Hey Y'all.
Clearly the whole National Blog Month thing didn't go very well for me. I did however do a 5k on November 20th. It was right above freezing. My lungs weren't very happy campers (read at least 6 puffs of ventolin was involved in this adventure). I didn't have a very good finish time: 45:37, official times TBA. I did jog quite a bit. I also felt like I was breathing shards-o-glass. I'm pretty sure I finished last. I was too busy balling my hands up in side my jacket to take pictures. The temperature didn't get me so much as the wind. It was an okay time. I think the fitness goals for the winter are going to shift more towards swimming or rowing or something indoorsy.
As you can see quite a spikey intermittent forward motion fitness event. I know the distance and time are a bit off. I started it a little early and ended it a little late(the water cooler was mighty tempting). I did get to try out a new bra "shock absorber" quite nice, really keeps the girls from bouncing pretty well. The course was around St. Louis University's campus, which is decently pretty. The markings would've been better had the weather not been kind of a foggy/misty/dampness outside since they used sidewalk chalk. All on sidewalk which was nice. Quite a few decent hills which is where most of the slow downs in speed comes from. The track club which puts the event together was out at every turn to point you in the right direction. Maybe about 50-75 people did the event, which was a benefit for the canned food drive/campus food pantry in the holiday season. It was good to get back in the saddle even if it wasn't a PR by a long shot.

At present fitness is kind of on hold. I'm working on a nice cold thing that has gone down to my lungs. It was up in my head most of this week and then moved down into my chest over the last 24 hours or so. Which is fun or something. So far just a nasty cough and short of breath. Not much peakflow drop which is good I guess. Homework has got me pretty well buried. Finals are not this week but the next. I'll try to be more bloggy, as finals permit.

. I was just so worn out from work and class and everything. The last 36hrs or so I've been brewing a nice flare after having my period last week on top of some ?fall allergy? conguestion. The conguestion has apparently migrated down into the lungs and is not playing nice. It feels like I'm running a 5k.

I don't mean to keep making excuses for why I'm not writing on here. I really do have intentions of getting back to writing on here. The transition to living away from home at State University has been slightly less than smooth. I've also had a bit of a hard time acclimating to the warmer weather. Between the stress of the new surroundings, recovering from the latex encounter over Memorial Day weekend, and all the day to day stuff that happens in the life of a busy college student I've not had the energy to write. The lungs have been atypically cranky spent a lot of time in the lime green which just zaps the energy. The fact of the matter is also that it is almost 5k of daily walking to get from my ResHall to the research lab and lunch and back. I have been doing a lot of napping in my free time outside my 40 hour work week. Not knowing people here who get that I don't look sick but some days dragging myself out of bed and staying upright really is an accomplishment. I mean I still have those friends who talk to online but they aren't around in person for a hug. Things are looking up, I'm getting settled and I intend to have some proper posts soon.

Well my sinuses have finally stopped torturing me (knock on wood). It's time that I think about getting myself off the couch and moving. It's gonna be pretty well starting over since it'll be a good 3.5 weeks that I've been sidelined and not feeling 100%. I did try to keep working out but that didn't work so well. I'm planning on forcing myself to take it good and slow. No rushing to get going with too much distance too soon.This time I've got my sights on a 10k in about 11 weeks. At this point not having pounded the pavement a single day yet; the goal is to run the whole thing. If I run the whole thing I should pace out to right around 75 minutes maybe a little more. Which would be awesome if I could beat my 8k time in a 10k.

I've found a plan which I'll make into a calendar in some free time, I should be able to go couch to 10k with minimal pain, and slow-ish. This will require 4 or 5 run days instead of 3 but I feel like I make runs happen better than I make cross training happen. I do need to get back to yoga to really get the flexibility and strength going again too. Not to mention I always feel so refreshed after yoga. The goal race is the Route 66 10k on June 11. I've also got a 5k with an 80's theme I might do in mid May as a pre-race Race :).We'll see how these next couple days go. Due to other commitments today and an allergy shot Thursday, Friday is the first possible option on starting to pound some pavement.

So I actually did the Run on March 12 not today. It was a good time, definitely a fun one to run. As you can see from some of the pictures in my 12 of 12. The course was pretty flat, some small inclines but nothing super intense. The t-shirts were awesome, green technical tee's heck yeah! People had really awesome costumes and were having a good time. I mean there were also people there to Run the race in like under 30 minutes. A good deal of the people were there to have a good time and for the free beer at the finish line.(I passed on having one of those.)

Requisite starting-line self portrait

Unfortunately due to the massive quanity of mucus in my head I didn't get to run much. I mostly kept a quick quip of a walk going. I'm sure I sounded wonderful. I'm kind of mad that I got sick at the last minute but I'm kind of also glad that I didn't give up and not go completely. I had been doing so well with my training and feel like I would've been ready to kick some serious tail had I been running not at about 70% of normal. The asthma wasn't really the issue so much as the nasty cold/sinus stuff I had/have going on. All in all I'm pretty proud of my 1:24:10 official time. Chip timing is pretty nifty since I usually end up starting towards the back of the pack. I was 421/428 for my age group and 8685/8910 overall.

I did get to meet up with my friend Kim who was doing the race as well. She finished in 55 minutes which was super awesome since she barely trained. She felt guilty for doing so much better than me when she knew I'd been training for about a month and a half and she threw hers together in 2-3 weeks. Such is life when you are a bit more physically fit and have less wonky lungs than I. We went for sandwiches afterward which was fun to catch up and enjoy some good food.

This is how I did last night. Under the snow on my shoes there is  hopefully a still working Nike+ sensor. I really had quite a pleasant run in the snow with a few layers on. The lungs were quite happy campers, I kept them warm with fleece balaclava. It was also just a few degrees below freezing so pretty nice outside and made nice fluffy snow. Quite refreshing to have a different running experience. I really enjoyed the crunch of fresh unpacked snow under my feet. It also isn't slick really hardly at all too run on which is a nice plus. Overall I'm feeling fairly confident about my running abilities. I won't be able to run the whole race but I don't have delusions that high. Realistically I'm just looking to keep an average sub 15min mile. Which I'm hoping is doable. I won't win any medals but I probably won't have the honor of finishing dead last like the last race I was in. Ultimately, I'm excited to have the chance to get out there and go, cause if you'd told me last year that I'd run in 4 inches of snow while 2 more inches were coming down I'd have told you you're nuts! This early March 5 mile definitely has kept me going through the winter. The next training trajectory is a Couch to 5k to try to get my walk to run ratio tipping more towards running than it already does.

On the asthma front my almost complete ignoring of the lungs for 2-3 months seems to have proved just fine. I'm still hitting low to mid 600's actually a bit above my PB from a few months ago. It's been really nice to ignore things for more or less 12 hours at a time. And all but forget about my peakflow meter. Best idea in the world probably not, but sometimes I just need a break from being 'sick' and winter is the time for that for me. I am starting to get back towards the habit of obsessively charting my peakflows and inhaler usage. I've had one or two blips but I've been reminded just how crappy 70 something percent feels.

Now for the bad news, I felt fine yesterday, today I'm sneezing and mucused up to wazzoo... I think I'm getting a cold or something. Hopefully not the flu. I'm hoping to thwart it and escape the steroids. I've been behaving myself, inhaling copious quantities of ventolin, drinking fluids, not going out and partying/drinking, and sinus washing. All the stuff you're supposed to do. I've got nothing to do this weekend so I may crawl into bed with my laptop and just kind of lay there quite a bit. We'll see how things go.

So mom and I were baking a pie the other afternoon and she mentioned that I apparently had a really nasty go with RSV when I was a lil one. She said toddler age but before my little brother was born which puts it somewhere between 18 months and 32 months. Apparently it was a bad case but not bad *enough* to land me in the hospital. She says I did have a positive culture or test for RSV. Toddler me had gobs of mucus coming out of my face and full body coughing experience for 2-3 weeks. Sounds like a joyful experience, kind of glad I don't remember. The mysterious part of it was that the pediatrician didn't understand why I didn't land myself in the hospital, according to mom by all that was logical in his mind I *should* have been hospital worthy and yet never got there.

Pumpkin PacMan: Delish

Does this explain anything, probably not since the RSV and asthma relation seems to be a correlation at best. Jury seems to be out on where those fit together or if they do at all. Makes me slightly intrigued to get my hands on my records from the pediatrician. On the other hand who knows what really got me to this point of inhaling way more stuff than I'd rather like to. Perhaps it was all the years of uncontrolled allergies or the RSV or random chance. However, this new piece of the puzzle is an interesting one.

Well refusing to get sick didn't really work. I got/am sick anyway. My peakflows have been holding steady in the above 78% range mainly green at that.  I've pretty much expelled a quarter of a tissue box of mucus out my nose today. Along with coughing up some lovely sticky gross mucus specimens. My energy is definitely better than it has been in a while. The only problem is that I can't really get much accomplished since I just keep sneezing out more and more mucus. I'm not quite sure where it's coming from although as my friend Maria told me on facebook: "That's the heck of it, unlike money, you can get rid of it and always make more." Really reassuring there that I will get rid of it anytime soon. Oh well. In the mean time I'll keep pushing fluids and ventolin so it all stays loose, thin, and open.  Hopefully soon I'll be back to feeling okay since I really don't have time to be sick with two term papers due in the next two weeks.