nags of a similar ilk

tl;dr: HeathNet sucks ass.

Long version:

So, Kris has had poison ivy going on ten days now. He's been miserable in more ways that I can think with his swatch of infected area, now ranging in the size of 10" long by about 4" wide, much of it raised, bumping, oozing and inflamed. After a week of calamine lotion, cold compresses and increasingly ineffective benadryl, Kris finally took my suggestion (my increasingly insistent suggestion, because we all know how stubborn boys can be) and called his dad for help.

On Friday, Kris' dad called in a prescription (yes, having an allergist as a father is fabulous), which Kris filled and immediately used. Given the large areas of infection (that 10" x 4"? that's one of THREE that size), he ended up using just under a third of it on the first application. Now, if the prescription, a lotion, was to be used only three times, this would have been fine. However, the instructions said use twice a day, he had huge areas to cover, and the irritation/infection had spread to the point of ridiculousness, three times was not going to cut it.

And it didn't.

Two days later, Kris was about to run out of the lotion. I called the pharmacy to refill the prescription and was told the prescription could not be refilled for thirty days.

WHICH rather defeats the purpose of having a lotion that both relieves the itching of an intense infection and cures it, if you can't use it FOR 30 DAYS.

Right.

I told Kris I couldn't renew the prescription, to which he speculated that a second prescription may have caused the delay in refill availability. He said he'd call the next day, not to worry.

Boy, was he wrong.

Despite the immediate need for the prescription, and the doctor's declaration that a refill was authorized, the F***ING INSURANCE COMPANY decided that one fill is sufficient, they would pay for only one refill. Worse, the pharmacy became unwilling to refill the prescription without the F***ING INSURANCE COMPANY's authorization.

Kris and I are lucky enough to both have the resources available to us to pay for the refill out of pocket, enabling Kris to get relief. However, not everyone is in that position. For those that can, great, fill and move on. For those who aren't, you have to ask, WHY IS THE INSURANCE COMPANY DETERMINING HOW MANY TIMES A PRESCRIPTION CAN BE FILLED?

Why is the insurance company determining what care a patient receives?

We're talking a $50 tube of relief. We're talking a non-addictive, non-abusive medicine. We're talking a medicine that can't wait until an insurance company decides it's "okay to provide."

We are, at this point, three for eight on successfully submitting claims with HealthNet. That 7% limit before you can start taking deductions on your tax return? One emergency this year and we'll be hitting that, given the crappy coverage with HealthNet.

Having coverage with HealthNet is the equivalent of having no coverage at all. There, that's my tweet.

I take back whatever complaints I had with BlueCross. At least they provided coverage.

P.S. And, yes, following my belief, "If you need to complain, you need to do something to solve the problem," Kris and I are looking for real coverage.

You can't cram for fitness. No, but you can set a new goal for yourself.

I ran track in junior high school, high school and college. I started running in junior high because that was the rule in our house: sports or a job. I didn't particularly like it, I wasn't very good at it, and I didn't exactly have the best experience with it. Yet, I ran because I was supposed to.

Did I mention I wasn't very good at it?

Yeah.

So, the way that distance runners are trained to run faster when I was running was to have them run speed workouts in addition to distance workouts. The theory being the distance running gives the runners an aerobic "base" and the speed workouts make them faster.

That theory may be all well and good, sure, but I'm not convinced it really works. Sure, the times for a runner's races over a season might drop, but they don't drop dramatically, maybe 10% faster for the longer distances, less for the shortest distances.

However, it's not particularly easy to make dramatic improvements without some SERIOUS work for two simple reasons:

1. The runner's mind doesn't believe she can run that fast.
2. The runner's body hasn't learned to move that fast.

The way I was trained was along the lines of "practice makes perfect." I'm arguing for "perfect practice makes perfect," and opting to train differently for an arbitrary goal I have set for myself.

I'd like to run a 6:30 mile.

Well, actually make that a 6:30 1600m time, which is about 9.3 meters (about 30 feet) short of an actual mile. I say 1600m because I really don't want to bother trying to figure out where the 1500m race starts on a 400m track. I might change my mind later, because a 6:30 1600m is a fast time. Kris clocks 6:00 miles in his race training pace, and I struggle to keep up with him for more than 300m.

Now, I recognize this is a fairly arbitrary goal. It's nominally a minute and a half faster than I've ever run a mile, an 18% drop in time from my lifetime personal best. So, why 6:30?

When I asked Lisa Timmins her best mile time, years and years ago, she told me it was around 5:30. I don't recall if her race was a 1500m race or a 1609m race (a significant difference really, if you're going for a goal). Lisa is an amazing athlete (just ask her what her best Boston Marathon time was), and 5:30 sounds incredibly intimidating. So, for my goal time, I arbitrarily added a minute to Lisa's best time. Given the speed I'll be running, yeah, I can believe Lisa would finish 3/4 of a lap in front of me in a mile race. She is that good.

I'll be training at a 6:00 pace

For this experiment, I have decided to try a new training approach.

Instead of training long(-ish) distances and run speed workouts, I'm going to run faster than my desired target race pace for as long as I can, then stop. I'm going to train my arms and legs to move the speed I want them to move. Since I'm not training to be faster than someone, and not training at all to go faster-faster-faster-as-fast-as-humanly-possible-to-go, I can try this new training plan, see if it works. If I were on a team, where I needed to win races, scoring points for my school, then I'd doubt this would fly, since you always want someone to run as fast as possible. Since I'm trying for a specific time, I can play around with this different training technique.

So, for 4-5 days a week, I'm going to go out and run 50 meters a number of times at an 11 second pace. Sure, that's 0.25 seconds faster than my target pace, but I'm sure the time it takes for me to check my watch for my pace will cover than quarter second.

For reference, 11 seconds for a 50m run is, by the way, incredibly slow, close to half the speed of my all-out top-speed 50m pace.

Initially, the plan is to run these 50m runs at the 11 second pace, then rest for a minute, until I can't run that pace any longer. While I'm not in the best of shape, I don't know how well this initial training will go. I don't know if I'll manage 3 runs or 30 before I can't keep up the pace. The minute rest is also arbitrary, I might change that to rest until my heart rate drops to 120 beats per minute.

Once a week or so, I'm going to run as far as I can go at this race pace, until I can't maintain that pace at all. I'll set my watch to beep every 5.6 seconds to let me know when I should have run 25 yards, giving me fairly quick feedback on my pace and how well I'm maintaining it.

As the distance I can maintain the 6:00 pace increases, I'll increase the training distance, from 50m to 100m to 150m and 200m. I figure eventually I'll be running 90 second 400m, which is so dog slow, I swear. However, a 3:00 800m sounds FABULOUS to me, since it's only 1 second slower than my lifetime personal best for 800m. Oooooooo, that would be so awesome, since I could probably go for broke and push out a faster time for that ONE run I cared about.

What do I have to look forward to?

So, there are some serious disadvantages to trying out this new training technique, and I'm sure I'll think of more. The ones that come to mind at the moment include:

1. I'm two decades out from my fastest 400m time. I'm not exactly in the prime part of my physical life. This training is going to take serious effort.

2. My knee being sort and nominally injured means I'll be able to run only as far as it allows When it says stop, I'll need to stop, and not start up again until it resets.

3. The speed I train at is the speed I'll run. If I wanted to run a 5:30 1500m, I'd have to start the training process over again, relearning the new speed.

4. Since the training is slower than my sprint speed, I risk losing top speed. I'm not overly worried about this issue, since I'll still be playing ultimate and working out at Velocity.

Advantages I have now

1. I'm stronger mentally than I was when I'm running at school. I recognize that I choose to run these runs. In school, I ran because I was supposed to, here I'm running because I want to try this new training, and that choice makes me stronger.

2. The training is an experiment. Experiments don't always work. If I fail, I may still achieve a respectable 800m time.

3. I'll still be in better shape after the experiment than I would be without it.

I need to figure out how to track my progress. Right now, I think I'll just decide at the end of each training session if I should increase the time or number of runs. I'm also thinking that completing 10 reps of my training distance at pace is sufficient to increase the training distance. I might need to increase the number of how-far-can-I-go tries to more than once a week, too.

I'm very excited about this plan.

I went to physical therapy today for my knee. I'm pretty sure that the insurance company isn't very happy with my sudden massive health failure with so many parts of my body. I figure, I've been saving it up for a while, finally decided to do something about it, and the POINT of insurance is to protect against bad outcomes with risks. Of course, medical insurance companies are actually collective bargaining middle men and not really designed to prevent financial ruin in case of catastrophic medical events, but hey, best to get something from the money the company throws at the insurance company.

That, and I'd rather pay a small amount in preventative health care. If I can't run or walk, most exercises are out for me. I'd like to be able to walk and run, really.

So, I've been going for a while now, with two weeks left in my prescription. The current theory, for which I'm in physical therapy, is that my knee cap doesn't track properly, too far away from the joint on the inside edge of my leg. The problem with this theory, I will comment, is that BOTH knees have the bad tracking, according to the x-rays, yet only one knee is having problems. The other issue I have with this theory is that it doesn't explain the locking I experience when something in my knee shifts and I'm suddenly unable to bend it.

Of course, the doctor knows all of this, and suggested physical therapy as a less invasive potential solution. I don't believe it's working, but hey, my legs are getting stronger. Stronger legs can't be a bad thing.

Despite all of this, today I learned how to tape my knee to bring my knee cap "back in line." I've had it taped before, without pain but with discomfort. I am, at this point, unclear if my new knowledge is both useful and good.

On a whim this morning, while looking for a pair of clean pants to wear to work, having not been home long enough in the last week and a half to even THINK about laundry, much less DO the laundry, I pulled out a pair of my skinny pants (not jeans, since I stopped wearing jeans about six years ago when I had the freaky, all over, hyper-allergic reaction and couldn't stand them any more), and put them on.

To my shock, they fit.

No, not the "hey, look, I can still zip of the zipper if I pull in my gut and hold my breath and pray I don't rip the seam when I bend over" type of fit.

Rather, they fit in the "hey, look, there's no bunching, no grabbing, no identation or bulge over the top of my waist because these pants fit perfectly" type of fit.

I haven't fit comformtably into this particular pair of pants since, since, since, well, ever. I actually bought them at the size I think I should be, not the size I actually am. Well, was.

But now they fit! YAY!

Well, that didn't work out as I had intended. Of course, many things don't, so I don't know why I was surprised.

My doctor appointment this morning was supposed to be a go in, have my foot cut open, clean out my foot, sew back up my foot, and I leave sort of ordeal, culminating in my hobbling for a day or two.

Instead, the doctor commented that, despite my attempt to cut out the wart, surgery really is the last option for warts, not the first.

What else did I learn?

Warts don't last 20 years, as the one on the bottom of my foot has. They tend to last months, maybe a year, but the body will reject the wart, which is caused by a virus. Since the wart exists in the skin, the continuous sloughing of skin will usually force the wart out of the body, through natural growth.

A wart that lasted 20 years? Yeah, it's probably not a wart, the doctor told me, but rather a collection of blood vessels that well, essentially just become confused and ball up into a painful lump embedded in the skin. Or, maybe it's a ball of scar tissue from some dig attempts of mine, other than the one last week. Unfortunately, last week was my first attempt at hacking this particular wart, so no, it most likely wasn't scar tissue. Well, he asked, had I during my many years of shaving off the top of the wart, ever noticed any black dots in the wart? Nope, hadn't noticed that either. I really think this is just a wart.

But you know, in the back of my head, I couldn't help but wonder if the wart was something more, something more sinister, because I thought the growth next to my eye was a wart: it looks a lot like the knot of flesh at the bottom of my foot.

The doctor, however, spent a few minutes with a knife, cutting off the top layer of skin, and looking at the lump. It didn't hurt a bit, which sorta told me the lump wasn't a collection of blood vessels balled up into a painful mass. After those few minutes, he declared, nope, looks like a wart, though twenty years? Wow, that's pretty much unheard of. Twenty years?

Yes, twenty years. Look at my chart. It's not that unreasonable to know that you've had a wart since your parent's divorce when you lived in another state, and hey that was twenty years ago, so just move on and accept that yes, this is a freaking twenty year old wart already.

Maybe.

Assuming it's a wart.

So, the doctor offered these steps:

1. Take a lot of vitamin A and zinc to help my immune system. The A will help the skin turn over, and the zinc will just boost the immune system, as if I had a cold.

2. Hold still while this magical blistering potion is dabbed on the wart. The skin will roil, boil, toil and trouble, hopefully ejecting the wart at maximum velocity off of my foot.

3. Keep the band-aid on over the blistering magic potion, until at least tomorrow, minimum four hours if I can't stand it any longer.

I can walk or run or do whatever I want, within my own pain tolerances. Want to go for a run? Have at it.

This guy doesn't exactly understand my pain tolerances very well, was my initial thought.

My current thought, though?

HOLY CRAP! My foot HURTS!

It's a throbbing, knife like pain on the bottom of my foot. Or rather, it's like a magical blister pulsing on the bottom of my foot, just throbbing, throbbing, throbbing, telling me, here I am! Here I am! Yo! Remember me! I'm not going easily.

Right.

Not going easily is still going.

Stupid twenty year old wart.