Day Two NaRunMoMo, What Doesn't Kill Me...

The time change is killing me.

Usually it wouldn't be a problem in the fall since you get an extra hour of sleep. But I keep waking up at 4 something a.m. and can't get to sleep until late.

Today was one of those days where you enter into it with good intentions and everything goes on a tangent. I did get a few things done that needed to be finished, and it's really not all that bad, but it totally screwed me up being half brain dead anyway. What happened?

1. Picking up my new laptop from the Geeks. I didn't go to the original Geek Squad. I have never used the Geeks before, I can usually manage on my own. But this time I'm busy, distracted, irritable, impatient, and I didn't feel like messing with it. Windows 10 will take some getting used to, as well as the new keyboard.

Plus they had some private information, my temporary password for some of the stuff on the computer, and email and phone number around the purchase of my laptop, and they left it sitting there on the counter. I happened to look back as I was walking out of the store, and my info was just sitting there on the counter next to the register, while they were ringing up more customers. I walked back up to the counter and looked at the clerk straight in the eye and said, "If you're not going to shred this, then at least put it somewhere so it's not in plain view." Oh I was pissed. I thought about raising even more hell, but I'll save my energy.

2. Getting caught up in social media distractions. Some of this was productive but it was very time consuming.

3. Issues with Blogger. I can't get photos to upload. And I'm an idiot because I just got a new computer today and I am way behind the learning curve here, between Windows 10 and my brain fog. So again, my apologies, but until I figure out what's wrong there will be text-only posts here.

4. Finishing up some continuing ed classes and stuff I had to do for certifications, etc. Took way too long.

5. Not getting out to run until 4 pm, when I'd already been up for 12 hours and working for 11.

So I went for a mile run, which took me 12 minutes and 27 seconds, and I was looking at my watch the whole time, it was the longest mile I have ever run in my life. I didn't think I could get through it without walking. Somehow I did, but I decided it was enough. I'll do better tomorrow. I followed it up by pushing Isabelle 2 miles in the cart. And then it was dark outside.

I already warned Dennis who is on his way home, that I had a day and I need to be chill. I feel sort of like I used to after those 12 hour shifts at the hospital, where I simply could not function or interact with another human being until I re-established the safe zone, the energy field around me, because I felt so stripped bare.

I haven't had a day like this in nearly 2 years, so that's good. But I don't want to have any more of them.

So now I need food. But at least I got through Day Two of the double challenge, running and blogposting. Hopefully tomorrow I'll feel better and can have a more balanced day.

Oh by the way one of our neighbors saw me pushing The Bella in the cart and told me when he dies, he wants to come back as my dog. That was the highlight of my day.

Day One of NaRunMoMo

My sense of smell returned this morning. I forgot that that's one of the joys of fall, smelling the leaves and earthy stuff. Fortunately we still have enough green foliage around that it should last a while longer.

Woke up at 4:24 am, couldn't figure out why except I heard a CLUNK in the bedroom. It was Isabelle, walking around in the dark, bumping into walls and knocking things over. Dennis woke up and carried her downstairs, thinking she had to go outside. Having a geriatric dog means you never know what kind of surprise might squish between your toes if you get up in the dark...

I went to bed at 10 last night, late for me, but then I realized we changed the clocks and it was really 5:24, close to my usual wake up time. Dennis went back to bed and I got up and made coffee, and came out to the cave. Isabelle seemed content to lie in the cold grass sniffing the air in the middle of the backyard.

For some reason my 4 year old coal-fired laptop with the 8 track drive in it has been having issues and I am about ready to spring for a new one. I saw a cool one with dual floppy disk drives, what do you think? I am having issues with uploading photos so I might have to add the pictures later. It could be an issue with Blogger today, which would really be annoying since it is officially NaBloPoMo, but my laptop really has been acting up. So I apologize if you get a bland text-only blogpost today. Should be fixed within 24 hours.

The Fort Collins Running Club was having its Tortoise & Hare 5K this morning and I try to attend as many as I can, I've been a member of the club for a gazillion years. But lately they've been getting 150 people at these things and I am not one for crowds. We used to have 10, maybe 20 people show up. It's great that the club membership has grown and so many more people are involved. I prefer it that way, it's just that I don't like running with so many people.

I know, most road races have more like thousands. If I wanted to be around crowds I would sign up for them.

This morning's event was at Warren Park which happens to be exactly a mile from my house. And it isn't cold, it was 40 degrees when I woke up and didn't dip much below that even at sunrise. I haven't run since October 21, the day I woke up with this crud.

I showed up and there weren't a lot of people, but then a few minutes later it was packed. The runners start according to their handicap time, so I wasn't going until 21 minutes after the hour. I had time to socialize. I lined up to start with my friend Joanne, we've never been in the same wave before but we ran together most of the way and finished pretty close in time.

I actually ran faster than I thought I could. I took off at a brisk pace but not too hard, and tried to maintain that. At the first mile mark I hit it in 9:12 which surprised me, because I felt comfortable. I haven't been running anywhere that fast on my runs lately, but we got through mile 2 in 9 something, and then I felt like I could push it a little harder in the last mile.

Ended up with a 27:23, which I figured out later is 8:50 a mile average pace. I honestly didn't believe I could even run one mile at that pace right now. Having an 8 before my pace is something I never would have expected at this point.

I ran one mile to the park and one mile home, so I ended up with just over 5 miles of running today, with a little extra effort. That's part of NaRunMoMo, picking up the intensity twice a week. Mission accomplished, for today. 29 days to go.

Boo! It's NaRunMoMo!

Yes, it's Halloween and I won't be out running all day in this beautiful weather we've been having, instead I'm indoors with the cookies. Not yo mama's cookies and milk,though...whatever this bug is that I caught in Arizona, it's got a grip on me. I'm coughing up lung cookies* and still feeling half wiped out.

Since getting back from Tucson I've been in a different type of work mode, though my energy has been only half of what it is normally. I've been working on marketing plans, social media stuff, some continuing education classes that I've put off for months, and thinking about the growing pile of edits I need to get started on, with a new website and associated busywork. The Bella has been at my feet, enjoying the sunshine in the woman cave.

We had our first frost this past week and the flowers haven't figured it out yet. Neither have the raspberries, the left side of the raspberry patch decided to bloom late this year and we've had some delicious berries as a second crop. That will come to a halt any minute, but it's been a nice surprise.

I walked a few times this week and the longest I went was about 3 miles pushing The Bella in the cart, and I didn't have much left afterwards.

I was planning to run with one of my new running partners, Colleen, this weekend, but I think it's going to be another week before that happens. If my energy comes back I might be able to run 20 or 30 minutes by tomorrow or Monday.

Color everywhere, even in the parking lots.

We're coming up on November and as of tomorrow not only will we have changed the clocks, but it's the start of NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo. Wondering if I should at least try to maintain some consistency since that is what I'll be doing in my work life.

If you're not familiar with those, they are National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month. I don't have anything that could be a novel, unless you count my past experience in nursing, but BloPoMo is right up my alley. Since I've been so lax in posting here this might help me get back to it!

the only way it will all be here, on this blog, is if I can make it #NaRunMoMo too...natonal running motivation month. Which is exactly what I need. As you can tell, I'm making this up as I write this post...

In my case, I'll be lucky to start with ten minutes a day tomorrow. But what the hell. Sounds like a good idea. I've never been much of a running streak type of person, it goes against better judgment in my opinion, but at this point in my life, I need to move regularly, and at a faster pace than a waddle, so it might be just what the doctor ordered. This doctor, anyway.
*forgive me I'm a former ICU nurse and I just can't help myself.

Whirlwind in the Desert: BRA Day

I'm home, looking at the cool fall colors, after a week in Arizona. I managed to catch a nasty cold, probably on the flight down there, so I'm sniffling, hacking and snorting my way through the day, surrounded by piles of tissue and tea cups.

This blogpost isn't much about running, although I'm proud to announce that I have now been consistent with running most days of the week for the past 6 weeks. This coming week I'm sure I will cut back in order to get over this crud, but I feel like I've finally reached a point where the running is habitual again. I was up to nearly an hour and a half of running 4 or 5 days a week with some 2 hour runs thrown in there. Still no interest in ending my current hiatus from doing any running events, but we'll see how that goes...

I went down to Scottsdale to visit my dad and stepmom, and speak at an event in Tucson. Wednesday October 21 was BRA Day, Breast Reconstruction Awareness Day. It's intended to educate women about a full range of options for breast reconstruction following mastectomy.

Most women don't find out that they have a range of procedures to choose from that include using their own tissue to reconstruct breasts after a mastectomy, often they rush into immediate reconstruction with expanders and then implants, without being informed about all the possibilities because of microsurgical techniques that allow the patient's own fat and skin to be harvested and a blood supply established to create a more natural appearing breast.

More about that in a few... I flew down and the weather was un-Arizona-like. It rained like hell two nights in a row, a deluge of rain and hail in different parts of the valley. I ran early Monday morning with my running friend Chris and another friend of his on the canal, before the sun came up. It felt more Florida than Arizona with the humidity.

I hung out with my dad and stepmom, my dad is doing somewhat better and it appears that chemo is working. We won't go into the details of the possibility of relapse, which is fairly high, but he's feeling better and things are going well overall. Things are looking up now. It's great to see him getting his old energy back. Not quite himself, but he's improved dramatically.

I met with a social media expert while I was down there and will be using his services as I move forward with my business endeavors. I finished a big chunk of work before I left and now I'm switching gears from developing content to marketing.

Then it was time to go to Tucson for BRA Day. I met Terri online, now I can't even remember the exact circumstances of our connection but we started corresponding last summer and Terri wanted to make a BRA Day event happen in Tucson and she perservered along with the help of some nurses and social workers in Tucson who convinced the powers-that-be that it would be a worthwhile event to host.

Terri assembled a panel of speakers and the backing of local businesses to support the event and it came together despite many hiccups and speedbumps along the way. I agreed to help in any way I could despite being out of town.

We set it all up in the lobby of the U of A Cancer Center, which looks and feels remarkably similar to the Cancer Center we have here in Fort Collins. It was dumping rain as we carried all the supplies and donated gifts from Terri's car to the lobby of the Cancer Center.

We didn't have a room, podium, or formal presentation set-up, just some lobby furniture and a screen, and a microphone. But we did it, and it worked. One of the nursing staff members bought the refreshments herself. Local businesses donated prizes. Terri's son recorded all he could on the Periscope app on my phone. Of course my phone battery died even with the extra battery pack, so we didn't get to record most of the speakers. We have a learning curve with Periscope, which has some glitches itself.

I spoke on "Reconstructing Well-Being", about some of the overall wellness, prehabilitation and lifelong habits to adopt regardless of where a person might be with regards to cancer treatment and reconstruction decisions. Terri talked about her experience as a patient, there were nurses, social workers, tattoo artists, a plastic surgeon's PA and a breast surgeon there. Topics ranged from sexuality to surgical options to cosmetic appearance to more personal experiences from a patient who is also a nurse.

We had no idea how many people might show up for the event but we hoped it would be at least a couple of dozen. As it turned out we had a good 40-50 people in attendance. Afterwards we cleaned up and moved the furniture back to where it was, and it was time to party!

Afterwards four of us, the three nurses and Terri, went out to a Mexican restaurant for food and margaritas and got serenaded by a mariachi band, and decompressed. It is so amazing how every health system, nurses, cancer centers, and administration work the same everywhere.

This event only happened because of the work of Terri, a patient advocate, and her backing by a nurse and social worker who wanted to do something needed, useful, important, and meaningful for patients. It wouldn't have happened otherwise.

This is what it takes, people need to speak up and be vocal. Advocating for yourself as a patient, and for others who face similar experiences, as Terri does, and health care workers advocating for patients' needs and filling the gaps in information and care, all of that only happens at the grassroots level. With the corporatization of health care, the people up high are running a business. To use an overused term, there is a disconnect yes- I hate cliches too - between the business of health care and the service of health care. Service is what it needs to be about, otherwise we won't be serving anyone's best interest except the people who stand to profit.

The only way to make things work for the people who need the services is to do the footwork, be vocal, don't back down, and persist. It takes effort to make worthwhile things happen, and if at first it doesn't fit, make it fit.

Just like you have to move and make some effort to improve your health, changing the way the system works will take real effort toward movement. Sedentary habits won't create change.

Second Wind

I'm back.

There really wasn't much to talk about running wise until now. I am 4 weeks into a consistent 4-5 day a week running routine and making progress. This weekend I did two back to back two hour runs. And felt pretty good.

The Great Squirrel Caper happened on Saturday night to keep us on our toes. Isabelle missed the entire thing, she was sitting in the backyard grass, oblivious to the chaos in the basement.

First, we heard something in the chimney. We tried to ignore it, thinking it was a bird. Then it got louder and more frantic. We decided it was better to check it out now than wait until we smelled it. Dennis got a big garbage bag and opened the cover and flue from the fireplace downstairs. He waited for the bird to come down.

And a squirrel flew out of the fireplace.

It ran all over the room, Dennis chased it with a broom, trying to figure out how to catch it. It ran into the bathroom, jumped in the toilet, ran behind the door where Dennis thought he had it trapped, but it climbed up the back side of the door and flew over the top back into the basement.

It had soot all over its paws and then they were wet, so it tracked black squirrel prints all over the carpet and the walls and everywhere it went.

Finally Dennis got the window open and managed to get the squirrel to go out the window.
A little Saturday night excitement at our house!

I've been busy trying to get the last bit of content written before I go to Arizona next week. Will be speaking at BRA Day in Tucson. And visiting my dad and stepmom, running with an new/old running buddy and so on. My dad is starting to feel a little better and we're hopeful that the chemo will be behind him before too long. It's too soon to tell but it looks good.

That's really all the news I have now. I'm back to running but I have to say that's tentative because it's only been 4 weeks and believe me it's been a struggle some days. I wan to to run 5 days a week but sometimes it only happens on 4 days. That's okay. I am still doing a lot of walking and pushing Bella in the cart. I use that as my brain breaks from working.

I am running again, though, and I'm at the point where I can start to think about running adventure. Who knows what my crazy brain will think up next? Once I finish purging my brain onto the keyboard, if I have any brain cells left at all, I'm sure it will be creative. Halloween is coming, look out...

Brownie & The Rocket

I have not lost my mind. Even though it would appear that a woman walking the streets pushing a hybrid bike trailer/baby stroller with a bag of brown mulch, and talking into her phone might seem like she crawled out of a cave (which she did!) and is off her meds (which she isn't!)...

I am just multitasking the best I can, dictating my various business and content ideas into my email while I get some exercise.

Last week was an incredibly busy week from a networking standpoint. I had some enlightening and highly motivating conversations with several different people. And I also participated in a Google Hangout with a number of international bloggers with similar interests trying to improve the patient experience interacting with the entire healthcare system and all its players. That was so cool.

I got my tire cover for my car, so now I'm officially promoting my soon-to-be-completed but not-soon-enough project.

If you want to see what it's all about, I now have a landing page, which you are welcome to visit.

So, among all these things, I'm still struggling with finding the motivation to get some sort of consistency in running and working out. Pushing the Rocket, whether it contains Isabelle or the bag of mulch, aka "Brownie", is a good workout, and I can get a lot of my thoughts down in voice memos and email messages. Occasionally I can tweet or post to Facebook, but I haven't tried doing a moving tweetchat yet. Eventually I might have a full moving desk, Bluetooth and all, though I'm not that technologically advanced yet, by intention.

I ran twice this past week and there were three days when I got some decent miles on my feet.

I did get an awakening yesterday when one of the runners I know from NorthCoast in Cleveland contacted me, asking if I was going to be there at the race this fall. Uh, no....but I realized it's been a year. A full year of not training like an athlete. September 20th was nationals last year. So I am telling myself that September 20th is when I need to start working on consistency again, even if I am not training for anything.

It's weird how for 30 years the priority of my day was getting my run in. And after just one year of a break, it's so hard to get started again.

But I have additional motivation now that the mornings have turned noticeably cooler. I need to make sure I can fit into my pants when I need to start wearing warmer clothes. I've been wearing skirts and dresses all summer. Now, for the reality check...

I am so looking forward to the cool weather. I have been in super hot flash mode lately, with the sleep disturbances and all. Hopefully this is it, finally, the real thing, now that I've slowed down and gained enough weight, menopause can finally catch up to me and stay. Bring it on!

Being Disruptive...and Loving It

Yes, that's me. Disruptive entrepreneur that I am, sitting in my woman cave in running shorts and sandals, commuting to work through the backyard garden, working in between dog cart runs.

If you hear someone say the word B.I.T.C.H...

maybe they meant Brazen Institutional Terrorist and Corporate Hellraiser, because I suppose that would be me. Dogma and bureaucracy be damned, I'm moving forward, glad to be independent of the weighted down, soggy conformist culture. Going on two years now.

Besides, Bitches beat Dogma, anyday.

I'm thoroughly enjoying it, too. I have a new student working with me, my exercise support group just started up again, I have some new clients, and I'm busy. Really busy!

Despite many distractions I have been getting some work done out here, but I can tell I need to put a stop to the social interactions soon and sequester myself for a few weeks to get things done. I have a big chunk of work that needs completion before I am ready to pay attention to some website details and then testing.

Went to Denver the other morning. What a beautiful sunrise, it redeemed the hour and 40 minute drive in traffic that should have only been an hour and ten. Damn, Denver is getting to be like California.

I will do almost anything to avoid crowds and traffic. I absolutely hate Denver traffic, especially I-25 between Northglenn and 270. It sucks, it's always backed up, and it was a parking lot for a good 20 minutes for that 4 mile stretch. Arrgh!

I was there because I went to a meetup group I heard about, it sounded interesting to me. It's a group of physicians and other professionals in health care and related industries called Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, and it well was worth getting up at 4 am to drive down in traffic, and the hour and twenty minute drive back.

Let's just say I have found a great place to get support for my endeavors. There was a very good presentation, and just by listening to the members of the group in attendance, I have the opportunity to connect with some great minds!

The Bella seems to be doing fairly well, she goes for her rides, she's been more vocal and excited to see us, and hangs out with us more. The Canna-biscuits have been on board for only a couple of days, too soon to see if she's feeling better from them yet.

It's Labor Day weekend, and my niece Jenny is coming to visit us before she goes off to college in Oregon. She's a mini-me, in some ways, but I'm a lot shorter than her. She got her mom's height and the Nitzky weirdness. We'll wine and dine her, or beer her, whatever she wants, and take her to fun places. And take The Bella with us, of course, in the Rocket.

Running? Still on the horizon. I have a lot more work to do before I can stick to a workout schedule, but the Rocket works well, whether I take The 60 pound Bella or a 40 pound bag of mulch (or two), I'm getting a good workout, and I hope to return to running in fairly decent condition as a result.

Happy weekend all.