March comes in like a gnu
The goal I set for March back in December was 130 miles run. After the letdown of February (goal: 110 miles; result: 50.2 miles), a lower goal for March seemed in order, but I wasn’t sure how much lower to set the bar. Then, while I was trying to set it, I tripped over it and impaled myself. Allow me to explain.
The day after my 10-mile bow on the last day of February, I ran three miles through the woods near my home. It is a bike path in name, but is more like a cross-country trail now, what with the colossal gouges from reckless ATVs and terrain that goes through mud, loose sand, cinders, railroad gravel, and the occasional low-bridge branch. On Saturday March 1st, it was windy and I got a faceful of a cloudburst of wet flurries at the start. I should have taken the hint ands stopped right there. Instead, Kid kept complaining about the pace while Coach kept saying I was lucky to moving at all within 24 hours of a 10-miler. After a lot of back and forth, it was three miles in 35:51, an 11:57 pace.
An angry bunch of small bumps appeared on my left shoulder soon after. This was not surprising considering the amount of time I was spending in cold, sweaty clothes of late. What was surprising was how painful it felt, not unlike a sunburn. I am not a hypochondriac, so I mostly ignored it. The “rash” was responding, I thought, to Benadryl and ibuprofen. I didn’t run on Sunday the 2nd or Monday the 3rd while I tried to ignore these bumps. On March 4th I ran three laps around Brick Reservoir for a 4.8-mile run in 56:51, an 11:51 pace. Despite being tired and having some skin irritation I was doing OK.
Then just before dawn on Wednesday the 5th, I awoke to what felt like a cross between a snakebite and a jellyfish sting in a line of lumps that had spread from the point of my left shoulder all the way to the left side of my neck to just below my ear. Between that nerve-jangling pain and the doctor appointment at noon, Wikipedia told me first what my doctor later concurred with- diagnosis: shingles. $h!t on a shingle.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s diabetes on first, borderline high blood pressure on second, high cholesterol on third, and shingles on… my shoulder. Four chronic, incurable, but treatable conditions simultaneously. It’s every boy’s dream: a grand slam in early spring training.
The drugs to manage shingles, an antiviral for the virus plus an antidepressant(?) for the pain in the nerves where the virus resides, kept me in a fog that I am only now, over three weeks later, emerging from. At first, I found myself sleeping ten hours a night and taking a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Driving my daughter to preschool- a 30-minute round trip- seemed like a real workout. Operating heavy machinery, like, say, my legs or my eyelids were a chore. I will say that the pain was very well-masked throughout, but after enduring peripheral neuropathy from uncontrolled high blood sugar a few years back anything less than a broken bone would not beat that older systemic nerve pain in my memory.
The virus did not spread further beyond a brief scare that it had spread to nerves in my left inner ear. My wife, who has never (knock on wood) had the chicken pox from which shingles occur, stayed far away from me. My 5-year-old daughter, who also has been free of all poxes, had to be kept at arms length for a while. Being treated like a leper by loved ones, while standard procedure, may have been more painful than the outbreak itself.
Meanwhile, no one has explained to my satisfaction how two weeks of chicken pox one summer over 30 years ago can be locked away in the body for decades without being bombarded with antibodies before recurring. Nobody seems to know what triggers an attack, exactly how many attacks one person may be visited with, or whether nerve pain may occur without the telltale blistering. If the nerve pain that has radiated through the my shoulder several times over the past few years with no other symptoms, a pain that has at times mimicked symptoms of heart attack, a pain that may linger for up to a month, was shingles, it may be that this is not my first shingles attack, but my seventh or eighth. Now I know what the antidepressant is for.
Now you know why I hadn’t been running or writing about it. I don’t think readers of this blog are interested in my writing about “so I didn’t run again today”, so I’ve been recuperating quietly. I did manage one run on March 15th, shortly after I finished the antiviral medication. It was three more laps at Brick Reservoir in 57:56, a 12:04 pace.
As I write this I’m on a little streak. I’ve run four consecutive days, all 3-milers on the “bike” path near my house, in 35:51, 34:57, 36:11, and 35:20. All of them had the walking breaks every fifth minute. I really hate those walks but they are necessary for now while I continue to recover. Overtaxing myself may be what brought this attack on; I’m not keen on being in pain or fogged in with drugs to avoid the worst of the pain. (Instrumental version of “Comfortably Numb” should play here.)
In future, I hope to blog post more often and run more often. I’m starting to regain the ability to use heavy machinery like my brain and these here Interweb tubes, not to mention this bar I keep trying to set. I’d say that’s good gnus.
Tags: coach, Comfortably Numb, endurance, energy, health, jogging, kid, mileage, pacing, pain, running, shingles
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