Health

What’s next after the Hyannis Half? My body turns to dough if I don’t exercise and indeed exercise hard. In fact, just taking it easy for the last week after the half-marathon made me feel all sluggish and yucky. I know I should probably visualize “thin” and go on a diet — but that just doesn’t work for me. And I need a goal to make me stick to a routine, but luckily I seem to have found my drug. So, what’s next is the Cohasset 10K Road Race by the Sea on April 6. My realistic goal is to run the 10K at my recent half marathon pace (9:36 min per mile = 59:39 for the 10K), my “reach for it” goal is to finish under 57:17, which is the time predicted by a cool predictive calculator I found. To assemble a training program for the next five weeks I used the Smart Coach program from Runners World. Onwards!

I have a mission for the rest of this year now. Today, I broke my half-marathon personal best (set last October) by running the 13.1 miles in 2 hours 5 minutes 38 seconds. I managed this even though I struggled mightily the last two miles. So, now my mission is to break 2 hours.

BTW, it was an absolutely gorgeous day in Hyannis. The route goes by yacht harbors and other beautiful parts of the Cape Cod coast. Brilliant.

I have been running for many years as my main form of exercise (since I can’t play soccer every day, which is what I used to do growing up). A couple of times I have trained for an actual race, only to suffer some injury or other along the way. This time, I managed to make it all the way through three months of training, and yesterday was the big day: I ran the BAA Boston Half-Marathon. It was a great day for running (after a few hot days, it cooled down just in time). My goal was to run the 13.1 miles in 2:30 hours for a pace of about 11:30 minutes per mile. That’s about the speed I ran in training. My longest run in training was 10 miles, but the wisdom is that the race day adrenaline will ensure that the remainder of the distance is achievable.

The experience far exceeded my expectations. It was a lot of fun to run the course along Boston’s riverway parkland, up into the Franklin Park Zoo (hi to the giraffes), and back. Running with 3,600 people sure does make a big difference compared to solitary runs along the Charles River. I ran at a speed that I truly did not know I could sustain for such a long time. I finished the run in 2:08:34 for a pace of 9:49 minutes per mile, placing in 2,670th place.

[The professionals, who we at the back of the pack got to see whizzing past on their way back to the finish when we were still on our way out to the half way point, ran about twice as fast.]

This was so much fun and so satisfying that I’m surely going to do it again.

Last week, coming back from visiting Emma at Shire Village and from the Mosaic general meeting, my toothache started getting worse (I had medicated some tweaks for a few days with Advil). Over the next three days, it gradually reached the excruciating stage, to the point where I couldn’t sleep at night. The pain got better when I walked around but I have never learned the art of sleep-walking. So, it was time to go to the dentist.

If you are ever looking for a good dentist in the Boston area, go to Eric Klein. He’s good. An hour of root canal treatment later, the pain was gone. Of course, there are follow-up visits and such to come. But it’s great to be living without pain again.

PS. Of course, Eric is my other dentist, the one that gets to work on my teeth. My main dentist, as in my friend who is a dentist, is Sabine, who — before becoming the brilliant linguist that she is — was a professional dentist, among other things.

We had a nice dinner (à deux — with Emma at her sleep-away camp and Pascal in Maine with his best buddy Zach) at Mulino’s Trattoria in Northampton on Saturday night. We had an acceptable bottle of Chianti Classico and struggled to finish it, especially since I still had to drive us back to our camp site in the Erving State Forest quite a ways away. Just as we were leaving we saw a sign on the door saying that the restaurant was in compliance with the new law allowing patrons to take partially consumed bottles of wine home after a meal, properly resealed etc. A while ago, we knew that such a law was being discussed but we had no idea it had finally been passed.

Indeed:

The Massachusetts Legislature has amended Massachusetts law now to allow every holder of a “restaurant” or “hotel” type license issued under M.G.L. c. 138, § 12 to permit “a patron to retain and take off the premises only so much as may remain of a bottled wine purchased by the patron in conjunction with a meal and not totally consumed by the patron during such meal; provided further, that the bottle shall be resealed in accordance with regulations promulgated by the commission. [from the site of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission]

The law passed against the veto of Governor Romney. No idea why he vetoed it. The change is a great idea.

This week I have reached a mile-stone, so to speak, in my 117th attempt at getting in shape. A couple of years ago, after some scary dizzy spells, my cardiovascular system checked out OK, but what with my family history of heart disease and my not so good cholesterol levels, my doctor gave me a 10% chance of a heart attack in the next few years. This was of course a shock. Unfortunately, I have not always been consistent in my project of getting completely healthy. Once in a while, I started running very regularly, only to get injured after several weeks. Getting orthotics helped with that. But still, I remained at the edge of being unhealthy.

Anyway, early this year I started working out almost every day, first in the gym, on the treadmill and on the weights. When the weather got better, I added more and more running to the routine. My first goal was to get up to 20 miles per week. This week I have reached that level (four runs of 5, 3, 9, and 3 miles).

20 miles is a bit of a magic level. I saw a snippet in my favorite journal, Runners World, that said that 20 miles a week is the level of exercise where one actually starts getting rid of abdominal or visceral fat, the most harmful kind of body fat. The source for that claim is this research article.

So, now my plan is to stay at this level for rest of the summer, adding some interval running on one of the short days. Then, in the fall, I’ll finally try to run a half marathon, after two failed attempts at running in races that I signed up for. This should finally get Jason Stanley off my back, who needs to know my half-marathon time (preferably at least twice as long as his, of course — Jason: my pace in today’s 9 mile run was a super-slow 11 minutes per mile).

How do I feel? Like I am slowly but surely getting healthier. I have not lost much weight at all, perhaps 6 pounds or so. But I feel quite a bit trimmer. Next up: my diet — perhaps, some dairy has to go. Also, I need to figure out how to not become a complete couch potato during the World Cup. Perhaps, I’ll need to use some handweights during the games.

In a sensitive, yet firmly scientific article in Sunday’s Globe Magazine, Dr. Darshak Sanghavi debunks the alleged link between child vaccinations and autism. Along the way, he reveals the truth about vaccinations:

The secret truth about vaccines is that they don’t have much of a benefit for the individual child who receives them. They’re mostly for the good of the community. My sons got multiple polio shots, for example, for little personal benefit. The same goes for flu, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and almost every other immunization. The reason they’d be fine without the shots is that most everybody else gets them. This concept is called “herd immunity,” and it is the foundation for disease control. Essentially, it means that once a critical “tipping point” for vaccination coverage occurs - say, about 90 percent of the population - the probability of getting a disease suddenly falls, since it can’t spread.

Following a 1957 influenza pandemic, the Japanese government began vaccinating all schoolchildren, since they spread flu efficiently. After mandatory vaccination ceased in 1994, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the vaccination campaign had prevented as many as 49,000 deaths annually among the Japanese population. That is, one older person’s life was saved for every 420 children vaccinated.

In the United States, getting your kids vaccinated is like paying your taxes: Cheating a little doesn’t really hurt anyone as long as everyone else pays up. But left to their own devices, parents may balk at subjecting their children to the needle when there’s no significant risk of disease. So the United States decided in the favor of greater good and not individual rights, making certain vaccinations compulsory for admission to public schools and day-care centers. As a result, despite well-publicized small outbreaks of whooping cough and even polio recently, vaccination rates in the United States are higher than ever. Today, about 90 percent of Massachusetts children and 80 percent nationwide are fully immunized - and millions of people enjoy some of the world’s lowest rates of devastating but preventable infections.

So, when you, as an affluent parent with all the access to superior health care, choose to not vaccinate your child, you are almost certainly not hurting your child’s health (although you are not helping it either), but you make it slightly more likely that some poor child somewhere or a vulnerable older person will contract a deadly disease. If many of us make that decision, we would hurt the general welfare of our society.