I've been thinking seriously about quitting. I love running, but I've been dealing with injuries pretty much all year, especially a nagging groin injury. It's frustrating the hell out of me, and I think I might just give up altogether.

Sometimes I dream about taking a vacation built around running.  There are a bunch of niche travel companies that do this.  Running Away has a trip to Gambia that includes a 10K race.  I might also do a destination race sometime, probably the Disney Half-Marathon.

Some cities do city tours for running.  Montreal has a tour, as do New York and Chicago.  They look fun.

I'd also love to go to running camp sometime.  This would be the perfect confluence of my favoritest things ever.  Summer camp and running.  What could be better?

I didn't do it.  Well, I kind of did it.  

I've been sick lately with a bad chest cold.  In fact, as of yesterday it had been three weeks since I had gotten out for a run.

This has been driving me right up a wall.  I worry when I don't run.  I especially worry when I know that I've got a race coming up.  I worry even when this race is an unimportant little 5K at a conference I'm attending.  They don't even post the results.  Still.  It bugs me when I can't run.

All the advice about running when you're sick says that you shouldn't run when it's in your chest, but you can get away with it when it's a head cold.  Don't run with a fever.  Yadda yadda.  I was tempted anyway.

Earlier this week I was just about over the not running and I decided that I would dope myself up and run anyway.  Unrelated to this crackheaded notion, I ended up being late for the bus.  Naturally, I ran the last few blocks to get there in time.  Dramatic coughing ensued and persisted the rest of the evening.  The next morning my wife said something about how I had kept her up with my coughing. Right.  No running with a chest cold.

Today I finally got back on the road.  I ran an easy three and had no problems at all.  I'm a little worried about navigating the hills in mountainous ConferenceTown, but I guess I'll be okay.  I don't expect a PR, and I'm going to try not to hurt myself.  I have a bad habit of going too hard in races and then limping around for a month or two because evidently my body is just that fragile.

The nice thing is that it's gotten a lot cooler here in North Carolina in the last three weeks.

As of December 1, the Federal Trade Commission will put into effect new rules about endorsing products. If a company hands you a free sample, pays you a fee, or employs you, then you need to disclose that when you review their product or services.

I know that some running bloggers get free shoes and other products (like The Stick. Why do people pay actual money for a stick?). My sense is that when they get free stuff, they go ahead and disclose that when they post their reviews. I suppose I wouldn't notice it if they slipped their raves into normal discussion without any disclaimer.

You can be assured that I have yet to recieve any of the free goodies that other bloggers have mentioned. I'm still waiting. When I talk about my fast pants, or my Garmin, nobody has paid me a cent and in fact I've forked over my hard earned cash to use the gear I'm touting.

In a column in Running Times, Jim Gerweck suggested that the largest races cost too little.  His argument hinges on the fact that many of the big races sell out within a day.  Gerweck argues that this is an argument that the price for these races is set too low.

Gerweck doesn't want to raise the fees for every race.  He thinks that there should be a two track system - smaller local races should aim to break even.  Large destination races should be priced high enough that it takes a little more time to sell out than it does presently.

Of course, those races will take more time to sell out because thousands of people who would have liked to run them decided that they can't afford the fee.  As a grad student, I am a runner of modest means.  I'm already shut out of destination races because of the costs of travel rather than race fees.  Any non-local in similar financial straits is probably also not attending these races.  That means that raising fees won't really affect those at the lower end of the financial spectrum.  It's affecting folks in the middle.

As a group, runners are already more likely to be white, highly educated, and have higher incomes than non-runners. I'm dubious about whether it's a good idea to add further financial barriers to participation. 

I am certainly a fan of my local races.  I appreciate the local running clubs and nonprofit organizations that organize them.  I have had nothing but good experiences running with as few as 60 and as many as 8000 other runners.  Nevertheless, those destination races can be a real motivator.  Should we really reserve those races for the most affluent of an already affluent, well educated crowd?

Last night I made my own granola, which is destined to go into my homemade yogurt.  If I quit bathing, somebody's got to stop me.

I've actually been making food from scratch a lot more lately.  I'm trying to put better quality food into my body, and making things yourself means that you know exactly what's in it.

My body may be in shock from this behavior.  I've been eating a salad almost every night, using lettuce out of my new garden.  In about a month, I should be eating carrots I've grown, too.  This is quite a change from my usual piss poor eating habits.  In the past, it wouldn't be an unusual week for me if I managed not to eat a single vegetable.  

This morning I packed a mozzarella and tomato sandwich for lunch with fresh basil on it from our garden.  We didn't have any basalmic vinegar, so I brushed some olive oil and garlic on my bread.  Mmm.  Lunch.

I'm not losing or intending to lose weight from these changes.  I'm partly inspired by Michael Pollan's book,  In Defense of Food, in which he sums up his advice with the admonishment, "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much."  I'm not an entirely reformed character, of course.  I still have my morning Pepsi.  I eat plenty of things that Pollan refers to as "food-like substances."  Still, I suppose it's not a bad idea to eat some fruit or a vegetable every once in a while.

This weekend I'm making some more applesauce.  Hippie.

 There has been a continuing controversy over 18 year-old Caster Semenya from South Africa.  For those of you who don't keep up with all of the running news, Semenya recently won the women's 800 meter race at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.  The controversy comes because of allegations that she isn't a woman.  In response to challenges, the IAAF instituted gender testing.

When thinking about this controversy, it's important to understand that you can't really check on someone's gender by asking them to pull down their pants.  A lot of people are born intersex - with characteristics of both genders, or indeterminate gender characteristics.  Estimates of how many people are intersex vary widely (really widely), but it would be fair to say that it could be as many as 1 in 2000 births.  There are a wide variety of syndromes associated wtih being intersex.  Many of the conditions are mild or minor enough that a person might be intersex and never know it.  Most people who are intersex happily identify with one gender without any concerns about it.  

While most people treat gender as an unquestioned binary, the truth is that it is really a continuum.  There is no bright white line that separates genders.  Biologists can't point to it.  Most people fall far enough on one side of the continuum or the other that their gender isn't really in question, but for folks in the middle the placement of that line is highly arbitrary.  The IAAF uses a five person team of specialists - a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, an internal medicine specialist, and an expert on gender.  Many intersex conditions do not provide an advantage to the athlete, and thus would not disqualify a woman under IAAF rules.

That's the basics.  If you're interested in the details, I highly recommend the Science of Sport blog.  It is written by sport scientists I really respect.  Their posts on the issue are interesting, accessible, and thorough.  

So where does the cognitive dissonance come in?  

Cognitive dissonance happens when something brings your attention to the fact that you believe two contridictory things at the same time.

I am fully aware that there is no such thing as a gender binary.  There's not only men or women.  It's a spectrum.  Most of the time, that belief doesn't really affect me.  I can consider my own gender identity as a woman to be culturally assigned.  Since it fits me pretty well, I can go right along with that assignment and not worry about it.
 
At the same time (and here comes the dissonance), I personally would NOT want to race against men.  I want them safely in another category, even if that category is a figment of our cultural imagination.  I mean, seriously, I have a hard enough time competing.  I won my age group once, but there were only sixty people in the race, total.  If we were all one happy uncategorized running family, then I could forget it.  I would go from being a middle-of-the-pack runner to being in the bottom third at least.

In my classes, I teach my students to make a distinction between equality and equity.  I do this when we're talking about making their programs accessible to all kinds of people.  Sometimes that means not treating people equally.  A person with a disability may need extra help that isn't equal but it equitable.  

What is the equitable way to treat gender?  If it's not a binary (and it's not), then what's the right way to handle it?  The truth is that I don't know.  What do you think?

This morning I finally ran at faster than a ten minute pace.  This is a happy thing, since it means that I'm humming along in my training without any (*knock wood*) injuries or anything.

Today's course was a bit less hilly, but I'm still quite pleased.

It's progress of a sort. 

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas wrote a fascinating analysis of Usain Bolt's most recent world record 100 meter race. If you're interested in their thoughtful, accessible yet scholarly analysis, I suggest you look at it. http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/08/analysis-of-bolts-958-wr.html

I can't add anything based on sport science. Instead, I want to marvel at a little factoid that they dropped into their analysis.

Looking at how fast he ran each 20 meter segment, Tucker and Dugas found that Bolt's top speed was 27.79 mph.

I run past speed limit signs sometimes and think jokingly, "I'll just have to restrain myself from running fast enough to break that speed limit." It's funny because I'm mostly running somewhere around 6 mph and nobody's going to come cuff me for that.

It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone could run almost 28 mph. What the hell?

If you haven't seen Bolt's race, you should take a look. It's pretty freaking amazing.

Moving to a new place always means making many small adjustments.  You spend the first few weeks posing and answering a list of questions.  Where is the nearest grocery store?  Which restaurants are good?  What are the neighbors like?

For runners, of course, the list includes questions about where to run.  Heading out the door in a familiar place means picking a particular distance and terrain.  Moving to a new neighborhood upsets all of these established habits.  You can try to find good routes through sites like http://www.mapmyrun.com or by driving around, but there's no substitute for lacing up and going out for a run.

My first run in NewTown demonstrated this.  From driving the route, I knew that the traffic wasn't very fast and that it was less than a mile before you hit sidewalks.  I had been looking forward to running on sidewalks.  

Alas, I hadn't noticed that verge was canted at a 45 degree angle.  This made it impossible to run when traffic came by.  Worse, this was only true on the way back.  It had been relatively flat on the way out, but on the way back I found myself trying (and failing) to channel a mountain goat.  Let's just say that my overall pace suffered.

Today's run went much better.  No sidewalks, but no traffic to speak of either.  This route has two great advantages and one serious disadvantage.  First, the advantages.  There's a stoplight to cross a major road.  Now, a more virtuous runner than I would count this as a disadvantage.  They might even jog in place to try and counter the fact that they are stopped at the light. 

They would be wrong.  Here's the trick.  At a stoplight, you get to stop running.  Even better, you get to stop your running watch, too.  You get to stand still, catch your breath, and  this doesn't impact your time at all.  See how awesome this is?

So... yay stoplights.

The other advantage is that once you cross this major road, you are magically in this densely wooded area.  It's a little odd, but very nice.  You cross a four lane road,  run past Rite Aid and Lowe's Home Improvement and then suddenly... nothing.  No houses.  No stores.  Just woods.  This makes me very happy.

Now for the disadvantage.

Hills.  The hills in NewTown are going to kill me.  They're still rolling hills but there are more of them and they're more steep.  I do not like hills, but I guess I'm going to have to adjust.

In addition to running, I also lift weights.  I haven't been able to lift for the past several weeks because I don't currently have a gym.  I'm not going to school every day to teach anymore, and we haven't moved yet.  I'll be getting a gym membership once we hit NewTown.

This bums me out for two reasons.  First, I had FINALLY gotten my bench press up to 100 lbs.  I was pretty psyched about that, and now I'm guessing that I'll be back to some 75 lbs. or so. 

My second reason for being bummed out has to do with the arthritis in my hands.  My hands hurt a lot.  Opening jars and bottles is no fun at all. Road trips mean that I'm hurting for the next couple of days from gripping the steering wheel.  On the worst days I have a hard time with buttons.

When I first started lifting, I figured that I was going to be making my hands hurt, but it seemed worth it to me. My approach to dealing with my arthritis has been to ignore it.  (I did mention it to my doctor once.  She listened to my symptoms and said, "Yup.  Sounds like arthritis."  I just goggled at her.  Gotta love student health.  And long parantheticals.)  Until it's a whole lot worse, I'm not about to let it stop me from doing anything.

Then, to my complete surprise, the weight lifting didn't make my arthritis worse at all.  In fact, it seemed to make it a lot better.  Still, I wasn't sure that it was the weight lifting.  I couldn't imagine how that would work.

Now, to prove causality, you need three things.  Covariation, temporal precedence, and a lack of other plausible explanations.  

Covariation means that as X changes, Y changes.  When I lifted weights, the pain in my hands receeded and vice versa.  Check.

Temporal precedence means that X has to happen before Y.  I lifted weights before the pain went away. Then more recently I stopped lifting and the pain has been bothering me again.  Check.

Finally, you need to be sure that there's not some other factor involved.  This is part of what made me suspicious that the weight lifting was helping.  Using my hands makes them hurt.  Why would picking up heavy objects over and over not make them worse?  Plus, I get better in the summer anyhow.  Maybe it was just that.  Only it's summer now, and when I stopped lifting my hands got mad at me again.  So... that made this a tentative Check.

This whole thing has been sort of nagging at me in the back of my head, so I finally spent some quality time with Google Scholar today.  It turns out that progressive strength training is GREAT for arthritis.  Why the hell didn't my useless student health doctor mention this to me? How did I miss this handy factoid?

So now you can add that to the list.  Strength training is good for brains, bones, and arthritis.  Some studies show that it also improves running form.

Now if I could only manage to make a respectable looking muscle....

Out to dinner with friends the other night, I started rambling on about the prospects for new running routes once we move.  Based on my friends' reaction, they seem to think that running is either a heroic endeavor or else something that qualifies me for a nice long stay in a rubber room.

I would love to think that running is indeed heroic.  The truth is that it's just a matter of persistence.  It is both more enjoyable and less heroic than, say,  getting up every day and going to work at a job you don't like so you can feed your family.

Whether we're all crazy, well, maybe that deserves its own post some time.

My friends did ask me (in that tone that implies that they think I'm nuts) why it is I run.  There are, of course, a host of reasons why I run. I simply haven't figured out how to talk about them to non-runners.  The problem with talking about running to most non-runners is that they carry all of these assumptions that I don't share.  This makes it almost impossible to explain running.  At least, I haven't figured out how.

Here are some of those assumptions:

Running is impossibly hard

The thing about this idea is that in some sense it is true.  When I talk casually about going out and running a few miles, that would probably be impossibly hard to whatever non-runner I'm talking to.  I didn't start out that way.  None of us started out that way.  It's a false comparison.  They're imagining the wrong task.

A mile is really really far

This is the same problem as above.  A mile (or five, or 13.1) is only far to run when you haven't trained for it.  Training isn't hard.  It's just a matter of getting out the door on a regular basis.  

A marathon, now, that's really really far.

Scheduling excercise is impossible in a busy schedule

In my discipline, we talk about constraints to leisure.  A constraint is something that makes it more difficult to do the leisure activity of your choice. "Time" is the most frequently cited constraint, in just about every survey.  Henderson (1997, p. 455) stated that “the real constraint isn’t time but something else that’s taking the time.”  There are, indeed, people who don't have time to run.  Sometimes my schedule gets crunched such that it's difficult to make the time to run.  However, considering how many hours of TV Americans manage to watch, I'm not sure that time is the real problem.  The problem is priorities.

The only reason to run is if a bear/an axe murderer/a car is chasing you

What people mean when they say this is that running isn't any fun.  And running just isn't always all that fun.  Sometimes running sucks. I have had my share of lousy runs.  But at 6:30 this morning, I was already enjoying a beautiful day.  The birds were chirping. I saw that herd of deer again in the same spot where I always seem to catch 'em.  The time I logged was a second faster than my last run.  

I don't need a bear to chase me.  I'm chasing my own goals.

We're moving on the first of August.  We've been here for several years now, and I'm a little bummed about moving away from my familiar running routes.  It seems a little ridiculous to miss them, but I think I will.

One good thing about being unemployed is that I was the one who had time to scout out a new pad.  We'll be renting a nice little house, and it looks like an ideal place to run.  Is it silly that this was one of my major criteria?  

We won't be living out in the country anymore, so I'm not going to run past cows (or elephants) on my new routes.  I suppose I'll get used to it.

This morning I startled a herd of deer.   They bounded away from me, although I consider myself an implausible threat.  It would be nice to think of myself as running with the deer in some sort of kinship, but my imagination just won't stretch that far as I labor uphill.  Still, it was a pretty sight, watching the deer bound off into a misty field.  

I'm going to miss them.

In my intro class, I teach students about conspicuous consumption and how it drives the leisure industry in the U.S.  I think about this a lot when it comes to my own leisure, particularly running.  You have to understand that I love running gear.  When I get my running magazine each month, I spend a goodly amount of time looking at the ads and going, "Ooo.  Shiny."  

I'm a gearhead in other realms, too.  I like backpacking gear and techie gadgets.  When it comes right down to it, it's probably more about nerdy consumption than conspicuous consumption with me.  

Nevertheless, I do try to be reasonable.  Except in the most extreme weather, I don't have a problem with going for a run in an old race t-shirt. Over the years, I have tried to sort out for myself which gear is necessary, which gear is optional, and what's downright silly.  

I was completely surprised recently to find that race number belts are in the optional and not the silly category.  Here's a picture:

The whole point of this item is that you can put your race number on it.  This seemed a somewhat ridiculous item for someone who does not run triathlons.  There's no quick change for me.  Why would I need this?  

Well, Brother Metronome seemed to feel that I was lacking in this area, so I am now the proud owner of a Fuel Belt race number belt.  In spite of myself, I came to appreciate my belt when I was at the Race for the Cure.  

It's not the putting-your-number-on piece that's nice about it. I generally have plenty of time to put on my number.  It's the taking-your-number-off part, where presto change-o you now (except for being sweaty) look like a normal person when, say, you go to a restaurant for breakfast after the race.  I liked this much better than I expected.  It's quite handy.

So, there you go.  Race number belts aren't silly.  Who knew?  

I still think running socks are utterly useless.

Today I was running a little 3 1/4 mile route that I run pretty regularly.  Like many of my running routes, it is quite pretty with a rural flavor. One field in particular has some horses that pasture there.  I always like watching them as I go by.  This is an out-and-back route, so I see them twice.  

On the way out, there was a deer near the road.  I scared her, and she scampered off, tail flagging.  The horses were mildly alarmed as she sped past them.  

On the way back, I noticed the elephant.

That's right.  There's a life-sized statue of an elephant at the far edge of the field.  It may even be larger than an actual elephant.

This prompts many questions.  How is it that I failed to notice an elephant?  How long has it been there?  At a minimum, I know that it was there when I ran past it on my way out. Has it been there for the three years that I've been running this route?  I don't know.  

I also can't imagine why there's an elephant statue at the edge of some random farmer's field.  It's a little quirky.

Clearly, I need to pay more attention when I run.

 Sometimes it's more important to look fast than to be fast.  Or at least, that's what I tell myself.  This is from the Race for the Cure.  I ran a 30:05 race, but you can't tell from the picture.

While I'm busy grading papers, why not waste spend your time watching this entertaining video?

Today, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in California.  At the same time, the court upheld the marriage licenses that had been issued before prop 8 passed but after the original court ruling that allowed same sex marriage.

What this means is that I'm married, but anyone else who wants to get their hands on a same sex marriage license in California is out of luck.

So I guess that gives me some sort of special access to the privileges of marriage.  Or something.  I was reminded today of certain friends of mine over the years who said that they refused to marry until same sex couples had the same right.  I've always appreciated the thought, but was somewhat dubious about this strategy as a way to stand in solidarity with me.  Now I guess I'm in the same spot, of having access to something that other people don't.  It's... strange.

Let's be clear about this.  My marriage license does absolutely nothing for me in North Carolina.  All of this talk about privilege is entirely theoretical.  Still, I wish it wasn't just limited to the 18,000 of us who happened to get hitched in California at just the right time.  I'm glad that things seem to be looking up for same-sex marriage rights all over the country.  There are five states now where same sex couples can get hitched.  This really has been a banner year.  

Becky and I had a moment today where we looked at each other and realized that we were really married.  If we want to get divorced, that's going to be a major undertaking.  The laws are a mess.

I like it.  It's kind of nice.

This morning when I was out walking the dogs, I found a four leaf clover.  This isn't unusual for me.  For whatever reason, I find four leaf clovers all the time.

Still, I started thinking about it after I dropped the dogs off back at the house and went on my run.  

The weather was perfect.  I wore my running shorts but needed my long sleeved technical shirt because it was a bit cool.  The birds were chirping their heads off.  I freaked out some poor bunny rabbit who would frantically run ahead of me alongside the road, crouch down and then hop off again as I got closer and flushed it out of hiding.  There were horses out to pasture.  Instead of doing my walk/run thing, I ran the whole way.  It really was a lovely run.

None of us gets through life unscathed.  I had a brain anuerysm while out on a run more than five years ago.  A good friend of mine also had an aneurysm about a year before I had mine.  We share the same doctor, and he told me recently that our aneurysms were in the exact same locations in our brains.  They fixed me up in a couple of weeks, and I had headaches for six months afterwards.  

Several surgeries later, she is still living with constant pain.  We sing in a chorus together, and I don't think she's managed to stay for an entire rehearsal all year.  She has to bail when the pain gets too bad.  I don't know if she was ever a runner, but I do know that there's no way that she could take it up now even if she wanted to.

I finished my run today feeling strong.  A good run makes me feel alive in ways that few other things can match.  I like being able to push myself to new limits.  

Bodies are fragile things.  I know exactly how lucky I am.

 Mother's Day is something of an ordeal for me ever since I lost my mom to lung cancer, back in 1998.  When I saw that the current Take it and Run Thursday topic was a salute to running moms, I was surprised and pleased to note that I have something to contribute on the topic.

First, my own mom.  As I knew her, mom wasn't terribly athletic.  She liked going on long nature walks, but that's probably the extent of any physical activity I ever witnessed from mom.  She always talked about the good old days when she raced on ice skates, played softball and was otherwise occupied in various sports at the local park district.  She never mentioned running, and I was surprised when these pictures turned up after her death.  Mom was the one furthest on the left.  She would have been a freshman or sophomore in high school in those pictures.

  

But that's not the mom I want to talk about today.

I'm a runner and a grad student.  It can be difficult sometimes to prioritize my running over, say, writing my dissertation.  (This is probably not nearly as difficult as it should be.)  Still, I may be busy but my time is highly flexible.  This makes it much easier for me to run.  We also don't have any kids yet.  Just dogs.  No matter how cute they are, being a dog mom doesn't really constrain my ability to head out the door for a run.  I have a very real sense of just how lucky I am.

We know, for instance, that parents engage in less physical activity than non-parents.  When children are younger, the effect is more pronounced, and it affects women more than it does men.  The research that supports this statement couldn't possibly come as a surprise to any busy parent.

We also know that when you add other factors, like having a child who is developmentally delayed, that can only further complicate yourlife and your schedule.  In a 2005 study in Occupational Therapy International,  Wayne and Krishnagiri found that "Raising a child with Down syndrome had an impact on parents' leisure occupations in many ways. These include limiting the amount of time available for leisure, changes in types of daily leisure from more active to more passive occupations, increasing the need to plan leisure more systematically,