MON !!/15/10- 6 depressed + slow. then p/u Ava + ran 4 more, much happier. bad day overall. cannonball cooldown.
TUES-->10 miles. freezing cold + soaking wet. strong NE'er. Ava wouldn't run. I felt mentally at peace, the run was good + positive. Used flashlight for 80% of it.
WEDOFF
THURS-->6miles woods. 4miles w/ xc kids. 3 miles @ YMCA: 400m @ 6:00, 400 rec. then 3 sets of 12 reps on leg press machine X 3. total miles for the day: 13.
FRIOFF (note: cooked all day for pumpkin party, ran errands for school)
SAT--> 13 miles from Gabbo 2 Wildwood and back.
SUN--> 13 miles (5 w/ Ava!)
59 miles for the week. (we'll go with 60, because Garmin is a guesser at best, plus on any given day i round down...and...and...i just want it to be 60. fuck it. when it comes to miles and machines...sometimes things just aren't black and white.)
had to get that in there. new yeezy dropped monday, ya'll.
This past saturday was Ava's first 5k race. We placed third overall (yeah, that's 4th place back there getting dusted by our finishing kick) and Ava placed 1st overall in the dog division...by like a huge margin. Running sub-7:00 miles wasn't easy for the field of hobby joggers at the race, but for Ava it was no fuckin' problemo, man. For me, I was pleased to feel like I was running hard, but really I didn't ever feel like I was pushing myself into anything near "race" effort. Which is nice and ultimately just makes me very curious as to how fast I could run a 5k right now. I think low 18's is possible. Which would be a huge chunk off of my old PR. Gabbo and Lorenzo (her chihuahua) were on hand as photog's and cheerleaders, my parents came out to see Ava...ahahaha! Anyway, the course was pretty fun, slippery trails and bridges (that crushed gravel was just a small part of the overall loop) and the whole positivity of the morning more than cleared away that crazy ass fog that has basically been hanging over our area for like a week now. it's nuts. fogville. cloudtown, USA. what the hell.
despite the detox stuff (see post below), this week was really a good turn-around week for me. I felt a lot better, a lot more stable and even with a few rough nights (i'm looking at you thursday night where I drank a case of beer, took some benedryl and still couldn't fall asleep) the week on the whole was very good. I had a perfect saturday with Gabbo and will remember it forever. it was THAT good! hopefully the pumpkin/goat cheese ravioli we made and froze for the pumpkin party will turn out as well as the day did. happy trails.
62 miles this week. long run on sunday was rough. need to start getting consistent with those.
this is just a rehab post. i met with doctor brown (who is black) on friday. several weeks ago, after much badgering of the doctor staff at the clinic, I had put myself on a super aggressive methadone tapering schedule (2mg's down every week). which means, for those whom fractions are mysterious, i am cutting off a larger and larger percentage "chunk" of my dose each week. i was warned by both Dr. Len and Dr. Brown that this was a bad idea. and hey, guess what? they were right. for the last two weeks i've gone back to sleeping very little and having horrendous bouts of anxiety, along with muscle twitching and body pain. ...i thought i'd just tough it out but man...i can suffer through a week, i can suffer through two weeks, but...getting on to a month of feeling horrible was starting to really grind on me. so anyway, i'm sitting there in the office, across from Dr. Brown, an old black man whose skin looks so dry and papery, it's practically mummified and whose eyes are two different colors (one is watery grey/blue and the other is, i swear to god, orangish/green.) He's a great guy. Very sage-like and wise. Basically he told me "You're not going to pull this off. Stop being stupid. There isn't any need to suffer like this, be patient, be smart." so, i've now UPPED my dose from 9mg back to 10mg and will hold at this level until my body adjusts and then go down ONE mg and see how that is tolerated.
while all of this may just be boring medical blahblahblah, for me this back and forth struggle between a fast, painful taper and a longer, methodical taper has been very very difficult. i equate it to whole host of personality traits, both strengths and weaknesses being tested. Am i tough? And which is tougher? to suffer out the quick detox? or make the hard, smart decision to taper responsibly? Or am i being weak to go back to the slow taper? is it me giving in? giving up? I think about this all the time because after having made a few monumentally stupid decisions in the past year, I'd really like to start making some smart ones. so...anyway, i guess i feel good about what happened during that doctor visit on friday. not happy, but at least resolved and ready to move forward. plus, it's not like a single milligram increase suddenly has me floating on cloud 9, humming show tunes...i still can't sleep through the night. i still have anxiety and a frustratingly high resting heart rate (for someone who's in as good as shape as i am, i should be LOWERING my resting HR...not waking up with it beating wildly in my chest. on that note, i can't wait to see how my body finally settles down after all of this methadone bullshit. i have a feeling that come january or so, when the detox is finally complete, i may be in for a pleasant surprise and that all of this hard training will rapidly reveal itself in my running. anyway, this is a long post about stuff that no one wants to read...but i needed to flesh it out in text so as to get a better sense of where i'm at on this stuff.
i still harbor this sense that, despite the extremely high accolades DJ Shadow's albums have accrued over the last decade of internet circle-jerking, on a serious note i think that future generations will look back at "preemptive strike" and "endtroducing" as two of the more remarkable moments in modern music history. no more music talk for me.
this week had such a bad start. part of that seeped over into the previous post (which was written in the thick of a very bad "down" swing despite ostensibly being a recap of the previous week). anyway, this week improved. i got back on a good schedule with life, work, running, methadone, etc. and by thursday things felt like they were improving. my students and i put on a great altar for Dia de Los Muertos on saturday. Gabbo and I went all gussied up and looking gorgeous, but we're such bums lately that we came home early, watched a movie and went to sleep before 10pm i think. i'm really so ok with this sort of lifestyle. the good lord knows i've had my share of late nights, loose women and too much booze and drugs. being healthy and sleeping adequately is actually my new big thrill. i'm an adult now i guess. sort of.
64 miles this week. i want to hit 75 for some reason. just to hit that number. this week though, i did a bunch of cross training at the gym. core body classes at the YMCA, elliptical stuff and weights. honestly, it was a really solid week of training. i got the lead out, as they say.
Ava's big race is this saturday! i can barely contain my excitement. the Dirty Dog 5K is basically ours for the taking assuming two things 1) Ava doesn't have a freak out issue with one of the other dogs i.e. fighting and hackles up aggression and 2) she feels like running fast. That isn't something i can totally control. i can cajole and beg her to run faster, but some days she just doesn't really feel like it. other days, i literally struggle to match her pace on certain sections of the run. no doubt our race will have a very fluctuating pace, but my hope is that by giving in to her pace variations (anywhere from 8:30 to 5:3o /mile) we can average out a pretty bangin' 5k. anything under 24:00 is reasonable and i think something sub-21:00 is not out of the question. depending on the depth of the canine field, i think this could be a serious debut for her. hahaha, i love taking this silly-ass race seriously because i love the fuck out of that little dog! woo!
40.5 miles for the week. i'm beginning to see a pattern here (higher mileage week followed by a lower mileage week). although, one of the low mileage days also included some additional cardio/weights/aerobics class (really?) and ended up being like a 3:00 workout. so the week was harder overall than my last low-mileage week. also, i had a day of really good speed work for the first time in ages, followed by 6 miles through the trails for a fairly rough 13 mile day. also got to do some hill repeats over at the bay for the first time in forever (because there are literally zero hills around me). so not a high mileage week, certainly, but some quality work throughout.
halloween was fun, went to put-in-bay for the festivities. a seed was planted while i was over there (no no, not that kind) and saw the bay almost all empty of tourists for a little while. i'd really like to go there this winter when the lake is frozen and do some running/snowshoeing/XC-skiing around the area, maybe across the ice to the different islands. i'm pretty sure i could find someone to let me stay at their house for little to nothing. anyway...it's on my mind now.
i also skipped two doses to go on the trip (as they wouldn't give me take-homes on such short notice). the last time i did this was for Run Woodstock and then by that sunday night i felt pretty horrible. this time, i felt even more out of whack. i think due to the doses tapering so rapidly and now being at such a low amount, it really is out of my system by morning (unlike before where i could coast through the day and almost into the next night on a single dose). two days off the stuff was not fun. what a horrible chemical methadone is. i now understand what all the forums and websites said about it...essentially that it's a necessary evil. i think the physical addiction is actually worse than with oxycontin, but it's something that is controlled and difficult to abuse. i really lost my shit by the end of the weekend mentally, felt horrible anxiety, like you're going over the top of a roller coaster over and over again. twitching throughout my entire body.
lastly...this past week or two has been really unpleasant. i'm losing my stamina in dealing with "everything." i had a solid couple of months where i could keep all parts of my life together and moving forward, but i feel a bit like i'm coming unwound right now. gabbo has been incredible: understanding, patient and loving. i seriously don't get her. i would have left me ages ago. i would if i could, frankly. "failed state," to use the parlance of our times. anyway, i need to do some real work now. stuff i've been putting off for weeks. re-organizing my ceramic kitten collection by eye-color now, just something for the autumn, i guess.
