drive.

Sunday, June 27, 2010
3 miles
32:57

It has been a while since my last post. I have run an additional three workouts between this one and the last one that I posted, but I've had little drive to write about them.

Shortly after my last post, I began having breathing problems. I felt like I could not get air into my lungs, and the feeling lasted over a week. Whether I was resting, working hard, or sleeping, I couldn't breathe. Finally, after about five days, I went to the emergency room. Five hours of CT scans, ultrasounds, and blood samples ended with no conclusion. The doctors were clueless, and finally, awkwardly, suggested panic attacks as the source. I had not ruled out the possibility myself, but I hoped that it was something more, that my chronic shortness of breath could be attributed to something more than stress and anxiety.

The next day, I had an appointment with a therapist and immediately following, with a psychiatrist. While my therapist gave me a diagnosis of panic and promised she would help me develop coping strategies for my stress, my psychiatrist decided that my labored breathing could be a side effect of a new drug I was on, so she stopped that treatment and gave me a new and more interesting set of prescriptions that require a day planner to manage their administration.

Anyway, since that incident, the breathing problems have, for the most part, ceased. I still do not know if I can say it is because I stopped taking a medication that i was allergic to, or if it is because the new medication is totally sedating me and preventing me from becoming too stressed out and reacting physiologically to increased anxiety.

So all that being said, I've felt a little unmotivated to run and even less motivated to write about it when I do manage to run. A few days before I went to the E.R., I ran a hill about a mile away from our church, which was great because I don't get a chance to run hills running in my neighborhood in the center of Tucson. I ran that same hill and got the same time a couple days after my evening in the hospital.

I ran about three miles last Wednesday, and I ran that same route tonight finishing 3 seconds faster. I am getting more accustomed to the heat, and if I begin my run at about dusk, 95 degrees does not seem to affect me as much as it did a month ago. I have completed my runs without stopping and maintained the same pace (albeit a slow one) for each mile.

I know that I have been a little redundant in my posts, but I am hoping by saying it out loud (or posting it in a blog) I will be more accountable and begin to gain more control over my body and mind through the discipline and satisfaction of running.

I'll end this post here, but I plan on posting in the next day of so about other changes I've begun to make in my life to promote my own health and well-being. More to come...