Well, we’ve gotten pretty tired here in Hartselle, AL. And, while the loveseat in our AirBnB is nice and comfortable, it’s not a recliner, and there are no ottomans; we have tried using the barstools, but that gives our knees a problem, because the stools are higher than the loveseat.
So today, for the last regular day of college football, we just pulled out the bed.
Sure, there’s a nice comfortable bed in the bedroom, but no TV. And it took about thirty seconds of effort. I got in all of my workouts this week, so I’m OK with reduced effort, and with watching Alabama play Auburn in a reclining position.
I’m ready to go home. I’m ready to be in my home, to go to my gym, to swim, to ski. I’m ready to go to my church and my meetings – although it’s been nice to see our old friends at Hartselle Hope group. I’m even ready to get on a plane, as long as it’s the right plane 🙂
(as I was typing that, Ethel said “uh…”, and then she said “I think our flight changed”. But it turns out that she was mistaken).
A low energy day. In fact, I’m getting tired of sitting up and typing this.
So yesterday, since I don’t have my pool stuff, I substituted an hour of aerobic riding for my swim, and then did my lifting. It seems that the weights on the Life Fitness machines here at the Hartselle gym aren’t the same as they are everywhere else; I don’t think that they are 2.2 times as hard (which would mean kilograms instead of pounds) but something is seriously different.
So when I finished with my legs, I sat on the bench for a long time, trying to get up the gumption to move into the upper body stuff.
As usual, once I sat there long enough, I got off my patushka and got the rest of the workout done.
These last two days I’ve made two meetings each, since my regular life is a thousand miles away and so I don’t have anything else to do. Yes, I’ve been visiting with my son’s family, but that can only take up so much time and energy (although Ethel seems to have made a new career out of it). And this little AirBnB is very comfortable, but there’s not much here for me to do. There’s no piano, either. So I go to extra meetings.
Thanksgiving “dinner” isn’t until something like 4:00 PM. That sort of throws the whole day’s eating out of whack, but I’ll trust God to take care of my abstinence. I am having trouble getting enough protein here in Alabama, though. Unless it’s fried.
Pandora just served up “Pieces of the Night”, which may be my favorite song of all time. It still throws my emotions around, because I let it – I attach my feelings to the song and let it jerk me around for about three minutes, because it’s so sweet, and sad. I have two pieces of decor in my house taken entirely from this song – a framed print that says “A hillside in shadow, between the people, and the starts”, and we have a small statue of Aphrodite on a barstool in the great room.
Now I reckon I’ll get a shower, finish the movie that we’re watching, and make a noon meeting. If anyone is reading this, then I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving!
We’re in Alabama, and my granddaughters made pancakes for me. So I ate them Harry Bosch style.
Harry and Maddie generally get pancakes at DuPar’s, and they eat them by pouring the syrup onto the plate, and then putting the pancakes on the syrup, rather than the other way around. No, I can’t really tell any difference. But I do like Bosch 🙂
If my granddaughters are cooking for me, then we must be in Alabama. But I almost wasn’t. Yesterday I got abandoned – left behind. Remember Willem Dafoe in Platoon? When the helicopter was taking off, leaving him behind while the Viet Cong was coming out of the woods? Yeah, like that.
We got to the airport at about 4:45 for a 5:15 flight. We went through security, and Ethel got pulled aside so they could go through her bag. I went on to the gate.
Well, I mean, I thought I went to the gate. Durango has few gates, and only two big “rooms” – one for American, and one for United. So I walked in and went to the right, just like the last time we were at this airport.
In that room, they had rows of seating, and a guitar, on stand – just sitting there, with a note saying it was available for playing. So I picked it up and played it. I was just sitting there, waiting for Ethel, playing guitar.
Finally I checked my phone, and I had texts from her – one said that I could go to the gate and they would check my carry-on bag all the way through for me. So I went to the gate, and showed her my boarding pass….
….which was for the other airline. At the other gate. At the other end of the airport.
So I ran over there, and saw the “Boarding Closed” sign, and looked out the window, and jumped up nd down and waved my arms – to no avail. They closed to door of the airplane and rolled the ladder away.
And there I stood.
Ethel was on the plane, going to Denver, and I was standing in Durango, all by myself.
Okay, the nice lady at the ticket counter took care of it – she put me on the flight two hours later, and she arranged to have Ethel’s flight from Denver to Huntsville moved to the next flight as well, so I caught up with her in Denver and we got to Nashville a couple of hours late. All my fault. Just wasn’t thinking.*
I slept pretty well last night, and went to the little Hartselle gym this morning and did my VO2Max ride – an ersatz version of it, on a LifeFitness exerbike – and my heart rate got up to 155, so I’m glad that coming off that calcium channel blocker seems to have worked. I don’t know if I’m going to try to go to the pool while I’m here; I’m thinking that I won’t. But the fact is that I don’t have that much to do while I’m here, so even though it’s inconvenient, I might go ahead and swim tomorrow.
We don’t have our mats, and this little AirBnB – although very nice – doesn’t have carpet, so I don’t know how we can do Yoga with Adrienne. It always seems like I let something get in the way of what I should be doing.
*N.B. – I had woken up at 1:30, and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I’ll say – of COURSE I wasn’t thinking! But it’s still my fault.
Yesterday was opening day at Wolf Creek. I think it was a pretty good start.
I managed nine runs before Ethel said that it was time to go.
I had gotten up around 4:30 AM to get on the bike and get my long ride done early, but – well, I wasn’t feeling my best, so I only got 90 minutes out of a planned 135. But “not feeling my best” is no reason not to go skiing, so we did.
No lines at all for the first hour or so, then only a short line on one side of the lift. Perfect weather, perfect snow, although there was the occasional rock.
Ethel took a major face plant, and is still feeling bad today. I can’t figure out what happened – she says that she doesn’t think that she crossed her tips, but she just went over fast and hard in the middle of a groomed run – on a fairly flat section, at that. So today she’s on the couch; I can’t seem to get her interested in anything. We didn’t go to church; we’re supposed to meet some folks for breakfast, but I don’t know if she’s going to be up for that, either.
She’s got to get up and busy sometime, though, because we have to pack today. It’s time for our regular Thanksgiving week flight to Alabama. And we leave ridiculously early in the morning – she wants to get up at 3 AM for a 5:15 flight. Yes, it’s almost an hour to the airport. I’m sure that we’ll do it her way. I figure any time that you spend at the airport before the gate closes is wasted time – well, wait, it is wasted time. That’s not an opinion – that’s just fact. But Ethel would rather waste the time in the airport than “waste” it sleeping. So, there’s that.
The hill got five more inches last night; I don’t know if I’m going to go up there or not. I have to admit, after riding and skiing yesterday, I felt terrible last night. I don’t want to believe – yet – that that means that I’m too old to ski.
But – if we’re too old to ski – then I’m going back to Panama. I’m not going to sit in Colorado and not ski. That’s not negotiable. (Okay, maybe it is).
It’s raining down here – there was a little snow when I woke up, but it quickly passed. But all of the forecasts say that, when we get back to Pagosa a week from tomorrow, winter will be here.
They said that they were opening on Saturday, but only the beginner lift.
But they’ve changed their minds 🙂 There will be at least two of the regular lifts open.
So, tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive up the hill to get in a few runs. It won’t be great, and there won’t be a lot of it, but it’ll be sliding on snow 🙂 We had to go into the attic to get our boot bags, and drop down the Thule to get the ski poles out. For some reason, although we left the skis down in the garage, we put the poles up. No, it doesn’t make sense. But we were in a hurry, I reckon.
I am supposed to ride for 2:15 tomorrow. I don’t know how I’m going to fit it in. I might have to wake up really early and get started while Ethel is still in bed. I’m not doing nearly as much as I used to do, so I really think that I need to be careful to at least do all of the schedule workouts, or I will slide down into the abysmal oblivion of sloth and inactivity.
And, besides, I have that Iron Horse thing schedule for May.
Ethel was talking about cycling the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper, but I think that she’s started to refocus on Everest Base Camp, instead. She’s watching the videos and talking to people. Who, me? Oh, no!…don’t make me trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp, B’rer Ethel! ….the high point of the trek isn’t at base camp; it’s at the Kala Patthar pass, around 18.500 feet. That’s not Kilimanjaro – in fact, it’s 800 feet lower – but the trek round trip is 130 km or 80 miles, and that’s twice as far as we trekked on Kili. So it’s definitely something to do.*
We leave Monday for Alabama; it seems that the forecast is calling for a lot of snow for the week that we are gone, so things should greatly improve by the time we get back.
Today was a lazy day. We did nothing besides yoga. Ethel is lost in Neal Stephenson’s “SEVENEVES”, and only comes up for air when I make a fuss about it. I’m reading Bosch and Ballard books and taking the odd nap.
Tonight we’re eating Chinese with friends. I’m not hungry, but that’s OK – I’ll figure out some way through the menu without feeling stuffed. And, if I do get stuffed, I’ll be empty in an hour.
A way long time ago, Lily Tomlin, in a stand-up routine, asked the question – “Why isn’t there a special name for the tops of your feet?”
It’s still a valid question.
So we do Yoga with Adrienne, and probably ten times a session, she’ll use that phrase – “Press into the tops of your feet”.
It’s an awkward phrase, and I have decided that it’s time to do away with it. So, I propose a name for the tops of the feet – “dorsals”.
Dorsal means – well, it means that top surface. Like the dorsal fin on a dolphin, or a shark. I believe that it would be almost immediately understood, and the explanation wouldn’t have to be repeated. If we adopted this term, Adrienne would say “Press into the dorsals”. Much quicker, much cleaner.
I mean, we have soles, and balls, and heel, and arch, and the blade – why not just say “dorsals” and then we’d have the full set.
….Who, me? Today was a Sweet Spot ride and yoga, and then we went to a deal where we were plating food for a local Thanskgiving community dinner. My job was to hand Ethel plates (I had to separate them from a stack) and she would put dressing on them and pass them to the turkey folks. It wasn’t difficult or complicated.
Then this afternoon we watched “Lost Boys”, with one of the best closing lines in cinema history. I realized while watching it that all of the actors in the movie are now almost forty years older; that gave some strange visuals for, say, the two Coreys.
Then I napped, and we went to meeting, and now it’s time to grill burgers.
We’re currently watching Appaloosa, with Vigo Mortensen and Ed Harris. Renee Zellweger plays a floozy. The floozy is promised to Ed Harris, but out of nowhere smooched Vigo. Vigo walked away.
Now, Vigo and Ed are great friends, but Vigo – while he rebuffed Renee’s advances – isn’t going to tell Ed about what a floozy she is. You can just tell that he’s not going to say it. Which will, no doubt, cause much trouble later on, as Renee keeps floozying around.
This happens all the time. If somebody would just SAY SOMETHING, the movie would be over quick and everybody would have an easier time of it. But, no – nobody just tells the truth, and it all results in drama, fuss and bother.
Honesty really is the best policy.
We’re still watching movies. She pulls ’em out, loads ’em up, and I say “What? Why haven’t we watched this?” Now, sometimes there’s a reason – Cocoon wouldn’t play all the way through, and it turns out – for various reasons, depending on how much tolerance you have for conspiracy theories – you can’t stream that movie anywhere, and you can’t even buy the DVD. I had to order a new one from Amazon Germany. I hope that it still has the English dialogue.
The other night we saw “Batteries Not Included”. The critics say that that’s a kid’s movie. Ethel says critics are morons.
I heard from the electrocardiologist in Colorado Springs. He told me to stop taking my calcium channel blocker – this was the same day that the cardiologist in Durango sent me a message to keep taking it. You wonder if these folks ever talk. So, I’ll stop taking it. I currently have no belief that this heart rate thing is going to work out, because nobody yet has actually hazarded a guess as to what is actually wrong – and, if you don’t know what’s wrong, how can you fix it? But I’m following instructions.
LIfted and swam this morning. It went okay. But, even so, my heart rate never went above 129. Something is wrong, but nobody knows what.
Took the truck in today to get the winter tires on. That, at least, is good news 🙂
Today, my heart stopped working the way that it is supposed to.
I was doing my standard VO2Max workout – I’ve been doing this same workout for about twelve years, on Tuesdays. Sometimes it’s an hour long, sometimes it’s the 45 minute version, but it’s the same thing – three minute intervals at 110% of FTP*.
When I’m in those intervals, my heart rate goes up to about 150 beats per minute.
Except, today, it didn’t do that. It stopped going up at 130 BPM. And that meant that my heart wasn’t giving my legs the food and oxygen that they needed, and I couldn’t do the workout.
(Note: this is only the first half of the workout. I had to stop the workout because of equipment issues, and restart it again. But things stayed the same).
See those two 3 minute intervals? See how suddenly the yellow line drops way down? That’s when I actually had to stop pedaling, because I couldn’t keep going. The red line is my heart rate. In this first half of the workout, it never got above 129, and I couldn’t keep pushing the pedals.
Think of it as though the carburetor had a chink in the fuel line, and so it couldn’t send all the fuel to the pistons. That’s sort of what was happening here. …or maybe like putting a governor on an engine, so that it could only go so fast; with that “so fast” meaning “not anywhere near top speed”.
Now, the question is – WHY DID MY HEART SUDDENLY DECIDE THAT IT WAS ONLY GOING TO WORK SO HARD – THAT IT WASN’T GOING TO RESPOND TO WHAT MY BODY WAS ASKING IT TO DO? That’s a systemic failure. Imagine if suddenly, one of your lungs stopped working – say, while you were climbing a mountain.
I have no idea what could cause this. So I called my cardiologist in Colorado Springs, and his nurse called me back, and she got all of the information, and said that they would get back to me.
But they didn’t.
I’ll call back tomorrow. It seems like something has gone terribly wrong. They fiddled around in my innards – I knew that they were going to do that – but the intention was so that my heart would stop responding to false signals – NOT start ignoring the real ones.
This will probably keep me up tonight.
*From the Google AI – “FTP fitness, or Functional Threshold Power, is a metric used in cycling to measure the maximum power output in watts a rider can sustain for approximately one hour. It is a key indicator of a cyclist’s fitness level and is used to determine personalized training zones, intensity for workouts, and to track progress over time.“
I was up sometime around 2 or 3 AM, and I was staring reality in the face. I realized that yesterday I couldn’t even do an hour on the elliptical, at low resistance. The ellip has always been my fallback when I couldn’t run for whatever reason, but yesterday, I simply couldn’t do it.
So, After very close to 35 years of recreational – and competitive – running, I gave up running. I have given up the ghost – which is all that was really left, anyway. I’m done. Running – or running substitutes or crosstraining – stopped being fun a while ago, and became simply painful. And it has left me feeling awful.
From now on, it’s the bike – and the pool.
I changed the schedule I’ve followed for years – this morning, I lifted and then swam, and tomorrow, I’ll do a hard bike ride. No running. None.
I’m in the pool. Now, since I can’t run, I won’t be doing any more triathlons, but, I’m still in the pool. I think it’s because being in the pool just feels right*. It feels like something that I should do. No, I’ll never be a competitive swimmer, but swimming relaxes me, and I really believe that it helps me recover better from my other workouts.
I’ll hit the bike tomorrow. I’m still signing up for the Iron Horse Classic in May – yes, I’m only pushing about 75% of the wattage that I was pushing when I came home from the Arizona Ironman, but that was eight years and a lot of injuries and illnesses ago. And even at an FTP of 179, I’m still a stronger biker than most guys my age.
I’m going to make the most of this. I’m determined to do so.
But no more running.
I still remember that day – I had been jogging a mile or two, two or three times a week (maybe) since I left the Army in 1986, but I quit smoking in 1991, and in January of 1992, I went out for a two mile run, and turned away instead of turning back home, and went eight miles. I came in the back door and told Ethel that I was going to run a marathon. She said “Yes, dear” and kept doing whatever she was doing.
I ran one, too, that next December – and then, the next year, qualified for Boston and then ran Boston the year after that. It’s been something that I’ve always done, for thirty-five years now.
But it’s over. And now I’ll remember the day that I stopped running.
Time to do other things.
*Now, Ethel will tell you the same thing. And she’ll tell you that she knows that swimming helps her general fitness, and that she really enjoys it when she’s doing it consistently. But – she won’t go to the pool. Self-knowledge avails us nothing.
See, I had this procedure a few weeks back – a pulse field ablation.
I thought I had nailed down the costs before I did it. Now I’m getting bills that don’t seem to make any sense. Now, I can afford them – but it feels weird to be paying charges that weren’t what I thought I was paying.
Ethel says don’t worry, the insurance folks will straighten it out. But I thought it was strange that the original charge, before insurance, was $125,000.00 on the bill.No, I won’t be paying any real fraction of that – but huh? Maybe six people, working for two hours, and they get $5000/hour apiece?
I picked the wrong profession.
There’s something wrong with a system like that. I told Ethel that I didn’t even want to be part of such a….a scandalous situation. I told her that we should move to Mexico or Columbia, where there’s no insurance, but the medical charges that I had while I was there made sense. I was going to have this procedure in Medellin, where the medical care is first rate, and it was going to cost about $2000 – with no insurance.
Then I had a 20 minute followup with my cardiologist’s PA last week. The charge was $500. That’s a third of an hour. $1500 an hour, for a PA? What the heck is going on?
Well, Ethel won’t move to Medellin. So I reckon I’m stuck here. But it just feels really, really strange. Is any of this real money?
….today was church, and then I was supposed to do an hour on the elliptical at low resistance, but all I could do was a half an hour. My long, hopeless slide into abysmal oblivion keep right on going, no matter what doctor I see. And nobody can explain it. Every week, I’m weaker than the week before.
Oh, well. At least some things are looking up. It’s raining right now – a big storm, but that means that up on the mountain, it should be dumping. In fact, it’s supposed to turn to snow down here tonight, but tomorrow back to rain. But at least winter’s coming. It’s been absolutely clear, sunny and 65 F for what seems like forever. Sure, that’s nice, but it bodes ill for a ski season.
I would say that we’ll be skiing next week – but next week, we’ll be in Alabama. It’ll be nice to see the family. But I wish that I could ski first.
Fat Charlie's Diary 