the horror
Saturday's run: the horror hill 15km country road race. I felt pretty cold at the start... it was 10c and there was still plenty of frost in the shade. As for horror, there was a few decent hills, one killer hill, and one short steep hill at the end that may or may not have qualified as evil. Oh, and I walked past roadkill on the way to the starting line. My splits were all over the place. I averaged 5:14 per km, but my slowest was 6:00 and my fastest was 4:30. Amazingly the slowest km wasnt the one with the big hill in it, it was the first one. I am thinking that a lighter breakfast and maybe waking up earlier or doing more warmup could have helped that.
Sat Oct 29. 15km 1:18:29 10c-12c sunny place: 50 out of 111.
flu the coop
From an NPR health Q&A: (available here)
Q: I work as a volunteer social worker. My organization has distributed Tamiflu to each of us -- how effective is it with avian flu? -- Renee Rivera, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A: I would tell her not to take the Tamiflu since there is not a threat of human to human spread right now. When you start taking Tamiflu inappropriately, it can lead to resistance of the virus in question to Tamiflu, that's the first thing. As far as how effective Tamiflu is against the serious complications or the serious nature of H5N1, we don't really know. We know Tamiflu works reasonably well in the seasonal flu, the H3N2 flu that predictably circulates each year in this country. It lessens the number of days of symptoms and from a broad stand point, lessens hospitalizations. We don't have hard data because there have only been 118 people infected, and they haven't had a situation where they can give some of them Tamiflu and others not, and compare whether Tamiflu works. We're assuming that it will work with H5N1 with a reasonably good basis for that assumption, but there's no definite proof that it would make a difference with regard to hospitalization or life or death.
my take:
Flu viruses mutate a lot. That is why the flu shot next year will be different than the flu shot this year. So keep getting the flu shot, they say.
Just not Tamiflu.
What is going on here? Don't take it, the virus may become immune... Is the flu virus this year immune to the flu drugs from past years? Does that make it more virulent?
I'd really like to know what the chances are of a person who has never had the flu shot catching the most recent strain of flu as compared to the chances of a person who has had all the flu shots catching it. Are all these innoculated people creating an environment that encourages the mutation of the flu that is more likely than previous strains to infect those who have not had the shots? And should that make us rethink the blanket policy on free flu shots for everyone?
Sadly, I dont think a study that answers these questions is even possible.
Now, I'm not saying that nobody ought to get the shot, but I dont think everyone should.
comitted
after the run last night I went down to the running room and signed myself up for the 'horror hill' 15k race this weekend. i dont think i've ever run 15k. well, maybe I have, but not since the majority of my running was 'after school'. Anyways, last nights run:
Thursday Oct 27 - 5.5km, ? university and ring rd, p.cloudy 6c
Things overheard at work: "You think you've got problems?? We're coding this ----!"
so tired
There are two reasons I started this blog... for one, I kinda miss blogging. it is weird to say that, but true. The other was that I thought it would be a good way to keep track of my running. I think that might help the regularity of posts... if I use this as a training log, then at least I'll have a reason to type in this window.
Just to catch up on the last few runs:
Monday Oct. 17 - 9km 1:05, bearinger route, rain 11c.
Thursday Oct 20 - 9km 1:00, bearinger, drizzle 10c.
Monday Oct 24 - 8km 0:55, westmount route, rain 5c.
On the 17th I felt really good, and felt good the next day too. but after thursdays run I felt winded and tired for all of the next day. Yesterday's run felt ok, but not great... I dont think I got enough sleep last night. I'm really dragging this morning.
Man, it has been forever since I did any kind of domain-spelunking. While trying to find a simple place to dump some blog posts, I ran across several blogs that were little more than 'wohoo, I got a blog for this name... cool' and that is it. How dumb is that?! Although, I did have to stop and think when I read the blog with the name
bitz.
Anyways, with that as the subject for my first post, I am running a decent risk of hypocrisy here. Maybe that will get me to write more. I guess the proof is in the posting.
