"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

PET/CT Scan

I had a PET/CT scan this morning. Friday I’ll know the results. This is a very important milestone for me. If my cancer is still in complete remission I will have gone 13 months since the start of my chemo. For prognostics, such as survival rates, studies use the start of chemo treatments as day zero. Typically, my type of cancer takes one very quickly if it is going to take you. The highest chance of the cancer returning is in the first year after chemo has started. There still is significant risk during the second year, but a lot less than the first year. Not that I worry about it much, but it is nice to know my odds of surviving the next few years is much better than 50/50.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Then There Was the Weekend

I got off to a good start with my new plan. I was carefully measuring my food, counting calories and staying well under 2000 calories per day. For the first dinner on my new plan I pulled out a kitchen scale and started weighing each food item at the table. My sons gave me the strangest looks but didn’t say anything – at first. Then my youngest sons couldn’t hold it back anymore and blurted out, “what the heck are you doing Dad?” My sons now think I’m a big weirdo. They are embarrassed to sit next to me at our own private dinner table. Don’t they know their father is a scientist? They should know better.
During the week my weight came down to 173. On Wednesday I ran 10 miles and felt really good during and after the run. It’s been a long time since I’ve run that long of a distance. I felt so good after running it I ran another 10 miles on Thursday. However, for the last 2 or 3 miles I felt really weak, kind of like hitting the wall at mile 20 in a marathon. I think what was happening is that my calorie intake had been so low that I didn’t have much sugar in my blood to support fast long distance running. I was burning fat, which I want to do for loosing weight, but burning fat for energy doesn’t work well for fast running. I may need to boost my calories, in particular carbs, the night before I do my weekly long run. My wife likes spaghetti so that would be a good spaghetti night.
So things were looking great for my fist week, then there was the weekend. Not just any weekend, but a 3 day weekend with a snowboarding outing, watching the grandkids, and a big garage project. There were delivery pizzas, a trip to Fuddruckers, and more delivery pizzas. My father-in-law help me put insulation up in my garage. That was a big project that called for a couple of beers. I need to be a good host, you know! I didn’t want my grandkids to think I was weird like my sons do, so I ate what they ate. I did record everything, sometimes having to estimate. I averaged 2447 calories per day, missing my goal by 447 calories. With my running I figured I probably burned about the same amount, so I went nowhere this last week. Well, I did learn a lot.
I am not going to give up on my plan. I’ll need to find a better way to handle the weekends. I’ll just have to learn to say no!

Monday, January 19, 2009

My New Adventure: The Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon

I miss having a marathon in my plans, but I promised my family I would take a break from full marathons. So I’ve decided to run in the Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon (http://www.lakeminnetonkahalfmarathon.com/) on May 3rd, 2009. To make it adventurous I’m setting a time goal of better than 1:39, which should place me in the top 10 for my age group (50 to 59) based on last year’s results. I was in my best shape when I ran the TC marathon in 2007 and at the halfway point my time was 1:48:52, so I need to cut ten minutes off that time to reach my goal. Now my thinking is I should be able to do that. When I made 13.1 miles in 1:49 time back in 2007 I had to complete another 13.1 miles, so I was saving a lot of energy at that point. Furthermore, it was hotter than heck during the 2007 TC marathon. So I’m thinking with good training I should be able to do this no problem. Last week I get on the treadmill and crank up the speed to 8.0 MPH or a pace of 7:30/mile. Holly smokes! I was surprise how fast that was. There’s a huge difference in the speed for a half marathon time of 1:49 vs 1:39. I can’t imagine running 8.0 MPH for 13.1 miles. Never the less, I’m going try.

I wanted some adventure into the unknown, well here it is. This requires a big change to my training. I’ve never done any serious speed training before, but now’s the time. Last week I started by speed training by employing the Fartlek (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartlek) method on my treadmill. I’ve tried Fartlek training in two different ways. One is to start out at normal pace for a few minutes to warm-up, then run for about 3 minutes at 9.1 MPH (almost a sprint for me), then back to normal pace to rest for a few minutes, then sprint again. I repeat this cycle until I finish 6 miles. The other method I’ve tried is to run again at normal pace, then up my speed to 8.0 MPH (my goal speed for race day) for as long as I can, then back to normal speed to rest, then repeat the cycle as often as I can. I love this type of training. It makes time go much faster when running on the treadmill.

Speed training may not be enough to reach my goal so I’m planning on doing something else to help my speed – loose weight. During chemotherapy last spring I gained about 7 or 8 pounds. There were a few reasons for that. The Prednisone increased my appetite. It also caused my problems with stomach acid and gas to flare up, way up, and eating actually helped with that, so I ate very often. The other cause of my weight gain was comfort foods. My sons like milkshakes. During chemo I would get through the day by looking forward to an evening of making and eating milkshakes with my sons while we watched our favorite TV shows. Fortunately I was running about 40 miles a week, otherwise my weight gain would have been much more.

I’ve read that you can improve your percentage improvement in marathon time is about the same percentage in weight loss. I’m assuming this is roughly true for a half marathon too. I’m at about 175 pounds right now. So I if loose about 15 pounds I could expect about a 9% improvement in my half marathon time. A 9% improvement over my 2007 TC time gets me pretty close to my goal. I have 15 weeks before the race so I need to loose about 1 pound a week. That’s not unreasonable.

I’m not planning on loosing weight just to improve my race time. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. 160 pounds is a very healthy weight for me. Maintaining a good weight has tremendous health advantages that are obtained in a natural way and without drugs. Before I lost my 30 pounds in 2007 my cholesterol was high and my doctor wanted to put me on drugs to control it. I lost 30 pounds and my cholesterol came down into the normal range without drugs. There are so many health risks associated with being overweight (http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/) and one of them is an increase risk in cancer. I don’t need that! So I’m going to use my half marathon time goal as a motivational means for obtaining my weight loss goal. I’m also using this public announcement as a motivational means – I must be crazy!

This will not be easy. Many of you know that loosing weight is not easy. I love food and many of the foods I love are not good for me. However, there are a lot of foods that are healthy and are wonderful for the palate too. For the most part I do have very healthy eating habits. My diet is very high in fiber, I eat a lot of fruits (mostly berries which are the best fruits) and vegetables (probably could do better with veggies), I go with low fat versions of most foods, I avoid foods with refined sugars as much as possible, and get low or no sugar added foods when available. So all I need to do is tweak my diet; mostly cut out those evening milkshakes. I’m not going on any special diet. My plan is to have a well balanced diet and to watch calories. For weight loss the bottom line is calories. To loose weight one has to burn more calories than what one consumes. It’s that simple. However, I’m not going on a strict diet like a 1200 calorie a day diet. I don’t have to with the running I do.

Here’s my plan and how I’ve figured it out. I’ve checked with many websites that have online calculators that calculate calories burned. They don’t all give the same answer, so I’m taking an average. For my weight, age and gender, I burn about 2000 calories a day without running – if I were to lead a sedentary lifestyle. The calculators also show that I burn at least 700 calories for 6 miles of running. So if I run 6 miles a day for 5 days a week I’ll burn 3500 calories per week just running. One pound of fat is equivalent to 3500 calories. So, if I eat 2000 calories a day and run 30 miles a week, I should loose 1 pound a week and reach my weight goal by race day on May 3rd. One way to look at this is that all my weight loss is due to running, not cutting calories. I just need to be careful and not eat extra calories.

Ok, now I’m going to get a bit anal with this plan. To make sure I eat the right amount of calories I’m going to watch my calorie intake very closely. I’ve bought a kitchen scale to weigh all the food that I eat. Weighing food is a lot easier than trying to measure the volume. For example, for breakfast I put my empty bowl on the scale, hit the tare button to zero out the scale, add my cereal, write down the weight, hit the tear button, add my fresh blueberries, hit the tear button, and so on until I have the weights of all my ingredients. It really doesn’t take much effort and it’s kind of fun. Then I’m going to try a trial version of some software from CalorieKing’s website that will help me keep track of calories. Once setup I’ll just enter in the weights and the software will keep track of calories and other nutritional data. If the software works well I’ll buy it. My poor wife, she didn’t know what she was getting into when she married me.

Besides keeping track of my calories I’ll keep track of my daily weight. They say you shouldn’t weigh yourself every day because there are normal fluctuations that occur and a normal but temporary weight increase may be discouraging. However, they weren’t addressing a scientist with this advice. By using curve fitting functions I should be able to average out the normal fluctuations and get a better measurement of weight loss trend with daily measurements than I can get with weekly measurements. Here is my weight over last week:







The solid line is a linear fit to the data and shows that over the week I had a weight gain trend of about a quarter of a pound a day. Kind of alarming! But my guess that besides a daily variation there is also a weekly variation. After a couple of weeks I get a better idea of things. The R2=0.6 is basically an indication of how well the line fits the data. The closer to 1.0 the better the fit. A value of 0.6 is not good correlation and is due to having a lot of variation over the fit period. What this means is that there is not a lot of confidence in the accuracy of quarter of pound weight gain trend. Whew! Eventually I hope that the fitted line extrapolated (extended) out to May 3rd will show that I will eventually get to my goal. I suspect that a linear fit may not be the correct model to use and I may need to go to something like an exponential fit (a curve that starts out steep and the beginning and less steep at the end).

Besides monitoring my weight I’m going to monitor my improvement in running speed each week. In a couple of weeks I’ll be running 13.1 miles for my long run each week. I’ll keep track of my time to finish 13.1 miles and chart that too. Hopefully a fit to that data will show that I will eventually reach my race time goal.

I’m really excited about this. Training for a half marathon will not take nearly as much time as a full marathon and there will be less risk of injury. From my experience I start to run into injury problems when I start running about 16 miles or longer. Keeping my weekly long runs to 13.1 miles will save a lot of time. Not only from running shorter distances, but also shorter recovery time. When I run 16 miles or more, I’m kind of useless for about 2 or 3 hours afterwards, whereas I can do something like mow the yard after a 13.1 mile run. That helps a lot in the wife department. The speed training is a lot of fun and from what I read can actually help reduce injury risk.

I can’t believe I’m doing this – posting this kind of detail on the internet. Oh well – I’m on the hook now.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Don’t Believe, Just Do It

It’s been one year since I started my blog and announced my plans to train for Grandma’s marathon while going through chemotherapy. I look back to that first posting on January 6th, 2008 and I remember how unsure I was about my proposal. You may think I had a bad attitude towards it; that I should have believed that I could do it. You have heard from other apparently successful people that, “if you believe enough in something, you will accomplish it”. I say that’s bull and those people are either mislead or just snake oil salesmen. I don’t believe in the mind over matter thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that attitude has a major role in how well we perform at something and can affect our physical strength. For example the mind can help release adrenaline which can greatly increase our physical performance. I know very well the effects of adrenaline during the first miles of a marathon. Attitude controls how well we use our abilities. I just don’t think that the mind can heal torn tissue, create glucose for additional physical energy, and all other things that follow the natural laws of the universe. There are physical and mental limitations that cannot be exceeded with even the best attitude and strongest beliefs.

What’s interesting is that we don’t exactly know our limitations and each of us has our own unique set. I prefer some uncertainty. Why pick a goal that you absolutely believe you can achieve? To me that approach lacks mystery and adventure. The most rewarding goal to work towards is one that we are not sure about. The road to this kind of goal is full of self discovery. You don’t have to believe you can reach the goal. What is more important is that you have a strong desire, the motivation and commitment to keep pushing forward.

A year ago I really didn’t know or believe I could finish Grandma’s. What I did believe in was that the road to Grandma’s was a good one to take, no matter how far I got. So I started down it one mile at a time and not knowing exactly where it would take me. There were times I thought that Grandma’s was out of my reach, but I never gave up. I wasn’t going to give up unless it was obvious that I could seriously harm myself. I’m sure glad I took that road.

Monday, January 5, 2009

2008 What a Wonderful Year

A couple of weeks ago I was going to title this post something like, “Good Riddance 2008”, because of all cancer and chemo stuff that happened. Then during New Year’s Eve celebrations I started to reflect over this year’s events and I couldn’t help but focus only on many wonderful things that happened in 2008. I’ve already shared words and photos on our Lutsen winter family get together, the marathons and the Minnesota Boundary Waters adventure, which were all fantastic times. There were many other great things that happened in 2008 as well.

A life changing thing that has happened to me this year is getting my Harley – a 1998 Fat Boy. My wife has been a Harley driver for many years and has had her own bike for a couple of years. When I was a teenager I loved riding dirt bikes and riding a motorcycle on the road seemed boring. So I was apprehensive when buying a road bike. But I was getting tired of watching my wife ride off on her Harley while I stayed at home working on chores. Once I got my bike I fell in love with it. I use it to commute to work whenever I can. My youngest son Daniel likes to be taken to and from school. Renee and I will take the bikes to go to the grocery store or do other errands around town. Renee and I have plans to eventually spend many days on the road exploring the U.S.


Me and my Fat Boy.










Renee and her Super Glide.


Renee and I on a day ride in Arkansas.
My oldest Son, Chris and his High School bowling team won the conference championship and went to the State tournament. His team was ranked 4th in the conference and had to upset all three of the leading teams to take the championship.


Chris applying his skill on the alley.




Daniel was chosen to be one of three Captains for his middle school wrestling team.





Daniel (in the grey/green shoes) performing a perfect switch from a sit-out. Daniel’s record was 11 and 1 with most wins by pin.






In December Renee and I went on a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary. We were big spenders by betting a dollar each at each of 8 casinos we visited. We left Vegas way ahead by $5.







Me eating a Kobe beef hamburger at the top of the Stratosphere.








Renee and I outside the famous Bellagio casino watching the water fountain show.