Light and Momentary

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

Today marks the beginning of the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, in which we will wind our way through Great Expectations at a leisurely pace. Join us! Great Expectations is short (for a Dickens novel) and it will draw you in from the get-go.

We meet our hero not long after he was still too small to say his own name properly, and we see right away that he is smart, timid, and lonely. When I first read this book in 1989 I was thoroughly creeped out by the escaped convict lurking in a graveyard, demanding a file (a metal one, for removing his leg-iron, not a paper one for contesting a will or what have you) and threatening Pip with a cannibal's revenge.

In chapter 2 we meet Pip's older sister and brother-in-law, along with Tickler, whose existence tells you most of what you need to know about Mrs. Joe Gargery. And even though it might seem a little early for Dickens to start talking about social ills, it's there if you've got your eyes open: prison overcrowding is bad, kids, and convicts deserve more humane treatment than the Hulks.

If you are looking for a free version, I suggest that you avoid Project Gutenberg, which inserts a seriously spoiler-y image with a seriously spoiler-y caption right before chapter 1. When I first read Anna Karenina, the back cover copy had apparently been written by an over-eager new grad: it connected the dots between the opening and closing railway safety incidents. They described the climax of the novel on the back cover! Who does that?! This image/caption combo is just as bad, so maybe find yourself a free Kindle version instead.

Next up, pork pie at dawn! This is the slowest-paced AMDRAL we've ever done, so maybe it's your year to jump on in.

Marooned in Blarghville

May is usually the happiest time of year for me, but I've been floundering. The spring semester ended later than it usually does, I had a student who added herself to the short list of Most Memorably Exasperating Students, my summer class started sooner than summer classes usually do, and it's kind of a tricky class to boot. Oh, and I had an exhausting unexplained arrhythmia episode two days after telling you how predictable my arrhythmia had been for 18 years, and I've been on a new medication that seems to make me more tired than the old one. On top of that I've had a weird string of minor but unpleasant staph infections. I'm hoping this means that I'm a little run down and not that I"m living in squalor, since no one else in the family has been affected. 

Anyway, this is the time of year when I am usually planning All The Things, but right now I am mostly planning my next nap.

I do still want to read Great Expectations with the folks who were interested in the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are running out of May in which to read it. So here's my suggestion: if we start on Thursday the 25th we'll still have a week of May in which to get the ball rolling. It's one of his shorter novels, and at this point I think I'll just plan to read it slowly: ten or fifteen pages a day should get us to the end of the book by the end of June.

I want a new drug

It's been such a long time since I said anything about my heart that maybe a recap is in order. You'd probably have to be a longtime reader with an excellent memory for this to have lodged in your brain.

When I was pregnant with Pete, who just turned 18 (!!), I had an unsettling arrhythmia episode that led to a diagnosis of PSVT. PSVT is generally benign, and I opted to treat it with medication. They offered me an ablation, a procedure in which they short out part of the wiring that makes your heart go, but I chose to keep my wiring intact.

My arrhythmia episodes are fairly predictable, and for 18 years I have taken the same medication if I am going to be doing cardio, heading into an unusually stressful situation, or spending time at high altitudes.

HOWEVER--

--this spring I started wondering if there might be a connection between the medication and my lackluster running performance as an adult. It has always seemed weird to me that I could run toward the front of the pack as a teen (i.e., I could knock out a sub-6:30 mile without working too hard) but I've always been near the back of the pack as an adult. I have written about some of that angst in these pages over the years. In the seasons when I was more serious about running I would sweat and labor and struggle and agonize, and never feel like I was seeing much improvement. I was always a little baffled about why it felt so hard.

WELL.

It turns out that there is a body of research from the 80s linking my particular beta-blocker to decrements in athletic performance. Reduced cardiac output. Reduced VO2 max. Reduced endurance. Some researchers looked at participants' skeletal muscles as well as their hearts, and found lower levels of ATP and creatine phosphate, along with impaired glycogenolysis. One study reported that they found 25-30% performance reductions in muscles with predominantly slow-twitch fibers.

SO MAYBE, just MAYBE, a person who has taken this medication faithfully before running for 18 years should not be surprised that running has felt hard!! Maybe this person should not have wasted mental energy on thoughts like "lazy" or "untalented" or "why bother?"!! 

So I made an appointment for next week to talk about a different management strategy. I think I will ask to try a different medication first, and request a referral to get more information about an ablation. I am still feeling a little cautious about shorting out the wiring that makes my heart beat, but I am also feeling cautious about continuing a medication that may have been slowing me down for eighteen years. (Wait, I need more exclamation points: eighteen!!!!!!! years!!!!!!!)

I am trying to keep my expectations modest. It is entirely possible that I am just a back-of-the-pack runner as an adult, and the medication only accounts for a tiny slice of my back-of-the-pack-ness. But I'm so curious now. And I can't help being a little bit hopeful.