I Live in Iowa: Week 47

Sorry this is late. Of course, this is my blog I'll post when I want to, post when I want to...

I spent the week sick and coughing and hacking up mucus. It was unpleasant. As a result I only worked about 37 hours and ran 55 miles. Which is significantly down from the week before of 43 and 82 respectively. It's terrible that I measure my weeks in terms of hours worked and miles run. While I love numbers, they are such a shallow way to describe something. For example, ladies, if a man came up to you and said, "wow you are totally a seven," I would expect that the relationship would be over about as quickly as it started.

I could try and go into mild detail about what I did at work, but suffice to say that I worked on finite element simulations helping give equipment a longer fatigue life. I more or less worked two half days, one because of sickness and another because I went to watch the NCAA D3 Indoor Track and Field Championships. That is really what I would like to talk about.

First, on the coaching side, it was a sparse week at practice. It seemed like only one or two distance runners showed up each day. My own running was pretty ugly as well. I even took Monday off because I was sick. On the positive side I worked out with one of my training partners for the first time since October. He had a stress fracture. He is back now and I look forward to more training sessions with someone.

Going round and round... I feel a little obstinate that I did not go to the doctor when I had a cold. I counted the number of people that I know that are doctors, premed, in medical school, nurses, or other medical support staff (dentists don't count for this example) and it is at least 2% of the people I know. It is not that I do not trust doctors, it is just that I feel doctors have failed time and again to truly help me. I did not have kidney stones when they said I did. I was not going to stop running when they told me to stop running. When they tried to sell me orthotics I said no, and healed just fine. When they gave me an inhaler for asthma I used it for a week and quit asthma because I felt the inhaler did not help me breathe better. Although, to doctors credit, antibiotics have worked wonders on me and so has anti-fungal stuff. You should have seen the athlete's foot I had in the summer of 2005... (But he was an intern...) I don't intend to die of stubbornness, but I don't intend to whine and complain to get some pills every time life is not perfect.

Anyway, indoor nationals deserves it's own article, tune in tomorrow.

I hope that you all had either a good week, or a bad week so that you appreciate your blessings more. We never appreciate the bountiful blessings in our life until after we did not have those particular blessings.