Rusty's Blog

We’ll just have to see how this week works out. I was up ‘early’ today for doing a run late in the afternoon. I finally got my session started at about 6:00 PM, only to be stopped within the block I live in to receive a package by UPS. Forgot that I had even purchased the books. Oh well. Restarted and got on my way.

Today was a broken up session compared to Sunday’s run. It started with a fairly short run to get the blood moving, then a walk of about the same length, followed by a long run of about 10 min, (I have not replayed any of the tracks to see what the timings are for intervals) followed by another walk I’m going to say both walks were about 3 min, as was the first run. There was a third run as well, I’m guessing again 3 min. Followed by a walk out.

The midel run I completed without any problems. I am presuming this was because while the altitude changed during the route, there were no really steep hills involved. Just some gentle rolling.

The first run I got as far as I could go, actually to the top of the hill I had run up, broke to a walk for few seconds to recover, started running again, and within seconds the transition tones kicked in.

On the third run I think I was about half way through, again up a hill, but not quite as steep, took a 10 second walking break, and went back to running, and completed the run.

Experienced a few scattered raindrops here and there, nothing significant.

Odd sidenote, I had switched loads in the laundry before I left, planning on quickly switching loads again when I got back. I had a meeting to attend tonight, and I was a little pressed for time (schedule reminder note, plan to do the runs around 4, not 5 in the future when running before work. if not earlier) In fact I was pretty sure that I was not going to get the final load out of the drier. So I walked into the laundry room before I got to my apartment, turned on the light, and saw that I had not pushed the coin tray in to get the dryier started. So I pulled all the stuff out of the washer, added it to the stuff in the dryer, and kicked it off. I need to be up at 8, or a bit earlier in the morning anyway, so what wasn’t dry when I got  home from the meeting, I will run through another cycle in the morning. (No use of the laundry room before 8 am, or after 10 pm.)

I’m guessing that for really long runs, I’m going to really have to work on those up hill runs. At the moment they seem to be the killers for me. Running along a level path, or along a lake side path, is probably not going to be a problem, even for 20 or 30 min runs. It’s getting to the top of the hill that I suspect will keep hurting me.

I may have lost a few choce words in this reverie, as it’s been about 6 hours since I did the run, but that’s what I get for setting up an event of this type so close to doing something where I won’t have the opportunity to blog. We’ll see if Thursday goes better or not.

Contemplating driving to a lakeside path for Thursday, just to see if my observations regarding hills has any validity. Just have to find some way to tag a reasonable turn–around point. I don’t mind being 5 to 10 min away, walking when I’m done, but if I’ve just completed a 30 min series of intervals, with a 5 min warm-up walk, that strikes me as a bad place to walk back from. Ok, just reviewed the schedule, Thursday should be a 5 min walk, 10 min jog, 3 min walk, 10 min jog, ‘done’. Based on that if I turn around at the end of the first 10 min jog, I should be about 2 min away from my starting point if I run at a steady pace. I doubt that the steady pace is likely, but I should still be less than 10 min away. Which works for me. To Medicine Lake it is. (Not sure what to do about Saturday’s walk… Cross that bridge when I get to it I guess.)

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.

Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I’m not really satisfied with my results today. I can come up with a number of plausable reasons, or combinations of reasons, but it comes down to either re-do this week, or redo today’s run this weekend.

As I’ve indicated before, I work nights, and last night was no exception. So when I ran this morning I had come off of a 12 hour shift, along with about a 1 hour bus ride each way. On top of that, I did not sleep well yesterday. I think I was up some 5 times in the 7 hours I was planning on sleeping. So when I went to run this morningI was not in the best condition. That said, I had hoped to do better than I did. I would say that I don’t think I did as well today as I did Wednesdayh, but I could be wrong.

I started out well enough. I got further during my warm up walk than I had the last time I too anything like this route. Once I started running I was going along well enough, but at about 7 and a half minutes I had to recover. I walked for about a minute, then got back going again. 2 and a half minutes later I needed to recover some more. This time I think I walked for a minute and a half. Then I got back to running. I’m a bit fuzy on how long I ran this time. I wasn’t tracking the intervals this time very well, but I did take another walking break and got to running with about four and a half minutes left, and stuck to it till the end of the 20 minute interval. So worst case I walked about 5 min of the 20, and best case I walked about 4 minutes.

My plan at the moment is to try to get a good night’s sleep Saturday night, and make another attempt Sunday morning. If that works, I’m going to roll Week 6 a day back and start Tuesday morning. I’ll take to running before I go to work in the evening. Presumably I will get a good day’s sleep on Thursday and Saturday. Then I’ll continue on with Week 7 the following Monday.

This schedule presents some problems for me participating in the 5K in June, as if I didn’t have enough problems with that, but I’m hoping that by then I will be in much better condition, and should be able to do a run like this, or longer, OK, quite a bit longer. It may not be ‘with ease’ and I’m not planning on setting any records in any case, but we’ll see what things look like in a week or so.

I suspect that one thing that will happen this weekend, is that I will force myself through a affine withdrawl headache. I suspect that is one of the things that kept waking me up yesterday.

Just loaded up the MP3 player with Friday’s set for the week. I have a little bit more time available to me today than I was thinking.

Somewhat out of plan for this morning was an early morning run. I normally plan on running around noon or very early afternoon on Wednesday, so that I can run either when I get home Friday morning, or before I go to work Friday afternoon, or even Saturday morning should that be the best opportunity.

However this week I have a dental appointment a little before 8 this morning, and I really didn’t want to have to be concerned about how a workout would either effect, or be affected by the recovery from that. So chose to wake up about 5 this morning and get the workout out of the way first thing.

The sky was already lightening up significantly by the time I got out and hit the streets. and I noticed that for the first time my shins were not complaining about the walk. They didn’t complain about the first run either. Today’s routine was a 5 min warmup walk, an 8 min run, 5 min of recovery walking, 8 min of run, and a walkout. The MP3 walkout was about 2 min, though I was further from home than that by about 8 min.

A couple of things concerned me duirng the first run. A bit of carry over from what sleep I got, or what kept me from sleeping well. I woke up about 2 am and had a vary substantial, though not solid bowl movement. I was a bit concerend about the prospect of having the runs today, though other than a second episode about an hour later, it has not continued to be an issue. On the other hand my stomach was not feeling the best either. So during the run I was a bit concerned that I would end up thinking I was passing gas, only to end up with very fowled shorts. That didn’t happen. I was also concerned because on at least a couple of occasions during the run I felt very much like I needed to throw up as well. Fortunately that did not become a significant issue either. Oh, my stomach still does not feel it’s best, but it is significnatly better than when I started.

I don’t know if it’s because of whatever bug I’m fighting off, or if it’s just because this was one of my first times with some fairly long runs in the mix, but for the first time after a run I’m feeling a bit chilly in a way that does not feel purely like I am cooling off from evaporation. I suppose it could also be the cool temp on the walk out, but I think I understand a bit better why runners need a blanket to warm up with at the end of a run.

Over the years when I was in HS, and the Army, all my exercise workouts ended with me going inside towards the end of the cool-down period. I was always fascinated by the fact that while I knew that I perspired while running, the recovery phase almost always included me being heavily coated in sweat.That said, I tend to suspect that the situation I’m dealing with now is the result of this bug dehydrating me, and I now need to address that as well.

When I was in College, one of my ROTC instructors had commented to people that running was not the best way to lose weight. Oh, it was find as part of a program that included other things, such as watching what you eat, and light weight work, but the problem with ‘running’ to lose weight is that more often than not, you replace the fat with an equivalent of muscle. Walking is more often than not going to give you better results for loosing weight. That said, you rarely see long distance runners, and I consider anyone regularly running more than a 400 meter distance to be a long distance runner, as unusually heavy. Part of that is that if you are carrying too much mass, you can’t effectively run long distances. So people who are interested in running more than a couple hundred yards or meters, and do so with some regularity, tend to change other aspects of their routine and diet to accommodated the changes they need to make. I will say that I really haven’t lost a significant amount of weight in the past month, but that may be changing as I will need to make changes along the way myself.

Assuming I don’t mung the data again, the kml will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May06.kml Remember that you can paste that link directly into google maps to see the route I took, or download it and open it in Google Earth to see the details as well.

Stay safe.

Literally just got back from my first workout this week. Legs muscles are still twitching. That will happen for another 20 min or so I suppose. If it goes on beyond that I would be somewhat surprised. the KML for today’s workout will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c2k5/May04.kml once I have it collected. If you look at the route I took today, you can see approximately what my 5k route is. I actually have two possibilities, one is to just do the loop around the blocks you see I’ve started today, the other is a bit longer, but gives me a reasonable walkout, and that’s to run down to Winetka, then up 36th, and walk about 6 blocks. If I take the ‘shorter’ route, I need to come up with a way to do the cool down walk as well, and I don’t think walking back along the initial 5 min warmup walk is going to be enough. But that’s the better part of a month away.

Today’s workout was interesting in that I kept telling myself during the walk portions that I really could be jogging a bit. I chose not to, if only because I also remember that near the end of each jogging/running portion, I really felt like I needed to do some walking. The pace felt good.

This week is a bit different workout routine wise. It’s the first of 2 weeks where the routine each day is different. And this firday I should have a 20 min run under my belt.

Well, the leg twitching is going down, so I am going to og and talk with the dogs, let them know how much I appreciate them watching the apartment, and see if I can scrounge up something to eat.

Edit:

Well, unfortunately my GPS did not retain the track information, when I mistakenly pushed the track from last Friday, instead of pulling the track that was sitting on the GPS. So it will take me a bit, but I’ll generate a path .kml file of the route I took, and attempt to identify transition points, but it will be anything but perfect from the perspective of what my real path was. That said, it won’t have me crossing streets that I didn’t cross, or have me running head long into traffic on busy streets, through and over buildings, etc. However since I can’t edit points on the path, it does have me running on lawns that I didn’t actually travel over…

Another week done. 5 more to go. A buddy of mine in the service, had taken up running for a while, and one day just stopped. Oh, he continued with PT and such, but in hs spare time he had been running as well. The reason he gave for stopping the running in his spare time had nothing to do with finding something else to do that was taking up his time, it had to do with the fact that he finished a run one day, felt ‘good’ and then realized that he had just run 10 miles, and felt good. In his world view, someone who has run 10 miles should not ‘feel good.’ Oh, he was OK with the endorphins, but he was not OK with the fact that he was not feeling any effects in his feet or llegs, etc.

I’m anything but in that boat at this point. But I can see me getting to the point where I’m pretty much OK with the 5k segment.

My workout today is already posted as a KML file. If you open maps.google.com then in the search field, type http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May01.kml, you should see my course show up for today. It’s not perfect, when you zoom in close, you’ll see that it thinks I wandered through some walls on an apartment building, and spent a lot of time on people’s lawns and suck. I gues I can say that fortunately it doesn’t show me swimming at 49 miles an hour though.

S stuck with the road I started the run on today, and ended up a block from the next major cross road. where I traveled around the block, and came most of the way back on the street one street over. I walked and ran on that till I got back to the cross street that I had used Monday and Tuesday, followed that to the bottom of the hill, went around the lake, and then followed the street that had confused me on Monday, ending the final run a block north of where I ended up turning on Monday.

Odd as it may seem, I’m looking forward to the bbegining of next week now. Part of that is the wanting to get this over with part of me, the other part is looking forward to having different schedules each of the three days next week, as well as for the week following. I’m still not enthused about Friday’s run this next week, but that will happen, so I’ll take that on as it get’s here.

Till next time, have fun.

I ran at about the same time today as I did on Monday, but for my ‘Wednesday’ schedule it was significantly earlier. I heard a Ham mention that it was raining pretty hard where he was as he was going to the gym, and knowing that it is supposed to rain today, I decided that now would be a better time to go for the run than latter. I ccan always take a nap later on and get rested up for my overnight at work. I’ll only have one sleep cycle between now and my next run, but it will be about 44 hours away, so that should work out ok.

I grabbed the foretrex gps today, somewhere in storage I have a forerunner 201, but I have never gotten a good sync to a computer with it, which I do get out of the foretrex. The down side is that the foretrex really isn’t designed around exercise, but I’ll at least be able to get the tracks and hopefully be able to post a link to a .kml file with an embeded google maps page as well. We’ll see.

I started on mostly the same path today as I took on Monday. However when I came out of the General Mills nature preserve, the first place I could take a right, I did. It wasn’t quite as much help as I would have liked, because that street immediately turned back to the left. Oh well. I took another right at the next intersection, which put me back on Monday’s route. However where I turned left to start my path back on Monday, I continued on for another 2 blocks before turning left today. When I got to the end today, I was pretty much at the same point that I ended on Monday. Which means that I ran just a bit further today than Monday, which I think is a good thing. I’m not about to go out and run the route a second time, but I’m begining to feel like I could possibly go a bit longer, perhaps run one more 3 or 4 min portion. In other words, I’m feeling OK at this point.

I got in and immediately walked the dogs, then fed them.Yesterday I took each of them out for a walk around the block. The one that people immediately think of as likely to be a good running companion, my lab, probably never will run very well again. She was hit by a car as a pup, and tends to drag her left front foot. She’s also 11 years old, which puts her pretty close to the end of her expected lifespan. She’s still bouncy when she gets excited, and the foot dragging really only happens when she’s tired, so I’m hoping to get her in a bit better shape by walking her on my off days. We only went around one of the neighborhood blocks, and she was pretty much worn out for the next couple of hours. Not to say she wasn’t willing, but I knew that she needed to get some rest.

My other dog is an American Eskimo. We took a longer walk, for a number of reasons. He’s smaller, so while he is 2 years older than my lab, he’s still in better shape age wise. Mostly though he was nearly always running the retractable lead out to it’s full length. We ended up walking about a mile, and he was still ready for more. Once I’ve finished the 9 week course, I’m thinking of adding a couple of build up days into the mix for me to bring him up to possibly being a running companion. During his walk before he ate this morning, he did something I haven’t seen either of them do in a long time. He took off running pretty much the length of the dog run, looped at the end and ran nearly half the way back then walked back up to the end to wait for us to get there to go in. It’s pretty good to see him get excited like that. Perhaps the walk did them both some good.

One difference about today’s run, vs. Monday’s, is that I didn’t think much about next week during the run. When I started the workout, there was a very light rain. I wouldn’t even call it a drizzel. The rain drops were larger, but very infrequent. Lot’s of dry spots where tree leaves had caught the rain, and no pooling at all. As I was approaching the General Mills preserve, even that died off, and by the time I got to my turn around, I was running on dry pavement. As I got to the end of the workout it was doing the light rain thing again, and I was wondering how things are going to work out weather wise on Friday. I guess I am at the point of saying that Next week will take care of itself.

Ok, after playing around with things, here is the map with my route for today. Ignore the first 4 points, I assure you I never got up to 45 miles per hour. WordPress apparently does not like iframes, so feel free to follow the link, or not. If you would rather, you can paste the kml url from my sebsite to maps.google.com’s search field, and will get pretty much the same thing. http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/April29.kml
View Larger Map

Very late start today. Most Mondays I like to get out and run either before sunrise, or along with the sun rise. However I didn’t really even wake up much before 9 today because of my weekend. (I worked Saturday night, 7 pm to 7 am, then after a quick run home to put radio batteries on the carger, feed and walk the dogs, throw together an extension cable for a radio in the car, and grab a few things I drove down to Montgomery and worked to provide radio assistance for the Iron Man Bike Ride 100 mile leg from 11 am to 3 pm. I may blog more on that later, but not right now. I got to sleep around 9 pm last night and apparently needed it.)

Last Friday I felt like I was fighting to run the entire way, so I was a bit concerned that I would have some of that this morning, but after feeding and walking the dogs, I decided that there was no sense in putting the running off any further. I am glad I did the walking the dogs first however as it was much cooler than I was expecting, and the experience suggested changing to something a bit warmer than a t-shirt and running shorts. I do need to pick up some sweat pants this week though.

I could feel that my body wasn’t fully stretched out when I started. I had to cross a couple of intersections at a light jog to reduce my impact on traffic, and my legs did protest. However after the first 5 min warmup walk when the cue happened to switch to jogging, I pushed and away I went. Of course today’s ‘route’ had me running up hill for this first run of the day. No, the ‘rest’ of the run was not all down hill, but most of the warmup walk had been. About the time the cue came to switch back to walking, I had gotten almost all the way to the top of the hill, and my first ‘turn’. I don’t quite run a square, but running mostly on streets, you kind of go where the roads are.

A short walk to catch my breath and realize that the jog hadn’t put me out of my misery, and that I would probably be OK, and the second cue to run came up and I was jogging down that hill and into the General Mills nature preserve. I’m not entirely sure how much ‘nature’ is preserved with paved walkways, but it may be a lower impact to the environment than having people walking through the mud and so on.

Just about the time I got out of the nature preseve, the second jog ended, and I was back to walking. I could hear traffic ahead of me, and thinking I was pretty sure I hadn’t gone far enough to be hearing Winnetka traffic, I started looking for landmarks. I spotted a tower, and thought, “I don’t recall anything like that being over there” looked around a bit more, and finally spoted the water tower close to home. “Ah, well, we’re too early in this run to be heading for home yet today.” So I back tracked a short distance, and took a right from the path I had been traveling. At the same time I was cued to go back to running.

This time I was going up a much more gentle hill, and to tell the truth, other than seeing a couple of people with dogs, or being followed by a dog, I have to admit that I don’t remember anything specifically memorable about this jog. About the time the jog ended, I made the turn that pointed me back at my route home. So for a short walk to catch my breath again.

Finally the last jog started, and within a block I was on the sidewalk on the road home. I would not say that I ‘felt good’ on this block, I could definately feel that I had been running, and there were quite a few instances where I would have been more than happy to stop and end it, but I have to admit that the fight about running that I felt last Friday wasn’t there. I could go on during this portion of the run. And while there was no ‘cheering’ related to the end of the running portion, and the walk out, I felt pretty good.

I have not run ‘competitively’ since high school. Even then I would not consider my running to be very competitive. I know I never ‘won’ an event, and dead last was not exatly an unusual experience for me.

For the 10 years or so that I was in the army, I went through various experiences related to running. However as far as the army is concerned, you really don’t compete. Oh there are track and field events that the Acadamy has, but I didn’t go to the Point, so those didn’t apply.

That said, the aftermath of Desert Storm did give me the opportunity to get into running a bit more than otherwise. I was stationed at Kobar Towers for about 3 months while they figured out what our priority was for getting back to the states. And there I got into a habit of jogging every morning and night, around the compound. There was an impromptu race held, but I had decided some time back that ‘races’ really were not something I was interested in participating in. I was doing my running, mostly because I didn’t like the idea of sitting around doing nothing but reading, and I wasn’t particularily interested in sitting on top of the towers getting a tan and working with weights.

I’ve never run in an event longer than 3 miles. 5k may only be .16 miles longer, or another 800 feet or so, but from a competition point of view, it is ‘longer’ than 3 miles. And to tell the truth, from my perspective, I don’t need to compete with anyone. I’m already reaping rewards from the workout. Aches and pains I’ve had for several months have been going away. Clothing that has been too tight to wear, is beginning to fit again. (It’s still to tight, but not quite as tight as a month ago.)

And catching the bus last week was only ‘bad’ in that it was definately too cold to be standing around as long as I did.

More on Wednesday.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am diabetic. I have type II diabetes. On it’s own, it probably won’t kill me, though it will probably contribute to my death. Whenever that happens. In a review of what my life has been like, and what my personality is, I have no doubt that I will end up dying of something preventable. I’ve no interest in suicide, but that is far from the only ‘preventable’ cause of death. It would not surprise me to find I die in a car accident, or from doing something that I should know better than to do.

Some things that I’m pretty sure will not kill me are alcohol related events (on my part) and I doubt strongly that I will die directly of smoking related conditions, though indirect exposure may have an impact.

Pretty heavy so far eh? Sorry about that, it will get a bit easier along the way.

Back a few years ago, I realized that I weighed too much. I knew well enough that being overweight was a contributing factor to people becoming diabetic (Type II, Type I is a different set of conditions in most cases.) and in as I had lost an aunt and two uncles to the side effects of Type II Diabetes, I took action. Apparently too late. I did loose weight. I went from a high of 260 lb as I weighed myself in the morning, down to a low of 170 lb. One of the things I was hoping to see happen in the process was that I would regain some of my ability to run.

In High School I ran in cross country, and track. I wasn’t very good, but I did run. Running is also one of the things you do when you are in the Army. When I was deployed in Saudi Arabia, I started running around the towers coumpound twice a day. I had  hoped that I would continue that once I got back to the states, but ‘life’ got in the way. I did enjoy running though, and when I was running, I would weigh in the neighborhood of 160 to 170 lb.

But as I say, once I dropped down to the 170 to 180 lb, I didn’t regain my running ability. I can jog about half a block, maybe a block or two if I’m not carrying anything, but that’s about it.

Somewhere along the line, my heart lost some capacity for pumping blood. About the same time I was diagnosed as diabetic, I had an ultrasound done of my heart and caratoid arteries, and a stress test, and it turns out that my heart is functioning at about 70% efficiency. I.e. about 70% of the blood is ejected from the main ventrical every time my heart pumps. It compensates for this by pumping at about 20-30 bpm higher than the ‘normal’ resting rate of 60 bpm that most people have. If we do have a limited number of heart beats to live through, I could be said to be getting close to living on borrowed time. However that’s not one of my personal beliefs. Additionally it’s only been within the past 20 years that my heart rate has become elevated, so I should have some time to go.

When the results of the ultrasound came in, my doctor suggested that it looked like I had experienced a heart attack at some point in my life. A normal cause of loss of function for the heart is a heart attack. However after my stress test, my cardiologist (I should set up an appointment with him soon as well) noted that while it’s true that I do have reduced function, he does not see any indications in the ekg or the stress test that it was related to a heart attack. We shall see what comes up after I have a followup with him (or another cardiologist.)

One of the reasons that this is of interest, is that simply because I am diabetic, I have a 50% higher risk of dying of heart failure than people in the general population. Another reason to take interest in this is that one of the varients of one of the medications that I take for Diabtes has been linked to heart failure for people with congestive heart disorders. I am not taking that specific medication, however Actos is in the same family, and while the study did not show a strong corelation for Actos, my doctor is concerned, and I understand that concern.

When I visited my doctor about a month ago, I had been off all medication for the better part of 8 months. My fasting blood sugar reading was 280 by the finger stick test, but the lab test showed a reading of 320. Note that a ‘normal’ fasting reading is under 100 milligrams of glucose per decilitre. Just reading over 120 two times is sufficient for a diagnosis of Diabetes. I don’t think I’ve had 2 fasting readings under 120 in the past month. For the purpose of that statement a ‘fasting’ reading is a reading that is taken more than 8 hours after my last meal. A contributing factor to this situation is that when you have not eaten for some time, your liver goes into starvation mode, and starts converting fat into glucose and dropping that into your blood stream.

As most diabetics know, one of the log term indicators of good control over sugar in your diet is what is usually called an A1C test. The way this test works is that red blood cells are ‘damaged’ by excess glucose in the blood stream. Your bone marow produces red blood cells, and they have a 90 day lifespan in your blood stream after which they are filtered out by your kidneys and ‘pissed away.’ the A1C test takes a snapshot of the damage to the red blood cells in a blood sample, and assigns a ‘damage’ assesment. I am not sure how most people consider the number, but if you think of it as a loss of carrying capacity for oxyogen in a blood cell, we can work with the system. ‘Normal’ blood sugar levels will introduce some damage to the red blood cells, The value is between 5% and 7%. When I visited my doctor, the value their equipment at the clinic was able to report was >14%.

I don’t expect to be getting an A1C evaluation done when I visit the doctor this time. If I do, I do not know if it would be meaningful. Oh, it might show a reading of 12 or 13%, which might back up the testing that I have been doing for myself, but it is not a given. The damage to blood cells over the period of the 2 months prior to my last visit doesn’t ‘improve’, though it should be ‘lesser’. The problem with that sort of an assessment is that it took about 2 weeks for me to get what I would call my daily average under 200. And I still spike over 200 after meals. That may improve depending on the medication that I start taking, but the most promising medications are some that I very likely won’t be getting, as they are the most expensive, and their long term side effects are still unknown. One of those may help with my overnight blood sugar rise, as it basicly tells the liver to hold off on the conversion of fat to glucose. It appears to be doing wonders for the son of a co-worker of mine.

I do wonder at times if having liposuction would help. The logic behind that is that one of the reasons that people become type II diabetic is that fat cells appear to be doing what they can to stay in shape. (I.e. stay filled with fats.) They do this by increasing the bodies resistance to Insulin. (Called obviously enough insulin resistance.) The question becomes if someone looses half a liter or so of fat cells via liposuction, (that’s about a lb of weight, but a quarter of the volume of a 2 liter bottle) does their resistance to insulin go down noticably. The supporting question would be what varieties of fat or other body cells increases the resistance of the body to insulin. If the predominate variety of these cells is those around the abdomen and legs, then a reduction in the number of these cells fhrough liposuction may have a positive influence. On the other hand if it is the variety of fat cells that are within the muscles of the body, then while the total fat cell volume goes down, the percentage of fat cells increasing insulin resistance goes up. I don’t think this would have a specifically negative result, however not having a positive effect would tend to be disheartening to many people.

Am I ‘getting better?’ Well that depends upon what you consider to be ‘getting better.’ I am not expecting science to come up with a magic bullet to cure type II diabetes. The best that I can hope for there is to ‘control’ my blood sugar levels and over the long term hopefully the damage to my body will be reduced. Some of the side effects of diabetes includes taking longer to heal damage to the body. Some damage will not ‘heal’ of course. If you tear a tendon off of it’s bone or muscle, it doesn’t self correct. The best you can hope for is that you get surgury done to reattach the tendon with stitches. However some of the other side effects of normal ‘wear and tear’ to the body do ‘self repair.’

As an example, when you work out at the gym, walk or run, one of the side effects of the workout is that in burning the sugar in your blood, your muscles generate lactic acid. This acid ‘damages’ the muscles, which is why a day or two after a heavy workout, your muscles get sore. Likewise most of use experience scrapes and cuts from day to day that scab over and we go on, and a week or so later the scab falls off and we have a light scar there. The effect of Diabetes is that your body’s repair system does not work well in a high sugar environment. So a diabetic with an uncontrolled blood sugar level will spend more than a couple of days with those sore muscles, it may be weeks or longer. Likewise scratchs may never seem to heal up.

One of the first thing that people who have been living with uncontrolled diabetes discover after getting their blood sugar under control is that the scabs that just wouldn’t go away finally do. Doctors and nurses who were working with me when I was first diagnosed with diabetes said that I was going to feel much better. In part this would have been due to muscles finally repairing, but also joints swell as the body works to get the excess sugar out of the blood stream into other places.

My first obvious experience was that I didn’t have to ‘pee’ all the time. But I never really felt bad when I was first diagnosed with Diabetes. At least not in the muscle aches, back aches, joint problems varieties. This time, and a few other times when I know my blood sugar had been elevated for some time, I felt it in my lower back, and I am still feeling issues with one of my arms that I’m expecting to see some improvement over the next month with. Though I will discuss it with my doctor tomorrow.

In the sense of not feeling that pain, yes I am getting better. Still some ways to go, but that is likely to be the case for some time. So my response is ‘Yes, I am getting better.’

I hope you are too.

Health…

One of the primary reasons I chose to lose weight, was that I had two uncles and an aunt who have died as a result of side effects of Diabetes. I had taken a look at where I was headed, and didn’t like the direction.

Some would say I waited too long. Actually I may have increased the speed with which my Diabetes kicked in, but Insulin Resistance appears to start as much as 20 years before people are recognized as being type two diabetic.

When I stopped in to see my doc, I had a fasting blood sugar level of 368. The threshold for considering a person to be diabetic is 125 (on two separate fasting blood tests.) In other words I was nearly three times the threshold.

A lot has changed, and I have a few other health issues that are of concern to me, but that was pretty much the start of things.

I would hesitate to say that my blood sugar is ‘under control’ at this time. It has only been two months since I was diagnosed, and my A1C at the time was 14.2%. I would be surprised if I was under 10% at the moment, and while I hope to be under 8% in a month, I don’t expect to be yet.

Obviously more to follow.

-Rusty