karl.tsakos.us/blog

I’ve made a goal.

That’s always been my problem, the lack of a goal. In this case a particular goal for a particular activity. The activity is running and the goal is to run a 5 K race. Not to win, and not to place, but just to run in an organized event.

I’ve toyed with running for the past few years. Mostly in the last five. I’ll start running and then I’ll stop running. I’ll hurt myself and stop running or I’ll get a cold and stop running or I’ll have too much else going on in my life and stop running. Well, now I’ve evaluated my free time and came up with a plan to ease into running so as to minimize injury. Thus far, I have worked up to five repeats of four minutes running, one minute walking with five minute warmup and cool down walks. Next week, I will change it up a little and go for twelve minutes running with a five minute walk in the middle. I will do that for one or two weeks and then switch to thirty minutes continuous running.

The time frame is tight. I need to start looking for a race for early February, around the time of my birthday. Pretty much, a 5 K (3.1 miles) is the shortest road race one can find. If I run approximately 30 minute I will be running shy of 5 K. So the race distance will not be out of the question.

The real question is if I enjoy the racing. If I don’t, that will become some lousy motivation for continued running. However, if it’s a good experience, well, I might have motivation for another race. Actually, if it’s good, I’ll do what I do with the dentist and plan my next visit before I leave the office. Okay, that might not work with racing, but I can certainly find another race to run in short order.

See, as I mentioned, the racing is the key. I know, how obvious, I have heard it for years, set a goal like a race to keep running interesting. So fine, I’ve done that.

Now, all I have to do is actually find a race to run and I’m set.

I’ll keep you posted.

Okay, I wouldn’t say I’m back in form. No, far from it. However, I went for another bike ride today. While it did hurt and made me pant, my average speed was back up to about 14 mph and I rode for about 50 minutes today covering around 12 miles.

It’s the small things. Small hills I wouldn’t consider hills remind me that I am not on flat ground. The first hill I hit (which is before I am warmed up) normally doesn’t phase me. Today, I was glad no kids on a single speed bike were riding up it as well. It looks bad to be decked out in one’s riding gear only to be lapped by a 10 year old on his way to his friends house.

The good news is nothing stopped me and I even had a good tempo and high speed in some sections. Once I was warmed up I was able to maintain pace without panting too terribly hard.

It would have been a shorter ride time wise but I stopped to take in some scenery. The route I rode today is one of my favorite short rides. It travels out onto Rye Neck where there are several exclusive beach clubs. At the end of the neck is the American Yacht Club. Just before the entrance to the club is a public pier. It just happens to be located about halfway in my ride. I always like to stop there and take in the boats floating on the Long Island Sound. It is an incredibly peaceful spot. On clear days one can see New York City on the horizon.

So, I rode, I stopped, I rode some more and I enjoyed. That’s what’s important. Well, all that was important but I’m referring to the enjoying.

In the world of club cycling, I’m normally what you would consider a C+ rider. This means, for any given ride I can expect to average 12.5 to 14 mph over moderately hilly terrain between 15 and 30 miles in length. I say normally as I just road today and barely made it through 7 miles of mostly flat terrain at 11 mph. It appears my summer of sloth has not been beneficial to my riding. It’s been about a month since I did any athletic activity other then Wii sports. And that was only twice.

I would never have thought it, but the stationary bike riding I did two to three days a week all winter seems to have paid off. At the start of the season, Yani and Chad and I joined my cycle clubs kick-off ride. We chose the D level ride since we all thought we were out of shape. Well, we and about three fourths of that group were very much underestimating our abilities and rode well ahead of the official ride. We were all clearly at least C riders and just didn’t realize it.

That was in April. Then, for the next month I did at least one ride a week. Including a beautifully scenic ride through Port Chester, Rye Brook, Purchase, and Rye. It was about twenty-two miles in length and relatively hilly. I averaged about 13 to 14 mph on the two rides I did on that route.

I called the route the RCH-Rye route after my grandmother. She lived in Rye and was very proud of it. She even got a personalized license plate for her car based on her name, Ruth Copper Helm. Thus the plate read RCH-RYE. When put on her second hand Cadillac which she bought from a friend (a very good deal), she must have appeared the biggest snob on earth. Rye, you see, is a very wealthy town. Anyone observing the car would of course assume she was bragging about her wealth. She was in fact middle class.

The ride however travelled through some of the wealthy neighborhoods of Rye and Purchase. Purchase recently rank fairly high on the Forbes wealthiest neighborhoods list and is home of the Westchester Country Club where the Buick Classic golf tournament is held every year. The name was give the ride based on the family joke about the license plate.

I should have know todays ride would hurt. For one thing, I am very aware that I have not done any exercising for the last month. First there was a heat wave which lasted about a week. It was too hot to sleep let alone ride.

Then I took my bike in for a tuneup. Since it was near my brother’s house, I left it for the week since I visit his neck of the woods on weekends. When I went to pick it up, they rolled out a bike, leaned it against the counter, and started for he cash register. “That’s not my bike,” I said since it wasn’t. The gentlemen helping me got a very strange look on his face and told me to please wait. He went back in to the shop and disappeared for about five minutes. When he came out a manager had entered the store and they talked in hushed tones. What I picked up from their conversation was someone else had brought in the same model and color bike as mine and apparently picked up my bike without noticing. He must not have been very observant as he had a different saddle and trip computer as well as two additional accessories on his bike i didn’t have.

They called him and he said he would not be able to bring my bike back until Monday evening and no one was home for them to go pick it up. He apparently noticed it had a different computer on it when he got home and was planning on returning it at his leisure. I said that was fine and my brother would pick the bike up. I would get it from him the following weekend.

When my brother did pick the bike up, he walked in the store and the manager looked up at him and merely said, “Oh no.” My brother, you see, had some problems with his bike tune up a couple of weeks earlier and they gave him a big discount for the error. Long story short, I got the deluxe tune up for free. But, that was another week I didn’t ride.

Finally, after I got the bike back, we had another heat wave followed by rain for a couple days. So that was a fourth week down the drain.

Recently I have noticed that my once muscular legs were looking stingy and undefined. And today I proved that in fact they were stringy, undefined and indeed weak. I was winded and they cramped quickly and had no power. If you want to know what it’s like to race in the Tour de France, don’t train a lot and climb Alp D’Huez. Do no training for a long time and then try to ride up a small hill. You will save time and money that way and still have the same feeling of exhaustion.

Anyhow, I hear by declare my summer of sloth at an end. With todays first ride under my belt, I plan to resume my regular cycling schedule.

I’m renaming the problem with my thumb from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome to the more benign but accurate, and rhyming Dumb Numb Thumb, eh, Syndrome. Well okay, but it mostly rhymes.

Yes, after a trip to the neurologist I can fairly accurately claim to not have anything really wrong with my thumb after all. Well, there was/is something wrong, it just not really very wrong.

My visit to the neurologist was an interesting experience. Upon entering the examining room, the nurse told me to put on a gown and the doctor would be right in. I said, yes, but I’m here for my thumb. She said he would be doing a full neurological work up. Well then, down to my skivvies and on with the gown.

The doctor came in after I had a chance to thumb (no pun intended) through a copy of wired magazine. He reminded me of a quieter Jeff Bezos except that the doctor only giggled a bit instead of Jeff’s famous laugh. Either way, he was a pleasant man with a sense of humor which I find a great trait in a doctor.

After asking a multitude of questions about habits that would affect my hands, he did do an exam. He checked my hands and wrists and checked the reflexes in my knees. At that point I made a comment abut having only coming in for an issue with my thumb and I was a bit surprised to find myself in an exam gown. The doctor said that the nurse gets a bit carried away but quickly followed up with people are often wrong with where the cause of a problem was and he often needed to do a more thorough exam. My problem was located pretty much where we thought it was.

So after some more talk and examining I mentioned how I know this sort of thing surely drives doctors crazy, but I had been doing some research online. He immediately asked, “so what is it?” I answered, “carpal tunnel.” His reply was along the lines that it could be, but if it were I would have more widespread numbness.

No, he narrowed it down to what I thought was a possible cause; that being a lot of work I had done at my computer at work when this came on. He said it most likely was the nerve feeding my thumb only that I had aggravated from the repetitive mousing and most likely the wrist pad I was resting on.

Since my hand was feeling almost completely better by the time I saw him, he recommended doing nothing and waiting. we could do a test for carpal tunnel syndrome, but that a) includes electrical shock and b) is only really done if you intend to remediate the problem through surgery. I opted for waiting and seeing.

So there you have it. I had all that annoying numbness and I didn’t even have a named problem to show for it. Oh, I got the comments at work, “well of course you never had a problem before, you normally don’t do any work.” But no named problem.

Still, I’m glad that my Dumb Numb Thumb Syndrome is going away. It really was annoying.

I mean, it’s a legitimate question. Typhoid was once all the rage as were the bubonic plague and consumption. But now, what, they get the odd historical mention. And, what’s worse for them (them the diseases) is that they can often now be cured with penicillin or other antibiotics. The once mighty diseases that conquered much of the civilized world, now virtually wiped from the face of the earth.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.

However, with the demise of these ailments, man had more time on his hands to examine the problems his body faced on a daily basis. We started to watch the mechanics of the body and come up with syndromes and maladies based on malfunctioning body parts. If one was lucky, one could suffer from a problem the poor never had, tennis elbow. The name implies a life of leisure and frolicking so hard that one injures oneself. Well who wouldn’t want to suffer that one.

But tennis elbow is also a type of specific injury know as a repetitive strain injury. Such an injury is the result of taxing body parts by repeated motions and activities. Such activities can also include typing, playing an instrument, and gripping an item such as a camera. I partake in all of these activities, and all of these activities can result in a repetitive strain injury known as carpal tunnel syndrome. Currently, I also partake in that.

Well, I don’t know that I do for sure, but I have a classic symptom: numbness in my thumb and sometimes forearm. When the numbness didn’t go away for two weeks, I thought it was time to visit a doctor. He checked me out and recommended I see a neurologist suggesting I may have carpal tunnel syndrome. Amazingly, as one of the most self diagnosed people I know, that wasn’t one of my conclusions (although I thought it could be a repetitive strain injury). I thought it much more likely to be cancer of some sort or perhaps leprosy. I haven’t yet seen the neurologist, so nothings ruled out yet.

I won’t see the neurologist until the thirtieth of this month. That’s okay. In the interim, I have had plenty of time to do some more research on the topic and see what the problem really is and what self-help remedies I can do for myself. Right now they consist of wearing a wrist splint at work while I’m at my computer and some stretching exercises. I think if I am still numb (and all likelihood is I will be) the doctor will prescribe some steroid treatment and perhaps some more stretching.

And this brings us back to the title of this entry. In the late ’80′s and early ’90′s, carpal tunnel syndrome was all the rage. Not because it was new, but because it was categorized as an issue because of all the typing people were doing. But then, as with any hot topic in the media, it was forgotten about. I had just assumed it had been resolved.

I was wrong. Turns out, it is a fairly common ailment for people to get. Look on line for treatments and the web provides. Which is of course how I am able to diagnose myself and prescribe my own treatments.

Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see if I was right. I mean really, leprosy makes you numb too.

I’m rather proud of some of the things I accomplished in aught-seven. Chief among those was loosing weight. I have never been a fat person, but I lost 20 pounds just to see if I could (and a little because I was aware that it was creeping up as I was aging). Turns out a healthy diet (were not talking scientific here, just what appeared to be healthy), some self control (we’re talking size and quantity of portions), and some exercise is all it took. I was amazed at how much I could eat and still lose weight. It just takes a little thought.

As of late, my self control hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be. My weight was averaging around 163 which is around what I weighed in my mid twenties. For 5′ 9″, at 38 years old, that’s pretty good.

Interesting aside, the scale I have that measures percentage body fat and all of the charts say that I am on the heavy side of what normal for me should be. Still, people were concerned about my health and wether I was too skinny. Just goes to show you what our body image for healthy really is as a society.

Anyhow, the point of this protracted tale is that I was fit and healthy. Then I stopped exercising because I couldn’t find the time. I still kept the weight of though. That was until the holidays hit. I tried to start exercising again. But then there was a hurt back from over doing it followed by a cold followed by another hurt back from over doing it. I took a week off from doing anything and let my back feel better. Then I over did it and hurt my back again. So as of a couple of days ago, I was sloth like and my weight was climbing out of my comfort zone.

That brings us to this morning, New Year’s Day. As I sat around wincing when I moved in a direction my back didn’t want me to, I thought about those people you read about. You know the ones, they haven’t taken a sick day in thirty-five years or they have run at least 3 miles a day for the last 20 years. What is wrong with me that I can’t have that ind of conviction?

Well, with this being the first day of a new year I decided my goal shouldn’t be so grand. I just want to go through a single year feeling good. Sure, when I am very active I can strain muscles or overheat myself by pushing too hard, but I recover quickly when I’m fit. There’s none of this sitting around for 5 days waiting to be able to move without pain, and then thinking about exercising in a few days.

Now, I’m the last person to make New Year’s resolutions, so that is certainly not what I have decided to do here. No sir. However, keeping with the occasion, it being the start of a year and all, I have decided I will make a valiant attempt to exercise once a day. Of course, we need to define what it means to exercise within this context. Simply, I will do an activity which is not a required part of my day which causes my pulse to raise above resting for a sustained period of time greater then or equal to twenty minutes. For example, my back still hurts, so I’m not about to go jogging or something like that which will aggravate it. However, studies these days say that activity is good for the back. It uses and strengthens the muscles while keeping them limber. So I went for a thirty minute walk. As I strengthen my back I will endeavor to increase my activity to where my daily exercise is at least thirty minutes and causes me no pain. We’ll see how that goes.

I also brought my pocket camera with me. I haven’t taken many pictures at all since last fall. I need to return to taking pictures as well. But that’s a whole different story.