October

Well, can't say my life has been to intense this month, well at least after the marathon. For the first two days of post marathon, I was in serious pain. Physically, I could barely walk and going down stairs was a nightmare. Mentally, I was annoyed and exhausted. I decided to do what I do best: research. I went to the library and found the journal of sport psychology. There, I found an article about marathon running.

The article stated that when you reach a certain point in the marathon, you mentally exhaust yourself. That is, your brain releases so many chemicals to keep your body moving, it often leads to exhaustion of the neurons. As a result, for a week or two after the marathon, you become kind of depressed and feel sluggish. Some have tried to compare this to giving birth, but the author was male and I'm not sure if anything can compare to that.

I soon found myself in a doctors office asking for a day or two where I could just rest. My legs were still not feeling great, I felt consistently dehydrated even though I was chugging nalgene after nalgene of water and I was tired. With a few days off and some time to veg out, I finally got the rest I needed to go and have some fun. This of course fell short because a constant injury I had throughout high school decided to creep its way back into my life: ITBS, or Illiotibial Band Syndrome.

The "IT Band" is a long inelastic muscle that stabilizes the femur. It is in the outer part of the thigh and can be caused for a myriad of reasons. My first ITBS came from wearing the wrong kind of running shoes, the second time (senior year of high school) came from weak hip abducters. This time, it came from plain old over working an injury prone muscle. For the past few weeks, I've been buying bags of ice at CVS and filling my bathtub with ice cold water and taking ice baths for 15 minutes. Painful as it sounds, the legs quickly go numb and it can make for a somewhat enjoyable experience. The idea is to constrict blood flow to your legs so that the legs can theoretically flush out waste products such as lactic acid and reduce swelling of overused tissue, in my case, the IT band. In addition, I've been using resistance bands to help strengthen my hip abductor and stretching to make sure the muscle releases all the excess blood from the muscle.

I went for my first run yesterday with minimal pain. Pretty awesome! Today, actually about 15 minutes ago, I got back from a 30 minute run and felt great on the last 2 or so miles.

So, now that I've talked way to much about my ITBS problems, I guess all there is left to say is that life is great. I've got great friends from both NatGeo, school and hell even around the world (shout out to my buddy in Australia Matt Zwiebel, can't wait to see you over winter break). Classes are really interesting and I'm being pushed to do my best in both of them.

Overall, when you look at the grand scheme of things, I need to count my blessings rather than my curses. If you add them up, the blessings win by a marathon. I am fortunate to have been born into this particular life and I plan on living it to the fullest. As Titanic's main character, Jack Dawson, would say "I love not knowing what's going to happen when I wake up in the morning, or who I'm going to meet, where I'm going to wind up...I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You never know what hand your going to get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you. To make each day count"

So with that I say: To make it count