But most of all, I wanted to set a better example for my daughter. As a teenager she is using her devices more and more and it bugs me. I don’t think it’s healthy but I can’t expect anything to come from a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.

Granted, her father his hopelessly addicted and can’t get off the devices. He has a habit of turning on the TV the second he enters a room. Then he sits down with his laptop, and pulls his phone out to play games. He needs as many devices going at once as he can.

Anyway, the BePresent app blocks the apps on your phone so you think twice about using them mindlessly. You can allow unlimited use of certain app categories. This comes in handy because I have to use my phone for work tasks, like two-factor authentication and testing my team’s development in various mobile browsers.

However the app tries to organize your apps into categories and sometimes I don’t agree with the classifications. Example: I have 8 web browsers installed on my phone. Most of them get filed under “Utilities” by BePresent but Safari is just a system app. And then I need the “Productivity & Finance” category for authenticator apps. But sometimes I have to test a podcast or video I’ve posted for work, and those are in other categories (“Information & Reading” and “Entertainment”). So while I’m in this focus time, I get blocked from some of the apps I need… and it feels like the camera is never available in any of the app categories I have enabled. Sometimes I want to snap a photo of something and I’m not wasting hours of time in the camera app. Or if I want to quickly scan a QR code and I can’t get to the camera. I have to test those for work too! My work apps run the gamut of their categories.

While it’s good to be held up and second guess if you actually want to open an app, it’s annoying when you’re trying to do something for work.

The other thing I have a love/hate relationship with is the leaderboard and the leagues. If I block all the apps for a set amount of time, then I get extra “points” that help me rank higher on the leaderboard. I realized that if I set my phone to block apps for 2 hours the app tells me I’ll get 25 points. But there were times I left the apps all blocked for 4 hours and it still only gives me 25 points! So now I pay attention to the timer on my lock screen so I can make sure to stop focus time and restart it to get another 25 points.

And why? What do the points get me? There are a few offers for some free audiobooks from audiobooks.com or a free trial period of the Headspace app. But I’m pretty sure that if I took advantage of those, it would just give me a chore to make sure I cancel the trial so I don’t get charged later on. Honestly, if I thought it would give me free Headspace as long as I maintain a certain level in the app… I’d work toward that. But I also don’t know that I would find the time to listen to meditations. I tried the Headspace app about a decade ago and found it difficult to commit. My family constantly interrupts me.

(Of course, my daughter is spending more time in her room away from me and I’d welcome her interrupting me. Not having interruptions gives me more stress than the more frequent interruptions that came from a younger child. Being a parent is hard! Thus why I probably need Headspace.)

Back to the leaderboard… is it good that I’m so worried about getting my points and staying at the top of the top league to the point where I’m paying attention to my phone screen often enough to stop and restart the focus sessions? That seems a little counterintuitive to me.

There is a scheduling component so you can have the app automatically set focus times for you… and once again I realized that setting it to put my phone into focus time over night was only getting me 25 points. But if you set up a schedule that turns your focus time on/off every 2 hours all night long, you can accrue more points. This is ridiculous and part of me fears posting this online is going to expose my secret so people will overtake my spot.

Maybe I should just block the apps with BePresent and ignore the leaderboard. Maybe they should have an option to exclude yourself from the leaderboard to protect your mental health from your hyper-competitive self.

Overall, I do like the app. And I’m averaging less than 90 minutes of screen time on weekdays. Some days I’ve even managed to keep it around 30 minutes. Weekends tend to incur more minutes, as I use my phone for grocery lists and end up with my phone on as I shop. I even paid for an annual subscription, I was liking it enough to pay. I would recommend the app to anyone, because I highly recommend getting off the devices more often. Our society is way too dependent upon these things now.

Okay, that’s not fair because I really don’t sell the book with that approach. I’m struggling to say this book was good or great, because the stuff that people have done to Mary Cain throughout her life… well, it’s awful. And when a subject is grim, it’s hard to proclaim it’s MUST READ MATERIAL!

Mary had exceptional running talent from a young age. She was far superior to other runners her age and outpaced the competition. And when she got moved up to compete alongside older students in her community, instead of embracing her like a younger sibling they should protect, they shunned her and were mean. This included her coaches and parents of other athletes on her team. I’m just appalled that adults could treat a child so poorly.

Mary had a little bit of a better experience when running with the boys at her school. I was glad to hear that. Truly, the middle school and even some of the high school years for girls are not great. I’m not letting boys off the hook, they’re usually obnoxious and loud and stinky at that age, but generally not flat out mean. (The entire premise of the movie Mean Girls is that girls can be awful toward each other. It’s in the name!) It’s just that those years are hard enough without having unnecessary cruelty, even at the hands of adults, to contend with.

When she turned pro and started to run for Nike under Alberto Salazar, that’s when things got really horrible. Everything I’ve ever read about Salazar indicates he is dreadful and his lifetime ban from running isn’t enough. He probably should be shunted off to live on some remote deserted island where he can’t physically or verbally abuse anyone ever again. (All my personal opinion from internet postings and books.)

The stories of how he made comments about female runners bodies and generally put them down wasn’t surprising, because I’ve read other sources that discuss his actions. But it still feels gross each time I read it anew from a different perspective. And the way he fawned over some of his chosen athletes, until he would eventually turn on them, was really creepy and indicates some issues of a damaged human being. But that damage doesn’t give him an excuse for what he did to others.

I really don’t want to harp on all the horrible things that happened to Mary and that she outlines so succinctly and bluntly in this book. Read it yourself for that. I will say that it’s readable, in that it progresses through a timeline and states every trial so matter-of-factly that it made it a quick read. Uncomfortable, yes… but quick.

Mary is now (as of this posting) 30 and a medical student at Stanford. And she is sharing all of this because she hopes that sports will change and improve. Change will never happen if people can’t share what happened and come forward. I hope that she continues to heal from her horrible experiences.

Sadly, I feel systems don’t change fast, and each time we take a step forward we also step backwards again. This is applicable in a lot of areas, not just sports. Maybe that is human nature.

This post feels bleak. But it is a bleak subject matter, with the glimmer of hope that someone made it through the trauma. I don’t think Mary Cain wants to be a portrait of abuse and a broken system forever, but by being brave and continuing to step forward she is helping expose the fractures. Maybe it will lead to healing for others and prevention of future abuse.

While reading the latest issue there was a short article on new research regarding New Zealand blackcurrant’s ability to help women in perimenopause/menopause with gut troubles and bone decline.

Bone health is one of the big concerns I have as I age. My mom had to have her hip replaced last year and if I can do whatever possible to avoid that fate, I’d like to. I don’t even know if her hip socket deteriorated due to menopause, I guess we’ll never have an answer to that completely. But it is proven that estrogen decline impacts bone health.

Wildly swinging hormone levels can affect gut health. That makes sense because even just the regular monthly cycle can cause problems for a lot of women. Estrogen helps the gut lining and progesterone can help keep things moving. So problems get amplified as our hormones are shutting down.

Basically, hormone decline impacts the entire body. It’s super fun that midway through our lives the body decides to stop making some of them and that affects every system. So we get to just keep living in poorer and poorer health. Yay… (sarcasm)

Anyway, I’ll add the blurb from the magazine here.

And for the studious ones among us, I found some studies:

Blackcurrants reduce the risk of post-menopausal osteoporosis

Study Suggests Blackcurrant Supplementing Mitigates Postmenopausal Bone Loss

The power of purple: The healthy ageing benefits of these New Zealand berries.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post and shared an interview with the founder of Curranz, a brand of New Zealand blackcurrant marketed toward the athletic population. Some of the benefits for athletes that impressed me at that time: it can help with inflammation, it boosts energy, improves immunity. I’ve seen reviews on other sites from ultra runners who depend on this supplement before long training runs or races.

Now it seems like the little berry has more potential benefits in store too.

Curranz supplied a discount code for me to share with everyone back then and it’s still valid now. If anyone wants to test it out for athletic benefits, or perimenopausal/menopausal benefits, or both; try it out! I don’t get anything from the code or your purchase, it’s just a perk to you. I’m not good at monetizing myself.

Code: jillruns
20% Discount at Curranzusa.com

The app automatically pulls in workouts from other sources, like your Apple Watch or any other app that writes to Apple Health, and gives you fun ways to track and/or share the details. And it works pretty seamlessly, after you complete a workout, a notification will pop up and indicate that Personal Best has received it.

I didn’t immediately take advantage of the 7-day free trial upon download, I waited until we were on vacation in Big Bear for a week to activate that. The main reason is I wanted to try it out with a few more options. I usually track all of my runs via Garmin and the majority of those these days are indoors on the treadmill. But I track outdoor walks with the dog on my Apple Watch. And when we go hiking I often track those with my Apple Watch and phone via AllTrails. So doing my free trial week made sense when I would be using a few different sources.

Each morning I got up and ran the dog a couple of miles. Since I didn’t have a treadmill at my disposal, that was the only way I would get any running in on vacation. Plus, it was delightfully freezing (literally, 32 degrees Fahrenheit), so running with the dog made the temperature more tolerable. My Garmin runs do sync into Apple Health, but apparently, it is not immediate all the time. I did not see them show up on the Personal Best app in a timely manner. I’m thinking that’s more of an issue between Apple Health and Garmin, not this app. Some days it synced in almost immediately, others it did not. I do know you need to open the Garmin Connect app after completing a run to try to force it to push to Apple Health. But it just gets lazy… (Talk about being unproductive, Garmin!)

Walks and hikes did show up quickly. I got a notification on my lock screen pretty fast after completing the workout, so I could go in and look at the workout details in Personal Best. I like that you can view a replay of your route, speeding it up or down to make a cool little video. Plus, when sharing a workout, you can select any photos you took during the workout and choose data options to overlay.

If you’ve been around here a long time, you might recall I used to take a photo of my feet during each run and share it with a weather overlay. Then that app decided it needed to become a subscription model at the ridiculous price of $9.99 a week. A WEEK! I tried editing photos for a little while myself to put the weather details in, but that was time-consuming. So I just ultimately stopped doing that. I do really like that Personal Best allows you to select specific metrics to put on your shared image. I also like that it encourages the use of an image description for accessibility purposes when sharing.

It would be nice if there were a few other layout template options for the overlays. Mainly because the circular badge that indicates what kind of workout you did could be disruptive to some of the photos. But maybe someday changing templates or positions will be an option.

The app’s dashboard on start-up has several options to show workout planning, insights, completed workouts, and goals. You can choose to turn these on/off and customize your experience. But you can’t change the order in which they display, just on or off.

To test the goal-setting functionality, I input that I wanted to cover 70 miles* of running during the month of June. The only annoying thing with is that the Garmin sync to Apple Health seems so slow. Now that the June goal has started, it’s always a day behind in measuring the output.

Setting up a goal is super easy. You can base it on the number of workouts, the total duration, or the distance you want to cover, as well as energy burned. Once you have set up the goal, then it will show up on your dashboard and keep track of it for you.

Just to be thorough I had to test the workout planning feature. I’m going to be honest here. The workout that I “planned” was frivolous just to try the feature. I knew I wouldn’t have that much time to work out on the specific day, but I would definitely be able to run around 2.5 miles that day. So I set a workout plan to run longer than 2.49 mi. And would you look at that? I was able to accomplish that workout!

I couldn’t tell if there was an easy way to schedule several upcoming workouts. It seemed like it was just a one-at-a-time thing. But if you could set up all of your planned/anticipated workouts for the week, that would be a cool at-a-glance feature.

The app has many other settings behind the scenes. I appreciate that it gives you the option to turn off the little comparisons like “you burned more energy than a box of six donuts”. Those kinds of things could be triggering for those with disordered eating. I’m now at the point where I can read those and dismiss them without feeling judgment one way or another. But it’s a thoughtful touch. (Other comparisons are in regard to distance accolades, elevation, or time… like “you exercised longer than the runtime of Titanic.” So there is a humorous element to it! You can turn those off if you prefer to remain stoic and serious.)

After my 7-day trial, I decided I appreciated the features and thought put into this app enough to pay for it for a year. It is a subscription, but right now it’s only $24.99/year. That is reasonable, especially given the effort the developer has put into it. Maybe I’ll even start sharing photos from every run again, if I can get myself back into a rhythm of running in the great outdoors more often. Someday, I’m going to feel normal and not need the bailout option from being safely inside my home, right? RIGHT?!

*70 miles used to not even be a question, I usually got 120ish a month. Now it’s my stretch goal?!

Recently I had seen mention of the book “The Long Run” by Martin Dugard floating around. I’m a running nerd, so I checked it out from the library. The subtext on the title is:

Steve Prefontaine, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz
and the Decade That Made the Marathon Cool

The book is about a lot more than those 4 people mentioned. A LOT more. It’s almost a disservice to the countless others mentioned throughout the book that we narrow the cover down to just 4 people. And while I have obsessively absorbed a lot of information about these people over the years, there were some things that I didn’t know prior to this read.

Like JFK’s influence on the running boom…

Back in the 60’s, President John F. Kennedy wanted the US to be fitter, so we could be ready to fight for our country. (Weird how this priority passes between parties over history, and every time one side is advocating for health the opposite is against it, because our two-parties are FUBAR. But I digress…)

Anyway, JFK thought everyone was getting soft and fat. He commissioned this amazing song and had it sent to all the schools to encourage them to get rid of their “chicken fat”.

The world was so much more blunt back in the day…

I guess the song inspired or annoyed a bunch of Boomer kids into more exercise, then hopefully they carried the message home to mom and dad…

Then a mandate from Teddy Roosevelt about being able to cover 50 miles in 20 hours re-surfaced to JFK’s desk and that was turned into a formal test of vigor. JFK was big on “vigor”, giving a speech where he mentioned the word multiple times. The first 50 miler was held in the spring of 1963. JFK was assassinated later that year, but the race continues on as the oldest continuously held ultramarathon in the US.

The portions of the book covering Steve Prefontaine (Pre) and Frank Shorter, also get into legends like Bill Rodgers, Bill Bowerman, and Jeff Galloway. Because that 1970’s era of running was so intertwined. This is where I felt like it was so glossed over, but if we went too in-depth the book would never finish. But it really does introduce far more of the running history cast than just the two mentioned on the cover.

And we also have mentions of Bobbi Gibb and Kathrine Switzer in the Boston Marathon stories, before we get into Grete Waitz and Joan Benoit Samuelson really taking on the marathon stage. There is even an honorable mention chapter for Des Linden, who is probably the GOAT for American female marathoners in recent times, but there are so many good stories in female marathoning that the subject is hardly scratched in this book. A lot of them have their own books, so I get that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list.

Before any of these topics are covered, the book covers early marathoning and the lore surrounding the distance. From Ancient Greece and Pheidippides, to how the Queen of England was responsible for the ultimate distance. Or not responsible for the distance. So many stories over the years and as any good legend or tall tale, details change throughout time and with the storytellers.

This book is great for a running nerd, even if you know the stories. Or if you are new to the sport and want to learn some of the history. But don’t let this be your sole source for the history. There is so much more.

The writing style is kind of odd and feels very much like the personable nature one might use… on a blog? But a blog over the course of an entire book. Sometimes it’s a little weird, but mostly it works because the author is a running nerd too and you can feel it. But if you aren’t one, you’ll probably not feel the undercurrent of jittery excitement and love of the sport. (Kind of how I don’t feel that enthusiasm when people talk to me about football. I want to tune out.)

Oh, and in case you were wondering… Joan Benoit’s win in the 1984 Olympic marathon did not start the boom for women in running. Yes, her win was inspirational and did get some people going. But a decade later a little unknown named Oprah Winfrey ran the Marine Corps Marathon and BOOM… bigger spike in female participation. So… Oprah is responsible for the women’s running boom more than Olympians.

The more you know…

Hey, I’m 47! I think… I forget sometimes.

As I was being detoured by Google Maps to avoid a giant crash and navigating traffic backups, while listening to my phone buzz in the cupholder with incessant work requests, and generally feeling down about life because that is my general state of being at the moment… some person on the radio has the audacity to tell me this is the happiest I will ever be?

So far, age 47 has been one of the shittiest ages.

I don’t know that it’s exactly because the needle has moved into the position of 47 that causes this. And I don’t see it improving any as I hit 48 later this year. It’s definitely a multi-factorial equation with all of the variables combining to make this very complex.

(My daughter has been doing algebra this year, so I’ve been relearning algebra to help with homework. Not happiness.)

Factors not contributing to happiness:

• My daughter turned 13 shortly after I turned 47, and some days it feels like she could send me off to the incinerator with just a stray glance. It’s upsetting! She wants more independence, but doesn’t want it in the ways I’d like her to take it on. Like cleaning or preparing meals. And it makes me sad and lonely.
• My husband is on a countdown to losing his job. It’s a very volatile and unpredictable countdown. But his company is trying to sell everything off and probably maybe definitely sometime this year I will have to be the sole income for our family. Yet again… if I wasn’t carrying so much of all the other mental load it wouldn’t be as frustrating.
• Parenting is brutal. I don’t think I’m cut out for this gig. How can you have someone you love so much and worry that you’re ruining things for them every single day? And how are you supposed to give up your life for this human in their early years, when the endgame is to send them off to be independent and then you no longer have any sense of self when that time comes? This is a cruel system.
• I must be perimenopausal… because despite getting my thyroid meds feeling like they’re more dialed in now, I feel like a walking disaster. I forget common words that I have known since I was a toddler. I mix up words in meetings and sound like a dumbass. My anxiety is sky-high, off-the-charts. I feel like I want to die every single month and that has become the indicator that my period is about to start. When you start to contemplate disappearing from the earth and that is the clue that your body is going to start bleeding diabolically, it’s kind of bleak. I think this phase is probably making those previous bulletpoints feel harder.

I have an appointment to discuss possible hormone treatment. I don’t know what that will entail. Part of me questions if that is actually the answer. I very much feel like a commodity in this whole “perimenopausal woman market” and I don’t want to feel like I got suckered into buying the Kool-Aid. But I also cannot continue on in this same way for much longer. Being on the verge of tears or a mental breakdown and trying to not “crash out” 99% of the time is hard.

The other 1% of time I am asleep.

Oh yeah… sleep is crap these days too. I can’t stay asleep and usually start to see every passing 10 minutes from 3 am until I finally just get up somewhere in the 5:00 hour.

But right now, I feel like I would love to just relive the years of 2015-2019 on repeat. My child was old enough to not need diapers, but she was full of joy and exuberance and innocence. I was running endurance events fairly often still. And work hadn’t become an untenable amount of demands or legislation and I received recognition for what I did. Life was hard, but it didn’t feel pointless or impossible. Maybe that was peak happiness. Ages 37-41 was the peak.

I did try to look up information on that 47 is peak happiness nonsense. I found a few articles posted in the past few days that seem to reference this idea. But nothing felt super trustworthy or groundbreaking. Or definitive as the final source.

Ironically, I also found articles from a couple years to several years back that say 47 is peak misery.

It’s kind of like fashion, it’s one thing and then it’s the other… but it will change and you can’t plan on any one way to be the way you expect.

It’s exhausting, but it’s supposed to be uphill from somewhere around now… but then, I live in our current world. So maybe not.

I was sent a copy of the book The Last of the Giants, a graphic novel by William Windrestin and Doug Mayer. The book intrigued me because it’s a fictional account of what many real ultrarunners go through in long distance endurance events. It also covers an event that I hadn’t heard about, the Tor des Géants in the Aosta Valley of Italy.

This race is about 205 miles and runners have 150 hours to complete it. It also has a high dropout rate, only about 60% of participants finish. There are 43 refreshment stops and 7 larger “life bases” about every 31 miles across the course, so participants can refresh supplies, get help, check-in, etc.

The illustrations throughout are not highly refined, yet you get a sense of character for each person in the story.

The main story follows a runner, Sam, in his journey throughout the race. We get to experience his highs and lows, his doubts and triumphs. It makes it very clear at the start this is fictional and resemblance to anyone real is coincidence. But I also think a resemblance is circumstance, having volunteered and paced at ultrarunning events the through line in this story is kind of universal when it comes to endurance.

Sam has his struggles with physical pains and mental battles. He has opportunity to help others on the course. He has to battle through the course on his own at times, and in other moments he finds strength in partnering with other people running to cover the miles. I liked the moment where it talked about night running and seeing all of the other runners headlamps. It was likened to fireflies in the darkness that helped runners remember they weren’t out there alone.

I’m not a huge graphic novel reader, but I thought this was an innovative way to tell a story of an ultra endurance event. I’ve read a lot of traditional books about running and this was a new take for me.

One interesting choice was about 75% of the way through the book, the character was wrestling with the proverbial dragons of the mind, which causes the entire book to flip upside down and then the reading pattern switches from left to right to right to life. It’s a clever mechanism in the print version, but I imagine it’s a nightmare on digital formats.

Overall, it was a fun and easy-to-read book. The choice to make it into a graphic novel was refreshing and made this something new to break up the monotony of traditional reading. (That sounds terrible, I love reading and don’t usually find it monotonous. But I am super burnt out on perimenopause books, so maybe it was a fun break to that streak I’ve been on of late.)

Get a copy from Amazon!

Or check it out at your local library. (Put in a request if they don’t have it. You might help introduce it to new readers.)

Last year I was going to enter the traditional New Years Eve/New Years Day races here in Las Vegas, but something kept nagging at the back of my brain to not register. I won’t get into the details here, but on New Years Eve last year we were suddenly on the road for family things. I’m glad I wasn’t on a race course when that started to unfold.

In August of this year I started taking MORE thyroid meds, I’m now on 3 pills taken at 2 times a day to manage this. But I actually was starting to feel a little more normal with this change. I don’t know that I will ever go back to how I felt pre-removal. But I could actually run fairly regularly the past few months, even if it was only on the treadmill because I’m still nervous about getting dizzy while a distance away from home. Especially since I usually try to shove a workout in place of my lunch hour so that I’m never taking time away from my family. Mostly my kid, she needs me. My husband probably doesn’t, except he might wonder why he has no clean clothes and why the kid was still at school if I were to disappear.

So about 11 days before the races, I bit the bullet and registered. And WTAF, why are races so expensive? I had to pay $120 for the two 5Ks, and it wasn’t even a guarantee that I would get a t-shirt. I know there are fees for permits and such, but DAMN… that’s kind of outrageous. That was with a discount for doing both races.

As the day got closer, I started to feel guilty. The New Years Eve race was set to take place at 4pm. Well, the 5K actually didn’t start until 4:15pm, we had to wait for the 10K runners to head out first. So I knew that if I ran in roughly the 30 minute range, then listened for awards and such, I’d be home a little after 5pm. But as it turned out, the finale for Stranger Things was supposed to release at 5pm that day and my kid was very much looking forward to watching it.

She told me it would be fine, we could watch it a little later. Just not too late, she had to text friends about it after watching!

Still, all day I felt like a jerk. Why was I leaving to do this thing all for me? So selfish, Jill…

But I’d already paid out the overpriced entry fee, skipping it would be even stupider. So I debated repeatedly about what to wear (it was in the 50’s, but it was supposed to rain, but it wasn’t that cold yet, but would it start to pour on me… I can overthink like an Olympian.) I settled on shorts and a quarter-zip pullover and headed out.

I got to the park to pick up my bib number and they told me since I hadn’t registered two weeks in advance, I’d have to wait until after the race the following day to see if I could get a shirt. Whatever.. I’m not in it for the shirt.

I’ve run this race so many times, probably at least 10 times as the actual race. Plus I used to run on the course every single week when I ran with the Fleet Feet running group, back before I had a kid and gave up all of a personal life. So I went in a little cocky/comforted, thinking how well I know the route. But they changed it up! I mean, not so much that it was dramatically different in terrain, but it was just down along the path that I have only run about 20% as much as the regular route.

As I started running, my heart rate spiked at first. It does that for a lot of runners, then you settle into a rhythm. And since it was all downhill for the first mile, I just kept telling myself that was free speed to bank.

The biggest problem was the fog in my head. I just feel like thinking is harder these days, and for some reason running a race at dusk when the world’s color is strange, it just played tricks on my brain. It is kind of hard to explain, but a foggy sensation that is dulling my brain is the best way to describe it. I feel that a lot these days… which could be related to my thyroid or it could be related to my perimenopause age. Or it could be both! Fun! Which is all so annoying, and probably better suited for more ranting on a different day.

As I reached the first turn to start running back uphill I was kind of surprised at myself because despite all of the annoying brain/thinking feelings, I was doing pretty well. Especially given the inconsistent running I’ve been doing the past 3 years and the relatively short time being back to running at least 3x a week. (Old me used to run 5x a week, except for that stretch that I ran every day for over a year.)

As I hit the second turnaround to head toward the start/finish line, I was had a feeling of slight accomplishment. Not much makes me feel like I’m accomplishing things these days. Parenting and working both end up feeling like getting by after negotiating a series of compromises and battles after clawing through the Upside Down. (We’ve watched a lot of Stranger Things around here lately, okay?)

But I crossed the finish line and I was super proud of myself for still managing to have a sub-10 minute mile pace overall in this event. 9:40 average, to be exact.

I downed my (faux) champagne at the finish line and headed back home to eat pizza and watch Stranger Things with my kid.

New Years Day rolled around and I was registered for the 5K to happen at noon. Well, 12:15… again, I was in the 5K group and we had to wait for the 10K runners to start first.

And again I had the feeling that I was being a shitty mother by taking roughly 90-120 minutes out of my day to go do a race. Does every mother feel like a shitty person all the time, just because they are responsible for a human? I don’t think they do, if I’m judging by social media. Several moms seem to relish leaving their kids behind and feel no guilt in doing so.

So as the morning ticked by, I was feeling anxious again. But as I recognized that my 13yo kid had mostly ignored me by hanging out in her room all morning and my husband was watching ALL of the college football available to consume, they really wouldn’t miss me.

This time, it really was raining all morning so I worried that I’d end up soaked. The only other time I’ve really run in the rain was the 2015 Boston Marathon… because when you go to Boston for the marathon and it rains you just have to run in the rain. Most of the time, rain doesn’t occur often enough to be concerned about it here in Las Vegas, so I usually can avoid it.

But the rain stopped for about 2 hours midday, right as the race was scheduled to happen. So yay for me, no soggy feet to be had.

At the start line, another woman asked me if I was there running by myself like she was. I confirmed and she said, “Let’s get a selfie to celebrate.” So we took a pic together!

The race started and we did the exact same course as the day before. As I hit the first mile, my Garmin beeped at me to tell me I ran that mile about 40 seconds faster than I had run my first mile the day before. I had been thinking to myself “This is a mistake, today feels harder. Perhaps I’m not ready to do two races in less than 24 hours.” But it actually was harder, I was running faster.

Overall I ran the entire race about 90 seconds faster overall than the previous evening, overall average pace of 9:18. I realize I’m technically a “masters runner” and have probably hit all my fastest races in the past, but it felt good to know that I wasn’t that much slower.

After the race I chatted with my new friend from the start. As it turns out, she had surgery on one of her parathyroids. While she doesn’t have to live a life without a thyroid and take replacement meds for that, it was kind of nice to chat with someone who had to deal with surgery to cut their neck open and making adjustments to life due to that. She said that she’s trying to get back into races regularly again this year, so maybe I can catch her at some other events in the future. If I convince myself to sign up.

It feels absolutely ridiculous that I beat myself up over taking the time and the funds to run a race when we can absolutely afford it and my family mostly didn’t even seem to notice my absence, especially today because there were no pressing television series trying to wrap up their story waiting on me like last night. But I’m also not sure that stress of beating myself up leading up to the race is worth it either. We’ll see… I do think the accomplishment of a race that takes more than an hour feels better than a 5K but I’m not sure I have the time or willpower to get out to train for a half or a full marathon this year.

The irony is that I’ve done a couple of treadmill half marathons as personal “challenges”… I’ll blow a few hours of sick/annual leave at work and spend the morning on a treadmill doing a course. But that’s different because I never push myself at a pace that feels super challenging and I can take regular bathroom and snack breaks as needed. Or respond to Slack messages so my work never thinks that I slack, even if I am taking leave that I’m entitled to use.

All I’m saying is… maybe. Maybe there are more longer races still in me.

Oh, and I did get a t-shirt after today’s race. Funny enough, it’s the same as past years. So I already have a few versions of this shirt anyway.

Earlier this summer I was sent a pair of H2Oaudio Tri2 Pro headphones. These are open ear (bone conduction) style headphones that are waterproof. Meaning, yep… you can swim in them.

But, there is a caveat with that. You can’t connect to your device via Bluetooth when one device (the headphones) are underwater. That means you need to preload the content onto the headphones first. We’ll get to that…

These headphones come with a convenient carrying case, so you can hold the headphones and peripherals all in one storage spot. Not that there is a lot of components, basically the headphones and the charging cable is all you need. I think they also came with a pair of earplugs, which always makes me chuckle to think of open ear headphones with a separate way to close your ears.

I found that they paired easily with my iPhone and I could listen to any audio started on my phone via Bluetooth with no problems. I found the headphones comfortable and the audio quality on par with most open ear headphones. (You’re always going to lose something if you’re wearing them out and a car passes you. Or a gaggle of tween boys on e-bikes.)

They come with a charging cable that is USB on one end and a magnetic charger on the other end, that is similar to styles used on some brands of smartwatches. Charging was easy, let the magnetic end grab onto the earbuds and plug in the USB. Wait until it turns green, you’re good to go.

So I just need to reiterate here, since the documentation for this product also reiterates it in several places. You cannot listen to anything via Bluetooth when you are underwater! You must load content onto to the device! If you are complaining about your Bluetooth cutting out while swimming laps, then you’re not following directions.

In fact, it was funny to have my daughter wear these while she was swimming and keep the app open on my phone. She was swimming away, listening to music on the headphones. But as she sent in and out of the water, I could see on the app screen messages about them being connected, disconnected, connected, disconnected. I wonder if that would kill the battery for your phone after a while. I imagine the headphones would be fine though.

There are a few ways to load audio on to these. The easiest being to connect them to the charging cable, connect the cable to a computer, and drag audio files onto them like it’s another storage drive. This works beautifully if you have audio files.

But if you’re listening to podcasts or audiobooks, you probably don’t have the actual audio file. *

The other methods to get audio on to the headphones are kind of clunky and I didn’t like them all that much. It worked, but it kind of reminded me of the 1980’s when I would make a mix tape by recording songs off the radio. You’d miss the first few seconds of songs and that was just how we accepted it.

To load other audio on the headphones, you have to use their PLAYLIST+ functionality, which lets you transfer any audio content streaming on your device to the headphones. There are two methods for this.

1. Directly via Bluetooth: Start your desired audio on your paired device, making sure you hear it playing through the headphones and that the volume level is high enough. Then you double-click the + button on the headphones. I would recommend you restart the audio before pressing the + button because you’ve probably lost a lot of seconds at the start as you’re checking the audio levels.
2. Loading via App: This is a little bit more intuitive, but the app interface needs some refreshing. It feels pretty rudimentary. But this is the same kind of concept, you connect via Bluetooth, start the song/podcast/book playing and then start loading in the app. With the app you can indicate time to load, so you could say “load for 40 minutes” to get a whole podcast. (Or load for 3 hours, depending on what podcasts you like.) But that means that your device and your headphones have to sit there for the whole duration of what you want to load to finish, then you can play it back on the headphones while you’re underwater.

Personally, I would prefer to just load songs on via the USB transfer. Much faster process. I did load a little bit of a podcast and a little bit of an audiobook to test it out, but for longer term use playing from the headphones memory I always reverted to music.

*I don’t know how far back in podcasting history you recall… I setup a podcast for something at work back in 2004 or so. At that time, you subscribed to a podcast in iTunes and each new episode would download to your computer/iTunes automatically and you transferred it to your iPod. So you actually did get the audio file. Podcasts are so ubiquitous now, I cannot imagine having to store that many audio files. And who needs to keep a podcast audio file forever, aside from the original creator? But if people were not careful or aware of storage limitations, they’d fill that up fast if we still operated like that.

ALL THE PROTEIN!

My favorite sarcastic Instagram account said in one post, “Google how much protein in a day will kill you, and subtract about 10 from that.” And do you know what the internet algorithm’s top protein choice seems to be? Cottage Cheese.

I’m not even sure who to attribute it to anymore, but I’ve seen the recommendation to shoot for 30ish grams of protein at each meal repeated all the damn time. (Grammarly really wants me to say “repeatedly” there instead of cursing. My blog, my language.) So I started to try boosting my protein at each meal.

I don’t usually spend time cooking breakfast, I have to start work by 7:00am, which means (in my self-imposed rules) I need to start working by 6:45am. Which means I eat breakfast at my desk. And one of the easier ways I found was to eat high-protein greek yogurt or cottage cheese.

Was I eating cottage cheese on the regular before this past year? No… not at all. But it’s now a staple of my diet. The internet algorithm pushed me into it. I joined the cult.

Think I’m exaggerating? Even the grocery store receipt says it’s a GD cult.

I have been buying the Good Culture brand of cottage cheese because it has cultures in it. The alternative is the Lactaid brand, which is cheaper on some days and not on others. They seem to flip-flop. But the grocery store abbreviated “Good Culture” as GD Cult on the receipt. Irony? (Probably, but it’s hilarious.)

Here’s the problem… I had my thyroid out a few years ago. And I’ve felt slightly crappy ever since, with one of my main complaints being dizziness. And since I started trying to eat more protein, the dizziness has amplified.

Some of this could be attributed to perimenopause. There are about 37,459,278 various symptoms documented that can be attributed to perimenopause. Or 34 symptoms. Or more… nobody knows for certain because “studying women’s health is too hard… let’s just not do it. Let’s work on erection medicines instead!” (I assume that’s how conversations go in medical research labs.)

So I’m dizzy a lot. If I crouch down and stand back up, the world goes black, and I have to wait a few beats for that to correct. But I noticed that with this protein increase the dizziness would intensify in other situations… like walking down the aisle at the grocery store. That was weird, but it made my head pound and feel weird. Weird is not a great descriptor, but it is all I can come up with.

As my estrogen declines, my endocrinologist has observed that my thyroid levels change, so I become hyperthyroid. So he adjusts the levels of my replacement med until I fall somewhere in the normal range. He doesn’t seem to care at all where I am in that range, I can be on the cusp of hyperthyroid by a hair, and he’s like, “Good enough, stay on this dose.” Actually, his staff calls me to say, “He said you’re in range, stay on that dose.”

But I still felt like hot garbage. So I started reading Reddit and Facebook groups about others who have had a total thyroidectomy. And one post jumped out at me, a woman said that she gets up at 1am to take her thyroid medicine so she can have her latte when she wakes up at 7am, because her doctor said the milk was interfering with her body’s ability to use the replacement thyroid properly. And several others jumped in on that to say the same.

Now, we won’t touch on the fact that “YOU DON’T WAKE UP UNTIL 7?!” went through my mind. But I did think to myself, “Wait… I get up at 5:45 and take my thyroid med right then, and eat breakfast at about 7 or 7:30am, am I interfering by eating yogurt or the gd cult cottage cheese?” I knew it said on the thyroid meds bottle to not take calcium supplements for at least 4 hours after taking, but I figured it was just the super high dose of those. I didn’t consider that the calcium-rich food would be a problem, because it’s still not as much calcium as a supplement pill.

But I stopped eating yogurt and gd cult at breakfast… If I want to eat those for an extra calcium hit, that can be later in the day.

And while I still can’t crouch down to pull a rogue weed from the yard without having the world shut down on me for a moment, I can now walk down the grocery store aisle without feeling like my head is spinning. So, it’s a small win?

But I’m still furious that I basically have to be my own doctor, because most doctors are overbooked and can’t actually treat patients and listen to their challenges. The Las Vegas medical scene is pretty rough; there aren’t nearly enough doctors and specialists for the population. And it’s hard to find someone who is accepting new patients and takes my insurance. And nobody has time to call various doctors’ offices all day to ask questions, because they usually put you on hold until you get disconnected. After all, they’re all too busy for someone asking stupid questions* while they’re trying to check patients in and out.

*They’re not really stupid questions either. “Do you take my insurance?” and “Are you accepting new patients?” just feel extra stupid when you can tell they’re frazzled and you’re stressed because you should be focusing on work at that time and not sitting on hold waiting/hoping for a doctor’s admin assistant to get around to the phone. I try to be self-sufficient, but the insurance company’s website is so unreliable. Half the time it is timing out on provider searches, and the rest it’s like, “Here’s a list of tons of people that probably take this insurance, but you should find their contact info and see for yourself if they’re still in plan.”