GAS GAS GAS
So today was the warmest day in like a week and a half and I was SO SICK OF BEING INSIDE that I decided to try running in the snow.
By “snow” I mean the compact snow on the river trail. I’d walked on it yesterday once things warmed up a bit and I felt like it was something I could run on, so I got on my winter running clothes and went to try it out.
It sucked.
I have no idea how people can run on compact snow, because I certainly can’t. I don’t know if I push off harder with the balls of my feet than most people, but it was definitely very slippery and hard to get a good footing. So super frustrating.
Once I got to the first point in the trail where I could get back off (which was like 0.2 miles, haha), I crossed the street and went back to the other side of the road where there was just a sidewalk. This looked relatively clear, so rather than give up on running today entirely, I decided I’d go a few miles on the sidewalk to see if that was better.
And it was.
There were a few snowy/icy places where fartbags hadn’t shoveled, but it was much clearer than the path. So I ended up weaving up and down a bunch of the side roads and going back and forth on the main road until I got to my standard 14 miles. It wasn’t the most enjoyable of walks because of the ice/snow, but the temperature was actually a nice one for running and it definitely beat running on the treadmill.
Plus, it’s only supposed to get warmer this week, so hopefully the sidewalks (if not the trail) will be clearer by the time I run again on Thursday or Friday.
YAY!
Edit: I have about six blisters on my toes and my quads hurt like hell. I definitely have a different stride and toe grip on the snow/ice than on regular pavement. Which is to be expected, I guess, but still. Ouch.
S W A G
I got my stuff from the half marathon today! Check it out:
Shirt!
Bib!
Medal!
Super cool. The last official race I did was the Vancouver Sun Run back in 2011; we got a bib (obviously, since it was in person) and a t-shirt (which I gave to my mom), but we never got a super cool medal.
Let’s try the full marathon next year!
Virtual Calgary Half-Marathon = DONE!
This was the one I really wanted to do in person back in May, but ALAS…
This was not my best run. For whatever reason my legs felt like they weighed like 80 pounds each, so I didn’t end up with a super great time. But it’s probably faster than I would have been able to do it back in May, anyway, so yeah.
Next year I’ll hopefully be able to do the actual factual marathon, and it would be super nice if I could do it in person rather than virtually.
I don’t have high hopes about that, though.
Around the World in 2,206 Days
Today, I hit a huge walking milestone: since my first walk in Calgary on September 8, 2014, I have now walked a total of 24,901.46 miles. That is equivalent to the circumference of the earth at the equator!
As always, here are some stats:
- Total number of walks: 1,938
- Total steps: 56,171,859
- Total time spent walking: 383,048.87 minutes, or 6,384.15 hours, or 266.00 days
- Average walking distance (when averaged across the 1,938 walks): 12.849 miles
- Average walking distance (if I had spaced out the distance over every single day): 11.29 miles
So that’s pretty cool, eh?
Boxplot of walk distances by year:
Boxplot of walk distances by month:
Boxplot of walk distances by day of the week:
(As if anyone cares)
Let’s start another trip around the world tomorrow!
Virtual Bloomsday = DONE!
YAY, I did my virtual Bloomsday run today. After much deliberation about how many miles I should walk today (reasons for that will be explained tomorrow), I eventually decided on 10.7 miles (I know, I know – not my standard 15 or 16…again, that will be explained tomorrow). But then I decided that since it wasn’t too hot out (and kind of cloudy) that I might as well use the shortened mileage to do my Bloomsday run today. So I walked for a bit and then ran the 7.46 miles (12k) to represent the Bloomsday distance.
I actually didn’t even run on the river path (a first for me!). The path is usually a LOT busier on the weekends, especially in the middle of the day. So I just ran behind the hospital, back behind the Children’s Hospital, towards campus, and a little bit north of that. The route wasn’t super hilly, but it definitely wasn’t flat, so I think that inflated my time a bit. But hey…the Bloomsday route isn’t flat and I’m sure whenever I’m able to do the Calgary Marathon that that route won’t be completely flat either.
So yeah! I should be getting my Bloomsday shirt in October sometime.
Run, Forrest, Run!
So somehow I managed to shave three minutes off of my half marathon time today. Three minutes is a lot of time, especially considering that I’ve only been beating my record time by like 10 or 20 seconds at a time, and have only set new time records three or four times since I started consistently running 13.1+ miles at a time.
I have no idea why I was so much faster today. Maybe it was a combination of good running weather (~50 degrees, only very light wind, overcast) and new shoes…though both of those things held last Friday and I was nowhere near a record time.
Maybe it’s the smoke. Maybe I’m smoke-powered. I honestly wouldn’t discount that; my body is weird as all hell.
Also, my dad have to have hip replacement surgery today, but it sounds like it all went well. Yay!
ALRIGHT BITCHES, let’s do a little math.
So I want to try to get another 5,000+ miles this year, because nobody thinks I can do it.
I shall do it.
2017 was the year of exactly 5,100 miles, so let’s compare this year’s pace with 2017’s pace to see what I’d need to do to get to at least 5,000 miles this year.
Through August 15, 2017, I had gone 3,298.9 miles in the year (I was also like a week out from that stupid knee/leg injury thing that slowed me down so much but DID NOT PREVENT ME FROM REACHING MY MILEAGE GOAL HOHOHOHOHOHO)
Through August 15, 2020, I’ve gone 3,164.2 miles in the year.
That means I’m behind pace by 134.7 miles. BUT, like I said, in 2017 I actually had gone 5,100 miles instead of just 5,000. So discounting those last 100 miles puts me only 34.7 miles behind pace.
Not bad.
HOKAY, so let’s just focus on this year, then. 5000 minus 3164.2 gives me another 1,835.8 miles that I’ve got to walk this year. There are 19 weeks (plus a few extra days) left in the year. That breaks down to about 96 miles a week (discounting those last few days), or an average of about 16.1 miles per day six days a week for the rest of the year.
Could I do that?
I absolutely could.
So if I did exactly 16 miles six days a week for the next 19 weeks, that would get me an additional 1,824, which would leave me with an additional 11.8 miles to do over those last few days of the year. Usually I have troubles getting my full six days per week at the end of the year due to travel, but HAHAHAHA THAT’S NOT HAPPENING THIS YEAR, so this should be an issue.
I could totally do it again, guys.
I’m going to do it again.
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 8
SO…guess who’s back at the dentist?
(This is the eighth time since the end of May, by the way.)
And today was “let’s try to deal with that problem tooth again!”
I was really, really nervous about it, since it was so resistant to the novocaine last time.
But for whatever reason, everything went a lot better today. Apparently, according to my dentist, this is something that happens with some people. They have a region in their mouth that does not respond to novocaine during one visit, but when they come back sometime later, the novocaine is effective.
So at least it’s not just my mouth being a weird fart.
More Walking Nonsense
Guys, I am super close to a very big walking goal. Not my 5,000 miles this year (I’ve still got a ways to go for that!), but a walking goal I’ve had since I started working towards when I first moved up here. I suspect I’ll hit it within the next month and a half or so, so expect a big blog post about it then!
But for now…VAGUE GOAL POSTING IS VAGUE
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 7
So after the madness that was my dental experience last time, I had to go back today (YAY) to get even more cavities filled on the top left-hand teeth. Unlike the previous visits, during which I trusted the novocaine to numb the pain and thus wasn’t too concerned with the drilling, this time I was really freaking tense the whole way through, because I was afraid that at any minute, the novo would stop working and I would suddenly feel a drill going through my tooth.
But luckily, everything seemed to work out okay this time. Hopefully whatever is going on with that backmost upper tooth is just going on with that tooth and nowhere else.
Party time.
Well that was hellish. (Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 6)
So more dental work today. Today was supposed to just be cavities – not a root canal – so I figured it would be an easier time than the two previous dental visits, right?
WRONG.
I get there and I’m like “k cool let’s do this shit, I’m down with dental nonsense” and they give me two shots of novocaine – one to numb the upper left side of my mouth and one to numb the lower left side of my mouth. My dentist said she was going to do as many cavity fillings as she could in the time we had booked for my appointment, so I guess she wanted both the top and bottom ready (I have cavities in like every single one of my teeth because, as we’ve discussed, I’m an idiot).
So that all goes okay. HGTV is on the TV on the ceiling, so I’m just chilling and watching that while the meds kick in.
Then the dental assistant comes in and says she needs to put in a rubber dam. No big deal; I had that for both root canals.
So she goes to anchor it in my mouth (specifically, on my back upper tooth on the left side) and it HURT LIKE HELL.
Worse than anything involving the root canals ever hurt.
So I kinda freaked out and she took it out.
The dentist gave me another shot of novocaine for the top back row of teeth and they tried it again.
It HURT LIKE HELL.
By this time I was really freaking out because I didn’t know why it was so painful this time (I felt absolutely nothing the previous two times), so I got another shot of novocaine and both the dentist and dental assistant left for a bit because they could see that I was starting to panic and wanted to give me a second to calm down.
So did I calm down?
Nope.
By the time they came back I was in a full-blown panic attack. I was hyperventilating, my fingers were all tingly, I was super light-headed and I was just overall losing my mind.
Luckily, my dentist is awesome. She got a few of those heavy x-ray vests and put them on my chest to try to calm me down. She got the dental assistant to get some cold towels and put them behind my neck and head, then tilted the chair back to help with the light-headedness.
Eventually I stopped freaking out and said I was okay with them trying the whole rubber dam thing again. FIVE MORE SHOTS OF NOVOCAINE LATER (we’re up to nine shots total now), I was still feeling the pain of the clamp on that tooth when they tried to put it on. So they were finally like, “screw it, we’ll just work on the bottom teeth today” and they put the dam on the lower teeth (I didn’t feel it at all) and did four cavity fillings before my appointment time was finally up.
So yeah, super fun.
Oh, also? Calgary got put under a tornado watch as I was walking home and I got caught in a serious rain/hail storm that soaked through my shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and backpack.
Freaking party time.
Edit: I didn’t know how these rubber dam things were actually anchored in the mouth until I looked it up a few days later. It must have been that clamp thingy that hurt so badly.
Take care of your teeth, children
Or else this will happen.
The Walking: Halfway Through the Year
What is UP, my nerdy turds?
Tomorrow is a “let’s start a brand new pair of Kinvaras” day, which means tonight I’ve downloaded all my walking data for the current set of shoes so that I can add it to the Excel file containing all my walking data since I moved to Calgary in 2014.
I feel like I’ve been more consistent than ever with my “15 miles a day” thing, so I was curious to see how this year compared, so far, with 2017 (my record walking year).
In 2017, I had walked a cumulative total of 2433.19 miles by June 30.
This year, I’ve walked a cumulative total of 2545.84 miles by June 30.
…I’m ahead of 2017’s pace? Not only that, but I’m more than halfway to a cumulative total of 5,000 miles by the middle of the year?
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Well, now I need to try for it again. I need to try for another 5,000+ mile year. Not only would it be cool to have that total again, but it would be a good way to show everyone who has doubted my ability to repeat 2017’s walking distance that 2017 was not a fluke.
BRING IT ON!
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 4
More cavities filled today, because man I really destroyed my teeth, huh?
I’m glad for the pain. I deserve the pain for being so stupid.
Also, the cavity fillings hurt more than the root canal. What the hell, pain receptors.
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 3
So today was my third visit to the dentist and the goal was to just get a basic teeth cleaning, but my teeth are SO DAMN SENSITIVE AND DAMAGED that we could barely get through the lower teeth (with a hell of a lot of bleeding).
Once they started working on the top teeth, I couldn’t handle the sensitivity, so the dentist said that she might have to deal with the cavities in those upper teeth before I could get the cleaning finished.
So that’s fun.
On the good side, though, my lower teeth are SUPER CLEAN. They haven’t been this clean in like a decade. Wild.
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 2
Today I had a ROOT CANAL!
It…actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I had a different dentist this time (though she was really good as well). She tried to root canal the broken tooth but said that it was so weak that it wouldn’t support the root canal, so she sawed off whatever was left and now I have a weird tooth gap in the side of my mouth and a funky-feeling little empty gum socket (the tooth is still in there beneath the gum line, but I can only feel a little spike of it sticking out). She was able to do the root canal on the other tooth, though, so that’s good. Now I either need a tooth implant or a bridge where the missing tooth once was.
But yeah, not too bad. I was mostly nervous about 1) getting the novocaine, since that required needles in my gums, and 2) the pain after the procedure was done. But the needles only stung a little bit and the pain I had in the afternoon wasn’t bad at all, either. The only real side effect I had was some SUPER BAD SHAKING as the novocaine set in, but apparently that’s normal.
In fact, the root canal pain was less severe than the normal pain my mouth has been in for the past year or so. Which I guess tells you a good deal about the level of pain my mouth has been in for the past year or so.
Hell, I did 15 miles on my treadmill when I got home after the procedure.
Wicked.
The next step? Getting an actual dental cleaning, since it’s been like 12 years since that’s happened.
I Made a Doodad That Ended Up Being Much Less Interesting Than I Thought It Would Be But Whatever
Hi.
So we all know I love walking, right? And stats. I love stats.
So I often like to put those two things together.
One thing I’ve been wanting to do is make one of those “racing totals” visuals where I see how quickly my mileage racks up for each year I’ve been walking up here in Calgary. I can do static visuals fine in something like R, but animated visuals are something that I’ve never really done on my own, so I’ve never been able to make such a visual.
However, I found an editable template of one on Flourish so I decided to give it a try.
The following visual shows my cumulative walking mileage for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 as the year progresses from January 1 to December 31. The year 2014 was excluded because I only moved to Calgary in September of 2014, and the year 2020 was excluded because we’re only in June.
Pretty boring. More boring than I thought it’d be, actually. I thought 2017, 2018, and 2019 would at least skip around in largest total until, like, March or something. But nope. Only through January.
Haha, I like how 2019 was like, “I’m gonna catch you, 2017!” and then July happened.
(I only walked 2,523 miles in 2015 what the hell was wrong with me)
Run-a Run-a Ding Dong
Yo.
So today should have been the Calgary Marathon, but with COVID, that’s obviously not going on. Hell, people are still afraid to be out on the walking/biking paths, I think.
I wouldn’t have been able to do the full marathon, but I definitely could have given the half marathon a shot. Assuming we’ve got all this virus madness under control by this time next year, maybe I can build up my running and do the actual marathon itself next year.
GOALS!
Claudia’s Dental Saga: Episode 1
I went to the dentist today for the first time since 2006 (when I had my wisdom teeth taken out, which I guess technically wasn’t at the dentist because it was a surgery but whatevs).
I was fully prepared for the dentist to take a look at my teeth and say that they were beyond saving and BEST GET ‘EM ALL YANKED OUT!
But that did not happen. He looked at the offending broken tooth, took a few x-rays of it, and said that it would need a root canal (or, more specifically, two root canals).
That’s it.
He said the rest of my teeth, at least on the surface, looked good and didn’t all need to be ripped out. He said he’s seen much worse before. He was funny and nice and the complete opposite of pretty much every medical professional I ever had to deal with in Moscow.
But yeah, next Tuesday (not this upcoming one) is ROOT CANAL TIME, which will be an interesting experience considering I’ve never even gotten a cavity filled before.
I’ll keep you updated.
(As if you care.)
Uh Oh
Heyyyyyyyyyy so three guesses as to what this thing is:
Give up? It’s a piece of my freaking tooth. It just broke off while I was having a waffle this afternoon (not even a well-cooked waffle; I put the toaster at like its lowest level ‘cause I like soggy gross food).
There was no blood or anything and as far as I can tell, the root isn’t exposed. But that’s a pretty decent piece of tooth to lose.
So I had to call a dentist and I have an appointment for Sunday to see what needs to be done about what remains of that tooth.
That’s going to be super fun – especially the part where I’ll have to explain exactly why my teeth are so bad and the fact that I haven’t seen a dentist since high school.
HOORAY BAD LIFE CHOICES, AM I RIGHT????
PMLE!
It’s hard to capture in pictures how gnarly my arms look right now, but here are a few shots at it:
It kinda looks like a bad sunburn in these pics, but it’s definitely not a sunburn. It’s just my body going “lol, ultraviolet light? I’ve never seen that before. Let’s have a bad immune reaction to it!”
Super coolio, body. Super coolio.
13.1
Y’ALL I ran a half-marathon today.
That’s the first time I’ve done that since 2017. In 2017, I did it on two consecutive days and gave myself a really bad case of runner’s knee, but that was probably because I jumped from 10k distances right to 13.1 miles. Not the smartest move.
But I’ve been building up to it a bit more this year. Also, for whatever reason, running in general this year is a lot easier than it’s ever been before.
So that’s cool.
Let’s see if I can do more of these!
OUCH MY ARMS
So remember last summer when I told you that I’d been diagnosed with polymorphous light eruption, but I was a bit skeptical of this because the eruptions stopped sometime mid-July and I didn’t think I actually had the condition?
Yeah, now I’m pretty sure I have the condition.
It’s finally, finally warm enough up here to walk without a coat on, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several days. This is the first time my arms have been uncovered and in the sunlight since…man, I don’t know, September?* Yesterday night I noticed a few bumps on my upper arms that very quickly started to itch once I poked and prodded them a bit.
And today, after walking another 15 miles in sunny weather, my arms were really looking roughed up. They were getting that same rash-like landscape of red bumps that I was getting last year when I started exposing them to the sun. And they itched like crazy. These were the symptoms that led to the diagnosis last year.
I’ll be curious to see if my skin “toughens up” to the UV rays like it did last year, which is apparently a thing that happens for a lot of people with this condition. It flares up when skin is first exposed to the stronger UV lights in the spring/summer, but starts to calm down once the skin gets acclimated to the light.
Who knows? All I know right now is ITCH and BURN and WHY DOES MY SKIN HAVE THE TEXTURE OF A BASKETBALL
*We actually just tied the record of the most consecutive days without reaching 68 degrees. We reached that temperature today; we hadn’t reached it since the end of September last year. What the hell, Calgary.
TREADMILL OMFG
So it didn’t end up coming yesterday, but IT’S HERE NOW!
AND IT’S HUGE!
AND IT’S DOWN IN THE MAIN LOBBY, MEANING NATE AND I WILL HAVE TO HAUL IT UP A FEW FLIGHTS OF STAIRS TONIGHT!
EDIT: Turns out the first workout involving the treadmill was an arm workout. There was no way I could have done that without Nate. But here’s the ‘mill all set up (from a few days later):
Eigenblogger 