- Important note: whale sharks are hella cool. That is all. #
- http://twitpic.com/3bdll - 7th circle of hell: found. #
- Jesus, I just saw Niko from GTA4 walking down the street. Wonder if he wants to go bowling? #
- It delivers the iPod Shuffle to my doorstep or else it gets the hose again. #
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I haven’t done a real post about the whole asthma thing, but I read something this morning that got me wondering. On the night of March 3rd I played a typical hockey league game at the local ice rink. I remember actually feeling pretty good that night as I played wing instead of my usual center and wingers are lazy. I got home, went to bed and woke up at about 4 in the morning coughing and struggling to breathe. I wandered the house checking carbon monoxide detectors and generally being miserable. The next day the feeling never left so I went to the doctor. After a chest X-ray and CT scan they didn’t find anything and sent me home.
I was still laboring to breathe that night and the following morning so at my follow-up the doctor said I had adult-onset asthma — which is fairly typically for ice hockey players, he informed me — and sent me home with an inhaler. After 2 days with the inhaler I felt pretty normal. I didn’t think much of it aside from being a bit bummed given my desire to run a marathon this year and wondering what sorts of complications this was going to bring up.
As a bit of background, as of right now my weekly running distance is around 25 miles with an average run length of between 5 and 6 miles. I haven’t needed to use my inhaler since that incident though I have used it as a precautionary measure as recommended by my doctor before my hockey games and before my runs for the first week following that incident.
So then I read this article that popped up this morning on ESPN’s site. Here’s a few snippets.
In the past six months, nearly 200 people have been sickened by carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or ultrafine particles emitted from poorly maintained ice resurfacers at indoor ice arenas.
One of those rinks was in Tampa, Fla., where the East Lake High School hockey team took the ice in January for a practice at the Tampa Bay Skating Academy. Players struggled to breathe during practice and as the night wore on, their symptoms worsened.
“I was playing normal, and then halfway through practice, my chest started feeling weird,” said East Lake player Alex Miller. “I had trouble breathing.”
Given my lack of symptoms even while exercising more than I ever have before it’s starting to seem more and more likely to me that, instead of asthma, I’m experiencing what this article is referring to. I’m curious how prevalent this really is.
I talked about Goozex a short while ago, pointing out the obvious benefits and obvious shortcomings. The shortcomings can simply be summed up as “humans are thoughtless twats” and you’d know all you needed to know. I detailed my initial experiences with the receiving-side of the equation in that post which mostly amounted to the items being fair to okay but the senders taking their sweet ass time. That continues to be a trend, though this time with a twist.
I’ve been interested in trying Killzone 2 for the PS3 for a while, so I stayed up until the requisite time on release day and jumped into the requests queue for the game on Goozex. I ended up 46th in line. Not terrible, but I’ll still have a considerable wait. Fast forward to last Wednesday — 6 weeks after requesting the game — and I finally had percolated up through the queue and gotten matched with some kid wanting to trade the game. Given the popularity of the game, the kid had obviously just listed it so he likely got a trade email within minutes of the system matching us. It took him about 18 hours to agree to the trade, saying he would ship it in 3 days. Ah well, fair enough. I’m getting Killzone 2 soon!
So, Sunday night rolls around which is 5 days after he accepted the trade and agreed to ship the game within 3 days. I get an email saying that the aforementioned thoughtless twat wants the cancel the trade. Why?
Reason for cancellation: Game was scratched and is not working.
I’m sorry, you didn’t think to check this before you listed the game? Nor did you think to check this before you accepted the trade? Nor did you look at it before the 3 day deadline for shipping the game? You waited 2 days after you were supposed to ship it to say “oh hell, looks like I somehow smeared shit on the disc and scraped it off with a Dremel tool”? I call batshit.
So, where does that leave me? Back in the queue, waiting to be matched to the next gibbering dildo who will almost undoubtedly wait until, say, Halloween to decide that he misplaced the game disc in his cat’s sphincter or something equally wonderful.
Frustrating. Such a great concept with such a gaping flaw, especially to those of us who try to provide good experiences to others.
- Running today was like swimming through billowing yellow fog. If only there existed alchemy to turn pollen into gold… or sweet crude. #
- Oh and the Hurricanes are playoff bound. “The whistles go WOOOOOOOO!” #
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- I posit that the universe is truly off its rails. http://tinyurl.com/cd4y3t #
- It is remarkable how palliative — and oddly appropriate — it is to sing Evenflow in a Cher voice. #
- Woohoo, guess who’s registered for the Marine Corps Marathon! #
- Won’t some company please provide a viable alternative to Time Warner Cable in my market so I can finally invite them to pound sand? Please? #
- http://twitpic.com/2rtiv - Watching the Canes beat the Rags is just so *tiring*. #
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Looks like I really am running a marathon this year, barring disaster. I had previously mentioned that I was going to enter the City of Oaks Marathon here in Raleigh and that was my intention. But… in the back of my head I kept thinking about the Marine Corps Marathon. However, I really thought the MCM was in March or April for some reason (I actually know why: I was getting it confused with the Raleigh Rocks Half Marathon in March). So I discounted it because the timing didn’t work out right. I certainly wasn’t ready this March and I don’t relish training through the winter for a marathon in the Spring.
But I still thought about the Marine Corps Marathon. So, on Wednesday I decided to take a look at the site for it just to see when it was. Oh! It’s on October 25th! That’s only a week before the marathon I was considering. It seems fate was taking an interest as well. Registration for it opened on, yes, Wednesday April 1st. That was a bit too perfect for me so I registered immediately after checking with Cat about her triathlon schedule.
So, I’m running the 2009 Marine Corps Marathon! I couldn’t imagine a better first marathon. We love DC and running through all of the landmarks should be fantastic. I like to think that my dad had a hand in this given the fateful nature of things. He was a marine and, frankly, it was sort of a defining characteristic. My mom bought a memorial brick for him at the National Museum of the Marine Corps south of DC so we’ll almost certainly stop off there afterwards to find him.
I couldn’t be more excited. Or scared, frankly :).
