When it Rains.
So many things are happening at the moment. I got a call I’ve been long expecting last night: my father is having heart trouble. We don’t know how serious it is yet, but it sounds pretty serious to me. Shortness of breath is always bad. He’s been in a wheelchair for something like eighteen years now, and doesn’t work too hard at controlling his diabetes. It’s always only ever been a matter of time. They’re going to refer him to a cardiologist, it seems. We’ll see.
My tenant abruptly abandoned my home in St. Louis. With no tenant and no real contacts there anymore, I’ve decided to sell it. So, I’m down a decent amount of income and additionally have to make all the repairs you have to make to a home to sell it. In this case, it will include the demolition of a detached garage. This is going to be very expensive, but I ought to get it back if the house sells well. I’m told the market is good.
I’m trying to sell my house in ECC too, of course, and it isn’t selling. But now, with a drop in income, I’m thinking of taking it off the market. It’s cheaper to own than rent, now that I’ve fixed all the problems. I’ll just have to see, I guess.
It’s a lot to do and a lot of stress and I don’t know what I’m up for at the moment. But I’m sober, I’m as sane as alcoholics get, and I’m better at handling situations that used to baffle me than I was before… when they baffled me. I can figure all this stuff out. And I may not be able to contribute as much to Dad’s situation as I’d like in the short term. And I may not be able to move to the nice fancy apartment I wanted to. At least not yet.
But my situation is not dire. I’m complaining because I have two houses to sell. Because I have lost some of my disposable income. Because it’s all a big pain in the ass. Well, guess what. Most of those are luxury problems. I know how to manage them. My personal life is in good shape. I have a job which pays all my bills and then some. And I’m healthy and happy when my stress levels are not spiked.
The only real problem here is that my father is possibly dying. Which is kind of unsurprising given his health, behaviors, and age. And even this problem, from my own perspective – which is the point of writing here – is common to most people. Middle-aged men like myself begin to have to consider the deaths of their parents. My father is about to turn 75, and has been sick for a long time. He’s going to die sooner rather than later, though I have no real idea what “sooner” means.
But this is life. Life ends. And the rest of us go on with our own lives as we can. We’ll see what happens.
An Unfathomable Achievement.
So, during my little break, something wonderful happened. I did it. I achieved something I’ve been working toward for longer than I knew I was working toward it. A bit more than two weeks ago, on a Sunday morning in Philadelphia, BB and I ran a half-marathon, and set a new benchmark for ourselves.
If you remember my last two race recaps, I’ve been hurting a bit, even though it hasn’t really affected my performance. My trainer says it’s a high-hamstring strain. Basically, some muscle deep in the crease between my hamstring and my glute is torn or strained or something and running on it hurts. But pain is complicated, and it feels pretty badass to go out and run like hell despite hurting.
The race was called The Love Run, and it is a challenging half-marathon run through downtown Philadelphia and then out through the park on the western bank of the Schuylkill (SKOO-kul) river. It’s challenging because there is a hill at mile 7 that makes Pike’s Peak look like a speedbump.
OK not really, but it’s a hell of a hill that lasts about a mile, and goes around several demoralizing blind turns where you think you’re done but you’re not. Then you have to come down. Up is what everyone thinks about when they talk about how hard running hills is. But down – down hurts. Jarring, quad-shredding descents that sap you for the long flats after.
BB and I were not expecting to run this fast. It was our last road race of the spring. I had run a hard 10 miler only the prior week. BB had been struggling with calf and foot issues. My hamstring and glute were still singing. We intended to just go jog out a nice little half-marathon and then go have some pancakes. I wore my TomTom MSC, but didn’t ever once look at it.
We just ran.
For the first few miles I set the pace and BB ran beside me. But it felt like a good pace, and I could tell that BB was feeling alright, and even feeling aggressive, because she drank water at the fueling tables on the jog. She doesn’t like to drink while jogging (does anyone?) but she did that day. That, more than anything, told me she was feeling like she had the legs for a hard run.
Then we hit the hill. BB has strength going up hills that I can’t begin to conjure. She led the way with a hard pace straight up while everyone around us slowed to a walk. I parked myself behind her and gave everything I had. My heart rate soared. My legs burned, and my left hamstring started in on Il Dolce Suono. And then we came down the other side.
Everything hurt. For the last four miles, everything hurt. But we passed a clock or two along the way, and we knew we were close to pace for a personal record. It’s hard to tell using the gun-time clocks. We knew we’d passed the start line about 7 minutes after the elite runners. Exactly how many we didn’t know, and sexagesimal mental subtraction is difficult after ten miles at pace anyway.
But we knew we were on a solid pace. And I knew I was hurting. And we ran.
All the races we’ve run in Philadelphia start and end in the same place. Unlike Washington DC, where they might be anywhere. You cross the river toward the Art Museum, and come up a little hill and then go around this big traffic circle, and through the finish gate. I was expecting it to be about a quarter-mile after the blind curve. But this race it was much sooner. As soon as we crested the short incline, we could see it in front of us. We took off at a sprint.
I grabbed BB’s hand and we raced over the final timing mat. BB looked down, stopped her watch, and then shouted and jumped in the air. I stopped my watch. I looked down:
1:59.
We did it. We ran under two hours. Less than two years after my first half-marathon, in Pittsburgh, where I ran in 2:38. In less than two years, we’ve taken almost forty minutes off of my half-marathon time. We’ve gone from 12 minute miles to 9 minute miles. I was in the top 40% of men my age, and 47% of men overall.
I have hit every running goal I’ve ever set for myself now. I guess I need to think up some new ones. And while I’m sure I will, and I’ll be happy when I hit it, if I do, there’s something kind of magical about the big odometer effect of breaking 2 hours. I don’t think I’ll ever reach another goal like that again. I won’t break 4 hours in the full marathon, I just don’t have the legs. And that’s OK.
But I’m proud of myself. This was hard. For years, I have run. For years, I have improved. Day in and day out I have worked and struggled and driven. Some days I haven’t had much. Some days I have had more than I knew. I’m proud of myself. I’m grateful for BB and for my sobriety and for all the things I’ve been given that have let me get to this place.
I feel like an Olympian.
BB with her medal.
The Peculiar Draw of Social Media.
I tried Facebook again. It didn’t work. The algorithms are scary good. I never gave it access to my phone. I never gave it any personal information except my birthday – not where I live, or work. I never sent friend requests to my co-workers or indeed, anyone who lives in ECC. And yet the “People you might know” suggestions included people in my office and my personal trainer. So I re-deleted my account.
I know that there are algorithms working in the background of multiple websites (probably including wordpress) doing similar things, scraping similar information. But I don’t want to make it so easy.
I have taken another hiatus from my primary twitter account, and obviously, I took a short hiatus here as well. I don’t know what I’m doing on social media these days. I like connecting with people, but the communities I’ve found end up so toxic. The world of academia online has wonderful aspects, and yet is also full of hate and viciousness that rivals any hate-group.
I’ve maintained my professional account which never wades into politics or the culture wars. But that also means that I can’t really connect with people there, because I’m deliberately excluding myself from the biggest topics of conversation. When I’m restricting my own expressions and communications (as is appropriate on a named, professional account), it limits my ability to befriend people.
I imagine taking a long break here to write other things. But in almost three weeks away from this place, I wrote exactly nothing on any topic. Blogging and twitter feel like my natural homes, for long-form and short-form online interactions. But what I bring to those spaces is not particularly valuable. As I wrote before, very few people read this. And in the communities I’ve found on twitter, I end up railing pointlessly against the hateful rhetoric, and functionally excluding myself because I don’t flow along with the mob.
It’s hard to find the right community. I’m trying to pivot from an academic-based online experience to an athletics-based one, because the amateur athletic community is a lot more welcoming and supportive, and seems less likely to eat its young. Academics love nothing more than picking clean the bones of the unorthodox. An irony among those so often excluded when young for being different.
Sometimes it seems that the marginalized create closed-door societies among themselves. Wounded by exclusion, they create exclusive systems in mimicry of the power structures that marginalized them in the first place. It makes me sad to see it among my brilliant and capable colleagues. And it reveals how remarkable AA truly is by contrast.
So I don’t know where I belong. Not a true academic, I will never be a real member of that community. I am not that person. And I do not admire the communities that academics build.
Maybe I belong here. Whispering my arrogant lamentations into a void.
Time to be Done?
Well, friends, Infactorium’s domain name is expiring in less than a week, and I think it’s time to let it go. I don’t write much about what I needed to write about when I started this blog many years ago now. I’m sober. I’m happy. My life is stable and secure. I have a loving partner and a good career. I am healthy and I am fit. And almost no one reads anything here anyway. If I am writing for myself, I can use paper.
I’ve done what I needed to do when I started here. It’s time to let go, I think.
The Ways I’m a Racist.
I’ve been kicking this post around in my head for a long time now. When it comes to race and racism, I have a parade of credentials. I have black and Hispanic family members. In third grade I punched a kid out for calling my friend Jonathan “a nigger”. I agonize over that last sentence. Is it better to self-censor, or tell my history as it was? I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer. I don’t know if there is one. Certainly not one everyone can agree on.
I’ve worked hard in my life to recognize my privileges. At least, I have for the past ten years or so. And I work to recognize my own contributions to my success, and not diminish what I’ve done to strictly privilege. But there is no doubt, I am privileged in ways that few others are. And there is simply no way to untangle privilege from perspective. My privileges influence how I see myself and the world, and they have indelibly infected me with racism.
There are many ways I’m racist. I’m aware of it. I try to act against it. I try not to let my first impulse direct my behavior. But I don’t believe it’s possible to prevent it entirely. I simply have to remain both aware and vigilant. And then take deliberate steps to avoid behaviors which disadvantage others based on my own inexpungeable first reactions.
When I see advertisements with persons of color as the stars, I automatically assume that the products advertised are not being advertised to me. But I don’t make the corresponding assumption that when white people are in ads, that the products are aimed only at white people. White people seem to represent “everyone”, but others represent only their specific groups.
The thoughtful part of me knows that that’s not true. But that part takes time to engage. It takes deliberate effort. If I don’t make that effort, it doesn’t happen.
At work, despite knowing that we have many excellent physicians and surgeons who are persons of color, when I see a person of color in scrubs, my first reaction is not “doctor”. It may be “nurse”, frequently it’s “environmental”. When I saw an Asian man in scrubs who was on our environmental crew, it surprised me.
This is a situation that am closer to instinctively correcting. I treat everyone at work with the same respect whether they are environmental or a world-renowned surgeon, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian. And I diligently avoid making assumptions about people whose job titles I don’t know. I work at it, because it’s not appropriate to make assumptions about people based on race.
But I do. And I think we all do. It’s easy to say, “That’s not me, I don’t stereotype people.” But I do. I have to work to correct them. I wish I were better at it. I wish it were more natural. I wish it didn’t take effort. But it’s not an effort I’m ashamed to make or to talk about. If privileged people don’t make the effort, then we consolidate our privilege among ourselves. That’s unjust.
I’ve written a fair bit about sexism. Racism is more frightening for me. I’m more afraid of getting it wrong. I’m more disturbed by my inability to root it out entirely in myself. I wish I knew how to finish the job, but I don’t. Especially because one of the few ways I’m not privileged – my mental health – allows me at least some small notion of how it feels to be unfairly pigeonholed.
But it isn’t the same. And it doesn’t undo all of the small ways that racism infiltrates my perspectives. It’s too easy to say, “Society is racist, but I’m not.” Society is made of all of us. And most of us – of all races – carry stereotypes about the others. The stereotypes I carry contribute to injustice in society.
We are all racists. But our racism does not contribute equally to the injustice around us. People like me, highly privileged and economically mobile, disproportionately enforce racial disparities simply by failing to work against the implicit and unacknowledged explicit biases we carry. We need to acknowledge them aloud so that we can work more effectively against them.
The Indignities of Age.
Yesterday a fifty-five-ish year old man stuck his finger up my butt, and I paid him to do it. Well, my insurance company did, anyway. It was a deeply unpleasant experience, but there’s no reason to believe that there’s anything wrong with my prostate. Which is good. Because I have warning signs.
Now, I’m not in any high risk group, from an ethnic or familial perspective. Or age. For the most part, men in my situation are not expected to start getting regular exams until they are 50 or so. I should have had a decade left. But I have warning signs.
I pee frequently. Now, that’s most likely due to my insulin resistance. Despite the fact that I take good care of myself these days, and only eat three cupcakes at a time once in a great while, and usually after a long run when I do, I am still insulin resistant. My morning blood glucose is too high (usually in the 103-111 range). My long-term blood glucose measure (A1c) is ok, at 5.5. But even that is toward the top of the normal range.
One way our bodies deal with elevated sugar is to pee it out a lot. So I do. And while my blood sugar is not alarmingly high – i.e., I don’t expect to suffer any complications at these levels – my body is responding by doing what it can to lower it. I need to eat less sugar, and I need to lose some body fat.
But insulin resistance is not the only reason that men pee a lot. Another reason is an enlarged prostate, which can be cancer. While I don’t have the familial indicators for that, having symptoms is more important than having family history. So I went to the doc and asked what to do, and he said that a prostate check was indicated.
So I had one. It was no fun, but it could have been worse. And now I know that I don’t have an enlarged prostate. So I don’t have to pursue a bunch of other, frightening medical remedies.
The doc agreed that my exercise and diet were doing alright by my blood sugar and said if I wanted to control my frequent urination I could take Flomax. I declined. I don’t need to start down the inevitable road of polypharmacy just to pee a little less frequently. I’m surviving now. It’s not a real problem. I just wanted to rule out more serious things. We did a urinalysis as well, and I’ll get those results tomorrow or the next day I think.
In the meantime, I need to try to eat less, or smarter. I can’t really exercise more. I’m doing a lot. But hopefully I’ll be able to drop down a few pounds one of these days and maybe that’ll have an effect. Maybe it won’t.
But it’s not worth worrying about something when there’s an easy check. So men, if you are in the groups, or of the age, or have some symptoms, go get your prostate checked. It’s no fun, but the knowledge is worth it.
Triumph!
The Cherry Blossom 10 miler was, from a physical perspective, the best run of my life. I felt fit, I had the calories I needed on board, I peed 8 minutes before the start, I was in the right corral. It was 37° Fahrenheit and windy. I was in shorts and my windproof running shell.
At the start, I was chatting with two women who looked like they had 20 years on me and were still going to blow me out of the water. We walked up to the start before I even really realized what was happening and then we were off. I just started running.
I saw the 8:00 min/mile pacer just ahead and knew I didn’t have to try to keep up with him. But I didn’t know where the 9:00 pacer was. Somewhere behind me, presumably. I stayed within sight of the eight minute guy for a long time.
There were a few times when the wind really began to whip in my face, as we ran past the Kennedy Center, and over a couple of bridges. But I felt like it was at my back more that it was blowing me down. And the cold wind helped me shed heat as I was putting down some hard miles.
I didn’t even look at my watch until 4.5 miles. And I was running too hard to do the math in my head. I could just tell that I was “ahead of pace”. I hoped to stay that way. It was around this time my feet went numb. I toyed with the idea of letting up pace to see if lighter pounding would ease it, but I decided that an hour of numbness wasn’t going to let gangrene set in and I kept running. They let up by the 10k mark.
At the 5 mile split pad my watch showed 42 minutes. This was when I realized I was going really fast (for me). At 10k it was 52 and change, about the fastest I’d ever run one. I gulped down Gatorade at the first two stops at full pace and at 5 miles I squeezed a 150 kcal shot of peanut butter and honey into my mouth and choked it down.
The rest of the race was an exercise in not surrendering to the gathering ache in my hamstring and my quads. I couldn’t tell how fast I was going, but I knew I was ahead of my 9:00 min/mile goal pace. By a fair margin. The last two miles were harder but I started to be able to make calculations:
“I can run 2 11 minute miles and still beat my goal.”
“So run faster. Crush your goal.”
I continued running as hard as I could, though my pace slowed some. I was starting to get hungry, and I was clearly out of fuel. If it were a half-marathon, I’d have been in trouble. But without having a real plan, I had chosen a good pace to be able to finish strong in a 10 miler.
There’s a low-grade hill toward the end before the downhill finish. It hurt a lot. Then I rounded the corner and came on the finish faster than I expected. I crossed the line in 1:25:23. Four minutes and thirty seven seconds ahead of my goal time.
So I managed an 8:32 pace for a full 10 miles. The last two were my slowest, at 8:45. The fastest was my first, at 8:13. I never knew I could run this fast for this long. It wasn’t that long ago I was incredibly excited to be finishing 15 minute miles.
I missed running with BB. The race was more work and less fun without her. I’m proud of my accomplishment but it was a good reminder of why I really do this. Health and companionship. Speed is a nice ancillary thing to enjoy. It’s not the goal.
But yesterday I felt fast. I finished in the top 36% of men my age, and 37% of men overall. Solidly better than average. I’ll take it.
The First Meeting.
Your first AA meeting is almost always scary. I felt, and most of us feel, humiliated. We’re in one of the darkest places of our lives, usually the darkest of them all. We’ve fucked everything up, and we don’t know how to fix it. We’re lost, terrified, ashamed, and befuddled. In my case, I was taken to my first meeting by a rehab. Some are ordered there by a judge. Most find their own way in.
We had a man in my men’s meeting Wednesday evening who was at his first ever meeting. He’d had a personal loss, and gone off the rails. For nearly a year, he’d been drinking and gambling as hard as he could. He came to his first meeting and was obviously humiliated and afraid. I hope we did right by him. We all gave him our numbers, and I talked to him after the meeting a bit. Told him to call. He hasn’t. But he might.
No matter what you’ve done when you walk into your first AA meeting, someone there has done something you think is worse. In my meetings, I’ve known rapists and thieves and murderers, batterers, embezzlers, child abusers, and child molesters. All of us just trying to find a way to stay sober and improve ourselves. We are the worst people in the world, until we find our way into the rooms.
Then we change. If we do the work, we change. Slowly. One step at a time. Never finished. But we change. Alcohol fuels our darkest impulses, and it fuels our entitlement. We simply take and do whatever we want, and we allow ourselves to ignore, diminish, deny, or simply not care about the consequences to other people. When we take out the alcohol, and address the issues underneath it, we recover and make make amends.
It’s not easy. But luckily it’s very simple. And it works, if you do the work. Go to meetings, don’t drink in between. Get a sponsor, do the steps. Come find what I’ve got. You can have it too. Even if you think you’re the lowest of the low, the worst of the worst. That there’s no way up. There’s a way up. We’ve got the ladder.
Well I’ve Done It.
I signed up for a triathlon. I am immediately scared. Not for the fitness elements. I can do all that. It’s the technical stuff I’m worried about. Having the gear down. Knowing the rules. The transitions. Bike maintenance. I don’t know how to change a tire, etc.. Luckily, I have lots of friends who have done triathlons, and so I’ll have good information going in. And BB can teach me how to change bike tires.
I signed up for the New Jersey State Triathlon, in Princeton. It’s a tiny bit short compared with other Olympic-length triathlons. There’s no official distance, I don’t think, but the sport seems to be settling on the 1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run. The NJST has a 37km bike but is otherwise the same.
Of those distances, the 1.5km swim (a little short of a mile), is far and away the most daunting. I’ve recently ridden more than 37km on the bike, and should be able to do it in less than two hours with no trouble. I routinely run further than 10km, basically every weekend. (For the metric impaired, 37km is about 23 miles, and 10km is about 6.2 miles.)
From what I’ve been told, an Olympic triathlon is somewhere between half-marathon and full-marathon effort level. But it takes a lot out of a lot more of your body than running does. Most people are most challenged by the swim, and I respect that. I need to find a pool and start swimming. And do a couple of open-water swims as well.
But I was born in the water. I literally cannot remember a time I couldn’t swim. I’m not fast, but I’m comfortable, and I’m a strong swimmer. I know swimming in a crowd will be different, and swimming in a lake will be different from swimming in a pool. But I’m confident in the water and while I’m a bit anxious, I’m not afraid.
I don’t know if I’ll like the triathlon. And even if I do, it’ll never be an event that will be my standard event. The half-marathon will remain my go-to race. I just love it. But this is a fitness challenge that I want to set for myself. I’d like, maybe, one day, to do a half-Ironman. It appeals to me emotionally.
But I can imagine a world where I do one triathlon, and one full marathon (this year we’re running the Philadelphia marathon), each year. And then 3-5 half-marathons. That keeps me running, keeps me collecting medals, and keeps me healthy and moving forward. And prioritizes the best thing about the racing: running with BB.
So. I’m way out of my comfort zone with this. But I like the idea of the challenge. Who knows. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe I’ll love it. Maybe I’ll fold up and crash and not be able to do it. But I’ll find out, rather than just dreaming about it.
Body Issues and Men.
I struggle with body image in a similar way that I struggle with competence. Some days I feel like I’m fit and strong and sexy and attractive. Some days I feel fat and ugly and doughy and obese. I rarely feel much in between. It’s difficult for me to see myself as I am. Objectivity doesn’t seem to exist. I have distinctly different experiences of my body, for example, before and after exercise.
Infactorium 