Nepal is still Struggling

Nepal is mostly out of the news here in the US. Celebrities are back in the news and a few protests and arrests are making headlines. 

This is so typical. A tragedy happens in a very poor place and before it has much of any resolution, the rich countries move on. Prove me wrong.

I Live in Iowa: Week 201

As life goes, sometimes it picks up. This past week ended up being a busy enough week. At work we ran into an issue, and it has no easy solution. Which means it ends up requiring quite a bit of time. I even worked a little on Saturday and Sunday thanks to this issue as well. One hard aspect of this is that designing out the issue would be challenging, or at least expensive. You know, work can take it out of me. I try to look at this experience, and work in general more as a learning experience, and to state the facts and let others make the opinions. When I offer an opinion it so commonly gets shot down or argued against. I'd like to make more decisions, and maybe I can, although it is difficult when I have the least seniority in the group. 

Running went wellish. I ran three times for a total of seven miles. Unfortunately my left fibula, which I ran 90 miles on two weeks ago without pain, started to hurt again. Great. So I'm working with some doctors to figure it out. 

Saturday morning my parents started texting me at 7 AM about the earthquake in Nepal. Wow! What a situation! I have to board a plane in five minutes, so this will be short. Dawa Steven Sherpa, head of Asian Trekking, is my best source for info. He is working with a Turkish rescue team and posting his resource needs on Facebook. Looks like diesel and satellite communications bandwidth are two things he could use right now. Everyone I know is safe except for one of my Sherpa friends. I assume he is simply out of communication range. 

Some Days Are Harder

Nepal... What a tragedy. What a bad day. What a bad week. 

#NepalEarthquake

Here's what I know, and it's not much:

• An earthquake 7.5-7.8 magnitude, depending on the source, struck about 80 km (50 miles) north west of Kathmandu on the way to Pokara, a major city in Nepal, and thus a well traveled road. There were also a series of aftershocks, maybe even 15 of them up to a magnitude of 6.6. 
• Confirmed dead is over 600 right now in Nepal and 700 total when you count India, China, and Bangladesh. 
• There seemed to be avalanches on Mt. Everest both in the Khumbu icefall and on Pumori, the other side of the valley. All of the members of Asian Trekking are okay, and the China Tibet Mountaineering Association said that there are not reports of injuries or casualties on the north side of Everest. Apparently the Everest ER test was destroyed in an avalanche and Asian Trekking is functioning as triage center with Dr. Nima, who I will vouch for as an awesome man and very effective doctor, very busy. Dawa Steven Sherpa is in Kathmandu and he is my resource via Facebook.

Here is some background:

• In 1934 Nepal had a similar 8.2 magnitude earthquake that did significant damage and killed over ten thousand.
• In October 2005 in the Kashmir part of Pakistan there was a 7.6 magnitude earthquake that killed 80,000+ and displaced over two million people. I actually volunteered to go to Pakistan to use my mountaineering skills along with about 50 other mountaineers, some of them very big names, to access some of the remote locations that had been cut off from land slides, but ultimately governments and militaries stepped in to help and our little mountaineering band was deemed not necessary.
• The Indian subcontinent is sliding up onto Asia, pushing the Himalaya higher, we all know this. Unfortunately plate tectonics don't always move nice and slowly.

Here is my speculation:

Given the poverty and ruggedness of Nepal I doubt most buildings there are built to withstand earthquakes. I also doubt that any numbers we are hearing in the media right now are accurate because communication is normally difficult due to the ruggedness in Nepal. And yes, while I imagine I could have done some good being over there in person and I have eagerly checked Everest updates this year as my friends go to camp one and two, I am rather happy this Saturday morning to be sitting in Dubuque, Iowa.

One Shot, One Opportunity

I'm going to Maine next week and I have to say I am extremely excited! I'm on a secret mission (or something like that) for work. It is a "mission" I have been lobbying to go on for the last 11 months and it's actually happening! The results of this short trip will be studied and direct quite a bit of my future work, as well as my team's future work. Point being, it's exciting. There is also some pressure to get it right. This is a one shot thing, and if we screw it up it will cost months of time and quite a bit of money. We're going to learn a lot!

Sometimes we only have one shot, one chance to get it right. Fortunately in things like long distance running or engineering that one shot might take a week of dedicated time or hours and hours of running, so it's not like one pitch in a baseball game, but the idea is the same. I try to take this attitude to most of the things I do. It's like 60% the next step, perfectly. It's why I kept walking for 10 painful hours at the 24 hour world championships, I don't know for sure I will get another chance, and I wanted to know I kept going and gave it everything.

When you give your best, you know there are no questions left at the end, that was your best. No one is perfect, and your best might not be as good as someone else's best, but if you really give your best, chances are you will be surprised how good that is.

What I've learned about Magnesium

I've been taking magnesium supplements for a week and a half now, and read a dozen articles on the Internet. Here's what I've learned, with strong confidence:

• You basically can't overdose on magnesium. You can, but the amount you would have to consume is prohibitive because the body will more or less just not digest it. It seems to pass through you like fiber, and give you diarrhea if you have too much. This is an important point because iron and caffeine are two other performance enhancers (in my definition of performance enhancer) and you can fatally overdose on them.
• Magnesium enables muscles to relax. It does not contract muscles or make them more powerful or help with oxygen distribution or dull the sensation of pain. The challenge I faced was that both my quads and hamstrings were probably locally short of magnesium so when I tried to step, I could not get either the front or back of my leg to relax when the other side was contracting and thus felt great pain trying to take every step. Similarly I vividly remember being on the table one time and one of the medical students, Katie, was trying to stretch me telling me, "relax" and I was screaming in pain, "I'm trying!" Yet I just could not. By the way, taking a magnesium supplement before going to bed is great, I have been sleeping so well!
• Number 569, Guiliana Frigero, is the one that suggested I needed magnesium at one point well into the darkness of the night as she walked past me, hours after I had been struggling to walk.

Roy Pirrung and  Guiliana Frigero, the woman who suggested Magnesium as she threw the hammer down passing me.

There are other potential benefits of magnesium, but the truth is, they are more contested and generally less well studied.

Maybe there is a placebo effect, but I have learned that if it works, it works, and magnesium has greatly helped my recovery. Talking to other ultra runners, I am not the first to have a magnesium shortage. At least, other ultra runners have felt much better after upping their magnesium consumption.

Relevant links:

Dr. Hyman's blog on magnesium and relaxation and doctors prescribing pills. 

WebMD's take on magnesium.

A Competitor article on magnesium.

To provide the opposing view that magnesium is not necessary: S!Caps.

An article about how difficult it is to measure magnesium in the body.

It's the hard times we learn from.

Sometimes you have to suffer to learn the lesson. It hurts. You may bleed. You will cry. But! You know what? In some strange way these things happen for our benefit. The 24 hour world championships hurt more than I have ever hurt before! Now I know about magnesium and it is a mistake I doubt I will ever make again. In hind sight of maybe another 15 really competitive years it's nice to learn the lesson so early.