats for you,” in his romantic ballad, “Flatline,” his lyrics could be telling a tale that’s as much physiological as it is emotional, according to a University of California, Davis, study that found lovers’ hearts indeed beat for each other, or at least at the same rate.

Emilio Ferrer, a UC Davis psychology professor who has conducted a series of studies on couples in romantic relationships, found that couples connected to monitors measuring heart rates and respiration get their heart rate in sync, and they breathe in and out at the same intervals.

To collect the data, the researchers conducted a series of exercises, sitting 32 heterosexual couples a few feet away from each other in a quiet, calm room. The couples did not speak or touch.

“We’ve seen a lot of research that one person in a relationship can experience what the other person is experiencing emotionally, but this study shows they also share experiences at a physiological level,” Ferrer said.

The couples, in one of the exercises, were asked to sit across from each other and mimic each other, but still not speak, and researchers collected very similar results.

The researchers also mixed up the data from the couples. When the two individuals were not from the same couple, their hearts did not show synchrony, nor did their breathing closely match.

Additionally, both partners showed similar patterns of heart rate and respiration, but women tended to adjust theirs to their partners more. This was true not only for physiological but for day-to-day emotional experiences as well.

"In other words, we found that women adjust in relationship to their partners,” said Jonathan Helm, a UC Davis psychology doctoral student and primary author of the study. “Her heart rate is linked to her partner’s. I think it means women have a strong link to their partners — perhaps more empathy.”

The research was published in two recent papers by the American Psychological Association, available at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21910541 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23107993.

Co-author: David Sbarra, University of Arizona Department of Psychology.

The National Science Foundation supported the research.

About UC Davis

For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 33,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget of nearly $750 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Media contact(s):

• Karen Nikos, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-6101, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu

Drug-resistant bacteria for dinner

Here is a great article I read today in the greatist.com blog  ( http://greatist.com/). Currently the livestock industry administers almost four fifths of all antibiotics used in the United States.

Your Steak Is Getting More Antibiotics Than You Are

by Laura Newcomer , Greatist.com

We might have bigger problems than fighting that cough. A new report reveals that the same antibiotics prescribed to cure sick people are also being fed to healthy animals destined for human consumption. But pumping livestock full of antibiotics isn’t doing any of us any favors. The practice is contributing to the development of “superbugs,” or bacteria that are immune to treatment, that are making infections harder and more expensive to treat.

What’s the Deal?

The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public policy, has created an infographiccomparing human use of antibiotics to treat illness with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) latest data on antibiotics sold or distributed for use in animals. The graphic reveals that human antibiotic use has leveled off at below eight billion pounds a year. Meanwhile, meat and poultry farms have been using up record numbers of the stuff each year — reaching a new high of almost 29.9 billion pounds in 2011.

In fact, the use of antibiotics in livestock may be expanding at a greater rate than the meat industry itself. While the American Meat Institute reported a 0.2 percent increase in meat and poultry production in 2011 compared to 2010, antibiotic consumption jumped 2 percent over the same time period — suggesting meat production might be relying more heavily on antibiotics. All told, the livestock industry now uses nearly four-fifths of the antibiotics administered in the U.S.

Why It Matters

Antibiotics are typically administered to livestock in attempts to make them grow faster and to compensate for the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions typical of factory farms. But here’s the rub: When animals are crammed together and regularly dosed with antibiotics, the bacteria living on and in the animals can gradually begin to develop resistance to the drugs. These resistant strains can easily pass to humans when we consume animal products.

To look more closely at the issue of drug resistance, Pew analyzed the FDA’s latest results from itsNational Antimocrobial Resistance Monitoring System. The sobering stats, as reported by Mother Jones,include the fact that nearly three-quarters of the salmonella found on retail chicken breasts were resistant to at least one antibiotic (about 12 percent of retail chicken breast and ground turkey samples were contaminated with salmonella). Of the salmonella bacteria discovered on ground turkey, about 78 percent were resistant to at least one antibiotic and — perhaps most strikingly — half the bacteria were resistant to three or more. These figures represent an increase in bacterial resistance compared to 2010.

Last year, the FDA proposed a set of voluntary guidelines encouraging the meat industry to cut back on antibiotics. But Pew’s research reveals the industry has been slow to take heed. It’s clear that more stringent requirements are necessary, lest “drug-resistant bacteria” become a new dinner staple.

PITB

     I am suffering with probable piriformis syndrome....I have a pain in the butt.  The piriformis muscle, when inflamed, compresses the sciatic nerve causing glute soreness, and pain down the hamstring in my leg.  I stopped running a week ago and am stretching like crazy.  I am still icing it and taking nsaids to decrease inflammation.  There is no improvement so far, but I don't want to start running again until the pain is gone.  I really don't want this to become a chronic problem.
     This is bad timing.  I had been increasing my mileage and was supposed to run a race this week.  I don't think that is going to happen.