I talked with my homeowners insurance agent and during the interview he asked a question which wound up leading my to understand the answer to one of life’s persistent questions: what is the difference between a jacuzzi and a hot tub?
Thank you.
So at last Tuesday’s track workout my leg was acting up again.
To recap: about four weeks ago I started pushing into the higher mileage weeks (mid-50’s). This turned out to be bittersweet since I did a couple runs with headphones and was really turning in some very gratifying runs of like 8-9 miles at a low 7ish pace (they were probably just about exactly at my Boston qualifying pace which is about a 7:10-7:15) and it felt really, really good, however around this time I also started developing a new pain in my right quad. I felt it in the time trial this month but did that anyway and still coasted to a fairly comfortable 11:47 and negative split, but this was kind of strange since the pain had stayed with me and felt deeper than normal (not quite in the muscle) and also wasn’t responding to ice like most soreness. I talked with my coach who suggested it could be a stress fracture, which was surprising since I always expected such a thing to develop around my shins but I looked online and many of my symptoms lined up.
Fast forward through me getting more concerned but not totally quitting running, noticing more of the pain if I hustled down the concrete hill to the bus in the morning, and an x-ray by a pretty suspicious tech whose nametag (”Sunshine”) didn’t really reassure me (but where the x-ray didn’t prove that I do have a stress fracture developing) and I made the kind of difficult decision last week to rest. So I hadn’t run in a week and continued to ice my quad. The symptoms *still* haven’t subsided, but I’d started going a little nuts and last night was too perfect for running to think about staying in so I went out for a blissful 6 miles at what turned out to be a 7 minute pace (telling myself the whole time “easy, fella…”). I’m finally scheduled for a bone scan (tomorrow) which should be conclusive for the stress fracture or not.
But for me, the key, is that I really, really don’t want to have an injury. A stress fracture would be just about the worst thing evar since it typicalyl means 6-8 weeks of rest. I could bike or something and wouldn’t be on crutches, but no running or impact. So I’ve got my fingers crossed. But I *am* excited about getting the scan done. This is MR technology, so I go in in the morning to get an injection (not the part I’m excited about), come back 3 hours later and get scanned for about an hour and then should have some cool 3D imaging of the interior of my leg.
I’ve plugged my favorite photohosting site, flickr, a bunch of times. I think one of its greatest characteristics is the ability to just browse through pictures of any kind of subject imaginable. Just come up with a tag name and look through all photos with that tag and you can get ideas for how you might design a pergola, see pictures of a red panda, see what Red Square looks for an upcoming trip, or find mood pictures like funny or sad.
You can also find some fascinating pictures like those tagged DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or North Korea) or 2008 Olympics. Really fascinating…
Today I signed a bunch of paperwork related to mortgages and talked with my lender about how mortgage rates are determined. As with just about everything that any professional field does, there really isn’t that much magic behind getting an approximate sense of how this works. Apparently if you want to know whether you can probably get a 1/8th % better rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage, you should watch the 10 year treasury note. Fixed rate mortgages tend to follow fluctuations in this. I’m guessing the magic threshold varies, but right now I’ve been told that if you witness a 0.070 change in price of this note then mortgage rates might follow suit (up or down, with the note). USNews has more on this. Obviously the tnote doesn’t strictly determine the mortgage rate, but if you look at tnote pricing going back to the 80’s when mortgage rates were 2-3 times higher than they are today, it’s interesting to see that this was also about 3-4 times higher then than it is now.
Sometimes I hear criticism when I tell people that I “run” where they say that nobody really “runs” and that basically everybody jogs. Obviously I disagree about this - I’ll let T settle the record on this topic:
