My Alley Cat

My cat got out the door a couple of weeks ago while chasing another cat who had been urinating at my doorstep. She used to be an alley cat whom I rescued about 3 years ago from work where she was hanging around the parking lot and was being fed by my co-workers. What enamored me to this cat was that she would approach just about anybody to be fed and allow them to pet her. During one of my off days, I just went back to my jobsite with a pet carrier and essentially kidnapped this cat from the parking lot. My co-workers didn’t mind because they knew I had been taking care of one or two cats at home for years. When I had her spayed, the vet informed me that she was pregnant so they had to “take care” of the underdeveloped babies. I didn’t want to know what they had to do but at least my new cat had been “fixed” and would not have unwanted kittens again.

I planned on keeping Boo as an indoor cat and that transition was probably difficult for her. She would spend a lot of time staring out the window at the birds outside or hiss at some cat that would come to my door usually to mark the spot. It must be a territorial competition thing with them. Last year Boo even managed to get out the door to chase another cat, then spent the day sunning herself on my neighbor’s patio before I finally managed to catch her and get her back indoors. Her coat was full of dirt and leaves by then.

So it didn’t surprise be very much when she got out the door and chased another cat a couple of weeks ago. The difference this time is that she disappeared for a few days. Then as mysteriously as she disappeared, she reappeared a few days ago peering into my screen door. But when I try to go out and get her, she would run away. I’m not up to doing wind sprints anymore because of my running injuries so I am not able to catch up with her. Anyway, it doesn’t look like she has had any ill-effects of being outdoors. I didn’t see any visible injuries from afar and she hasn’t lost weight, so apparently she has found another food source (the birds?!). So although I miss Boo being close to me, I’m glad that she is surviving in the environment that she is more comfortable in. I hope she comes and visits once in awhile so I can see that she is doing okay. The good thing is that she has been spayed and would not be contributing to cat overpopulation. In short, you can take a cat out of the alley, but you can’t take the alley out of the cat.

Postscript: There is an upside of not having a cat after all these years. The smell of litter is (almost) gone, and after using the carpet sweeper and vacuum, there are no more visible granules of tracked litter and cat hair all over the place (although the deeply imbedded ones still come up to the surface once in a while).

Don’t Be Ridiculous!

I laugh at myself sometimes over the ridiculousness of what I’m doing. I mean, who in their right mind would go through the suffering that I am going through just for the sake of fitness or getting a high out of it? Illegal drugs would probably be an easier way to get a high but it’s just not my thing. After runs like today instead of someone asking me what hurts, they should probably ask what doesn’t hurt because it seems like the what doesn’t hurt list is lesser than the what hurts list. Well I’ll tell you the what hurts list anyway from bottom to top. My right inner ankle hurts, that’s a given. My left knee hurts, that’s fairly new. My lower back hurts due to my stride changes. To add to all that hurt I’ve been having a toothache the past week. That’s the only non-running hurt that I have and of course when I’m not running the tooth hurts the most.

When today’s AREC run started, I told John M. that I was going to follow a line from a song from “Phantom of the Opera” (The Music of the Night) and run “slowly, gently”. But that didn’t last very long. I’m back to my old habit of trying to catch up with someone up ahead again. Although it feels good to be able to pick up the pace and do that, it jars the joints harder. Like last weekend I was running at about 85% perceived effort again, this time for 10 miles. The good thing about today’s run is that it’s the longest one I’ve done since I tore my posterior tibialis tendon last October, and not at an easy effort. The downside is all the pain I’m experiencing. A normal person would say that that I’m being ridiculous or just plain crazy (I already knew that) for doing what I do to my body (it’s my body so I can do what ever I want with it, so there!) Oh, my goodness that sounds almost like I’m hearing voices in my head just like the patients I work with do.

My joints are beginning to feel the cumulative effects of the increasing mileage. At least we get a break next Saturday, we only have to do a 7 miler and ooooh, can my joints sure use the break. The ridiculousness of running in pain sometimes has its rewards. In the middle of today’s run Nancy D. commented that I looked happy. All I can say about that, to borrow and paraphrase from another old song “ Smile though your joints are aching, smile even though they’re breaking”.

The Accidental Pace

After checking the beep alert on my GPS watch at two miles, I thought it said 19:30, but I did a double take when I saw it actually said 18:30. That would be 9:15 minutes per mile for two miles. I was either having a good day or it was going to be an interminably exhausting run for me. It turned out to be a mixture of the two.

While doing a warm-up jog prior to the AREC nine mile run yesterday (Saturday, June 20), I noticed that my left knee wasn't tracking properly. I could feel a slight pain on the kneecap. It had been hurting on and off in the past week. I was hoping the warm-up would take care of the problem or just hope for the best when we embarked on the nine miler.

My breathing was good and it felt like I was running at about 80% effort most of the way. When the effort went to 90% I would just back off the pace. In past weeks I was running at about 60 to 70% of perceived effort to keep the pounding of my feet against the pavement to a minimum. But then I was running with somebody who enabled me to do that. Yesterday, she wasn't there, so I missed my pacer. I suppose I could have just slowed down and paced with someone else but for some reason I failed to do that. So away I went doing what I was not supposed to be doing: pushing the pace however slightly.

I caught up with this girl going up a hill and on the way down and most of the rest of the way I could feel her just slightly behind me. She would surge for a few dozen steps then back off, almost like doing a fartlek workout and she did this the whole way. Her style of running somehow gave me the push I needed to be able to run a tempo or anaerobic threshhold pace for the whole workout. The problem was I could feel my left knee and right ankle rebelling against the added stresses they were being subjected to. Somehow my joints managed to hang on to finish the workout at a pace I didn't plan on running. The pace for 9 miles was only 8 seconds per mile slower than the 10K I ran a couple of weeks ago. In other words I had a good aerobic day to the detriment of my aching joints and survived to tell about it.

(Also shown in the above photo is the girl who was running her fartlek workout. Thanks for the push Sophie)

Okuribito

I'm watching a movie called “Departures” (Okuribito) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/. It's a Japanese movie which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 2009. I'm only thirty minutes into the movie and already I'm finding it quite funny even though the subject matter is about “a newly unemployed cellist taking a job preparing the dead for funerals” (per IMDB Summary). It's 130 minutes long so I hope it takes the subtle humor all the way to the end.
During the second half of the first hour the preparation of a body is finally shown and it is done with so much sensitivity, care, and dignity in front of the deceased family. Undressing, cleansing, grooming, and dressing the dead is done with such precise movements, it's almost like a dance.
The conflict comes going into the second hour when his wife finds out what his new job is. She and his friend find his kind of work unclean and not a normal job. So she leaves him because of this. All this time his thoughts go back to his father who started him playing the cello but left him and his mother when he was six years old.
In the last quarter of the film, the wife comes back and witnesses for the first time how her husband does his job when the owner of the bathhouse they visited in the past suddenly died. The owner's son happened to be the friend who vilified him for his job and now ironically, he has to prepare the mother's body for her funeral.
The end of the movie involves the cellist/undertaker's father but I shall leave this review at this point because I hope whoever reads this will get the chance to check the movie out for themselves. The film evolves slowly but beautifully. In the end, it had nothing to do with subtle humor like at the start, but turned out to be a very well composed drama which also illustrated how the Japanese people take care of the dead.