I searched for a replacement, preferring to buy online since it’s easy to find the same shoe online for 30-40% less than in a brick and mortar store.  From suggestions on Internet forums, I bought a similar shoe from an online retailer made by the same manufacturer.  However, the new shoe felt like running in sandals compared to the discontinued model.  It gave me no stability and very little cushioning in the forefoot.

Why do shoe companies insist on changing their shoe lineup every year?  There isn’t a shoe model that either doesn’t get changed or discontinued on a yearly basis.  The shoe that treated me well for so long was suddenly gone.  I probably bought 15 or 20 pairs of that model, and what does the manufacturer do to reward me for my loyalty?  They hang me out to dry.

There’s no functional reason to update, discontinue, or introduce new running shoes with such magnitude and frequency.  Some research indicates people are better off without running shoes.  However, shoes are generally made to accommodate a small handful of biomechanical differences in runners.  With these differences identified, each manufacturer should make a shoe that successfully addresses these problems for most of the population and let things be.  With the current cycle of drastic shoe changes, either running shoe technology is so terrible that the manufacturers are constantly scrambling to find shoes that work or human evolution is taking place at unprecedented levels.

Instead of producing something consistent and functional, shoe companies care more about generating marketing hype surrounding their products.  They want consumers to crave the latest running shoe with its biodegradable materials, patented cushioning materials, and futuristic looks.  I don’t care how many proprietary materials the shoe is made out of or what the shoe looks like, I only want it to keep me from getting injured.   Every shoe I’ve ever bought goes from mostly white to a dirty, muddy mess in a matter of days, but as long as it keeps me in one piece, that’s all that really matters.

The constant shoe updates also force me to buy from a regular retail store since I have to try on several pairs to find a new one that works.  Sizing changes from model to model, so I’m wary of buying a new pair without first trying it on.  Retail stores mark up prices as much as 100% of what they paid the manufacturer, so it’s easy to find an online retailer who charges far less than the suggested retail price.  Going to the store today, I’ve found that what was the $80 shoe five years ago is now the $100 shoe.  Some shoes are nearly $200.  All of them wear out in 300-400 miles, so what exactly is it that warrants the extra cost?

Running shoes shouldn’t be any different than a household appliance.  Shoes should be something that do their job faithfully and can be replaced at the end of their lifespan with a model that performs exactly the same way.

Last week I was at home for the first time in awhile and while I was out running, I saw a guy who I always used to see in the early summer mornings before I headed to work. He asked where I had been and I told him what had happened. I said I was lucky just to be out there.

I don’t feel like I used to. Five miles is hard and it beats me up good. The loop I’ve been doing at home is probably more like 5.5 since I used the GPS once and I used to be able to do it in 31 – 32 minutes with little problem. Now I struggle to keep it under 40 minutes. While many others have returned to where they were following similar procedures, I’m guessing I won’t get back to high mileage weeks and workouts and long runs. The risk of undoing everything is too great and I’ve heard of people who pushed a few track intervals too hard and were in pain again the next day. For now, I plan on supplementing the running with biking when I get too beat up. I’ll probably gradually increase the amount of running I’m doing until it feels more comfortable.

Maybe in ten years some of those experimental stem cell injections will be common practice and I could get something like that if what’s left of my cartilage wears away.

Yesterday, in the middle of my run I tripped on a branch that came down with all the rain and storms. I twisted my left ankle so bad it hurt the rest of the day and irritated the plantar fascia. It was the same twisting that I think contributed to the whole knee mess in the first place, so that little move has me worried. After a day on the bike, I’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if I’ll ever run on any trails again after all of this just to keep myself from tripping or twisting my left ankle. But, even in the street I still manage to hit something.

Everything has improved significantly in the past year and hopefully it will hold up into the future.

I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met.  I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college.  John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.”  He did not want to actually run the race.  This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs.  To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work.  Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents.  To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools.   To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day.  You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.

The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts.  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts.  Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up.  This ethos carries over into other areas.  An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post.  The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight.  They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t.  It takes time to build a reader base.  More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read.  I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts.  Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months.  People just don’t swarm in overnight:

Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post.  Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals.  Followers just don’t appear because you signed up.  Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today.  I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM.  Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam.  To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.

Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic.   Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar.  Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point.  Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards.  Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less.  Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in.  I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid.  What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice?  It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students.  Work harder, and anything can happen.

It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved.  It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking.  Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters.  Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat.  A recent study reports that an astounding  2% of researchers fake their results.  In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings.  They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing.  Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.

What is the real solution to this lack of motivation?  How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog?  How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards?  Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades.  This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points.  Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up?  Apparently.  Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more.  But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario.  How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough?  Almost zero, I would guess.  Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term.  I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this.  I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down.  I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.

Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects.  It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery.  I run slow, go out every other day,  only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer.  By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.

Today, there was an article in the local paper about a guy, Paul Boyette, from Chesapeake who had a running streak that lasted over six years.  He ran at least two miles every day, running through injuries, terrible respiratory infections, and all kinds of weather.  His streak was finally ended by a torn meniscus which proved too painful for him to run through.  Oddly, this happened last summer, within a month of the pain in my knee becoming too great to run.  The article was really vague as to what happened after he stopped because of the torn meniscus, but one of the photo captions describes him running last month.  So, it appears as though he is back to doing what he loves.

The author of the article really makes this guy out to be an eccentric, hounding him because of his massive music and beer stein collections.  The author describes how Boyette’s family and friends gave him endless grief about maintaining the running streak and running every day though illness and injury.  Boyette is compared with a drug addict, as someone who has to get his fix or else he can’t function.  His stacks of meticulously kept running logs and piles of worn out shoes are referenced as paraphernalia, aiding the addiction.  A few commenters for the article say the guy is addicted to endorphins.

It isn’t addiction.  It isn’t obsession. It is passion.  Over the years, I’ve been hounded by people saying the same things, over and over:

“Why are you running in this weather? It’s too [cold/hot/rainy].”

“If you’re tired, take a day off.”

“Why don’t you try doing something else instead of running?”

The mediocre, the average, the run-of-the-mill Joe Six Pack only cares enough to go through the motions with any activity.  These people, which make up a large majority of the population, see those who put all their effort into something as obsessive.  The mediocre only wish to do good enough and to quit early.  They will never feel good about any of their accomplishments, yet they simultaneously envy and criticize those who work extremely hard and become successful.  The mediocre are everywhere and would love nothing more than to witness the failure of those who actually try.  To that end, the mediocre spread their negativity and criticism to those they know that are successful, secretly wishing their endeavors will implode and their work will be for nothing.  The author of the article and the commenters that follow are prime examples of those who just don’t get it.

People scoff at Bill Gates for sleeping in his office during the early years of Microsoft, working at his computer until he collapsed onto the floor with exhaustion.  Though the mediocre label him as obsessive and wish to see Microsoft wiped from the earth, every single one of them has used a Microsoft product.  If it weren’t for Gates’s efforts, this large scale success would never have been realized.  Computing would never be what it is today without those “obsessives” working until they drop on the floor.  Still more people can’t believe that the efforts Adam Savage of Mythbusters undertook to recreate an exact duplicate of the Maltese Falcon.  He spent months of work researching the prop from the film, drawing sketches, making several mockups, and eventually getting his hands on the original prop to create a near flawless duplicate.  In the video, Savage’s passion for his work really comes out as he speaks quickly and excitedly about every last detail of his quest.  You don’t see that with the mediocre.  You can tell when someone is passionate about their work when they speak of it like Savage, and you can tell when someone really just doesn’t care.  I’ve seen professors, other grad students, running teammates, and internship co-workers speak with the same excitedness as Savage when they speak about their latest accomplishments.  The passionate can pull you right into the hype.

It disappoints me to see that most others criticize the concentrated efforts of those like Bill Gates and Adam Savage while it is efforts such as those that keep the world in one piece.  Without them, this world would be a bunch of slackers.

So why run until the pain becomes unbearable?  Why work until you fall asleep at your desk?  It is because not doing so would be a failure.  I ran every day I could because I wanted to make the best of what I had.  I ran every day and through all weather and many illnesses and injuries of my own because I knew there would be a day where the problems would be too great to run.  On that day when I finally couldn’t run, I could look back and know that I had done my best.  On the day I couldn’t run, I would have no regrets about the past.  I would not have to wish that I had gone out for a run on a day that I was only too lazy to go.  That day came last summer when my knee made running unbearable.  Like Boyette, I had to stop.  I had no regrets: I knew that I had made the best with what I had.  Those who are mediocre will regret the day that they are unable to do something because of circumstances beyond their control.  They had the chance to give it their all, but they didn’t make use of it.

I hope that I never again get criticised for biking or running as much as I can or for doing work when someone wants me to go out.  It is what makes me who I am and it is not a disorder that should be treated with magic pills.

It could be that biking is just making things tight and that maybe I should run first.  I also really shortened my stride so I didn’t have to bend my knee as much, which probably helped.  It might be that bending it too much is causing the pain in the damaged area, so I might be constrained to shuffling around everywhere.  If my body permits me to go more, maybe that will work itself out.  Regardless, it was the best four minutes I’ve experienced in quite a long time.

Pain is a weird thing.  When you don’t have it, you don’t think about it, but when you’ve got it, it makes things miserable.  I remember my high school coach giving a speech about pain before a workout.  It was during the first few weeks of my freshman year.  He asked how many of us had older siblings in our families.  A lot of guys raised their hands.  He then went on to say that our minds don’t remember pain and if our mothers had remembered the pain of childbirth that many of us who were second or third children would not exist.  The point was to illustrate that though you’ll be suffering through the workout, an hour later, you’ll be fine and you’ll be willing to do it again a few days later.  The same thing goes for injury pain and illness: it’s hard to concieve what it’s like when you’re healthy, but when you’re down, it really sucks.

An interesting study/article points this out: that the little things like pain are what make or break our lives.  People believe that it’s the big things that really make us happy or sad, but it isn’t.  It’s not the new and exciting job, it’s not the move to sunny California, and it’s not winning the lottery that makes your life better.  People who survive natural disasters and other traumatic incidents and those that even lose their vision or hearing don’t report that they feel any less happy than they were previously.  However, those that develop strong ties with family and friends report being happier, while those that develop chronic pain or discomfort never adjust.  It seems that indeed, pain is something that can never be adjusted for, and it’s probably some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism.  Without pain, I would have run even farther on my knee last year and probably to the point where I would become unable to walk.

For now, I’ll get while the getting’s good and try to run in real small increments all the while being on the lookout for any serious problems.

All I can say with certainty is that my knee hurts when I run.  I went about twenty or thirty steps before pain started somewhere around the joint.  I went about a minute, stopped and stretched, and then walked for a few more minutes before going again for another minute.  It wasn’t any better the second time around, and the pain seemed to get worse.  I haven’t had any serious knee pain in a very long time.  It doesn’t hurt when cycling: I can mash the pedals and ride up hills out of the saddle or sprint to beat a light and I have no pain at all.  It doesn’t hurt when I climb stairs, nor do I feel any popping or locking that I used to.  It still doesn’t hurt when I put in the clutch to shift in my car.

While running for the first time since November or December felt awkward, the pain eclipsed any biomechanical weirdness.  Run enough, and the biomechanics will smooth out.  Oddly during a recent practice, one of my old teammates told me that my coach gave me as an example of good running form.  I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone comment on that.  It’s like saying I’ve got great coordination — I struggle just to get my feet in the bicycle clips.

It feels as though the pain is in a different place than last July when the knee pain took me out.  Since it’s been so long since last July when I experienced the knee pain while running, my perceptions of how things feel have been invalidated.  That said, last July, I could tell that the pain came from a very specific place right next to the kneecap and that it was deep in the joint.  This time it seems more spread out, more to the surface, and more lateral in its location.  I had occasional pain similar to this at PT when the leg brace came off, and the PT told me it was my IT band.  It could be my IT band, but when my teammate who eventually had microfracture first started feeling pain, he thought it was his IT band too.

The pain really comes down to one of two sources: either the microfracture failed to produce enough fibrocartilage to protect my knee from the impact of running, or it’s something soft tissue that I can deal with.  Since the doctor and PT were extremely optimistic that the microfracture worked and that the cause of my pain was most likely from my IT band, I will first try dealing with this as a soft tissue problem.  That means loads of stretching to try to smooth stuff out.  I am not without precedent: when one guy with torn cartilage and microfracture first started running in the early winter, he experienced a lot of pain like I am now.   Now he is running six, seven miles a day and the pain is much more manageable or even nonexistent on some days.  Initially, I thought he was crazy the way he talked about running in excruciating pain, but it appears as though the pain wasn’t from the torn cartilage.  At least not if he is feeling better while running more.

I can say that I am feeling a lot better overall than even before the surgery.  I can go harder and longer on the bike than I could before.  I can go almost two hours before I start to feel tired, while last summer I would be exhausted if I went that far.  I can now power up hills that previously left me in the lowest gear and I can take on someone who passes me, when previously I would struggle just to stay on their wheel.

I will try to run small amounts as much as I can and see if this pain is manageable, while hopefully not making things worse.

But now, it’s almost worse. I started working on my current project in September, right after my knee surgery. It’s been going for nine months and now I am finally cramming all of those nine months into ten pages or less, double column.

To put this in perspective for an undergrad: take all the papers, all the projects, all the homework assignments, and all the exams, tests, and quizzes in the last two semesters and make them all due next week. That is the weight of what I am working on. It nags at me every day that I have been working for so long and have nothing to show for it. I think about it in bed before I go to sleep, I think about it when I wake up, I think about it when I’m in the shower, and I think about it when I’m on the bike. As an undergrad and even for the first part of grad school, I got closure incrementally: with periodic assignments and tests and at the finish of each semester when classes end. Closure is now when I get a paper out, and the time span for that seems indefinite.

My first project and paper was faster — it took a semester and a summer. However, I’m still dealing with that project now — I’m going to present it at SECON and when I do, it will almost be a year since the first version of the paper went out.

It seems most undergrads treat papers lightly: “Oh, I can crank out a ten page paper in a few hours and still get an A…” I was the same way — it was spit something out as fast as possible to get it over with, but put enough effort into it to get a decent grade. Now, papers are everything. The paper is how everyone else sees your work. I may have spent the past nine months creating something that could have huge implications for the future of wireless sensor networks, but nobody but my adviser would know about it unless I tell them in a paper. The reviewers will lay the smack down on you if you try to whip out a paper in a matter of hours. Yesterday, I spent six hours writing and got out about five paragraphs. They were five critical paragraphs about the core of what I did, and they had better be comprehensive and understandable from the perspective of an outsider.

I find it hard to tell the story of my project, but I think the difficulty is from inexperience. There are key things that reviewers look for that I must give special attention in addressing. Because of this, there is a pretty rigid way to write a research paper, but even then I find it difficult. It is hard to convey specific algorithmic details, yet be concise and easy to understand. I have to remember the main selling points of my work and refer back to them throughout the paper. For these projects, I find the initial problem discovery, solution design, and implementation to be interesting and sometimes even fun. Enough experience programming and thinking about solutions to problems has helped with that, but I haven’t done much writing.

With time, I imagine writing will get easier. I will know exactly what to do. With my current paper, I’m almost there. I’m almost to the point where I feel good about what I have written and know that everything will turn out okay. I just have to keep working and get it done. Then there will be some closure.

Over the past week or two I had been getting really restless.  The hour on the trainer every day gave me a workout, but the weather was starting to turn.  Spending nearly 95% of my time indoors over the past seven months was starting to really get to me.  As goes the quote from “Office Space,” “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day,” which was pretty much what I have been doing.  I would walk back and forth from the Computer Science office and that was about it in terms of getting outside.  Something was about to give.

It gave this weekend.  The Colonial Relays was this weekend, and on Friday I walked over from the office and watched some of the distance races.  The hour or so that I was out there had been the longest I’d been outside in quite a long time.  That night, I went back and talked to a few of my teammates and alumni that had come back to watch.  It was a great change of pace and was good to see everyone run.  I talked to a lot of people that I hadn’t talked to in months, some even longer than that.  A lot of people asked me when I would try running again, since the doctors have given me the okay to start.  I replied that I wasn’t sure, but it would be soon.  In talking to my old teammates, I had forgotten what I had left behind.  For quite awhile, I’ve been in my own really tiny world, working on my projects.

Until now, the only times I would be shocked back into reality was when I would be having a discussion with my adviser in the late afternoon.  We would be having a discussion on the whiteboard in his office and I would happen to glance out the window and see all my teammates run by in a blur.  It’s a real kick in the butt to see that and remember what I used to do.  In the world of computer science, the atmosphere is mellow, but determined.  In the world that I came from, it’s about getting on the track and suffering.  Unfortunately, in the context in which I live now, I don’t think anyone says, “I really dominated in that conference paper.”  You don’t sweat and breathe hard while thinking up and coding a slick algorithm.

On Saturday, I got up, ate breakfast and prepared to do what I had done since before Thanksgiving: get on the trainer and pound away for about an hour.  I would open the window, turn on the fan, and listen to music while I looked outside at the law students coming and going from the library.  But on Saturday, the sun was shining and it was getting warm.  I couldn’t take it any longer: it was time to go out.

It was about the best feeling I’ve ever had.  I was uncaged, released into the wild, my natural habitat.  I hauled it out past the state park at York River.  The weather said the wind was blowing 30 mph gusts from the west, but I didn’t notice a thing.  I powered up hills where over the summer I remember being exhausted and downshifting into the lowest gear.  I remember trying to upshift, only to look down and see there were no more gears to use.  A dog bolted out from its house and chased after me for nearly a quarter mile, but I kept it at bay.  I turned around right before the road ended at the river.  As I got closer to home, I never got tired.  I looped around campus and got to the track just in time to watch the 4×800.

Yesterday was the first day in months that I didn’t do any work before dinner.  I still did a little before I went to bed, so I couldn’t call it a complete day off.  I was outside at the meet all day and got a nasty sunburn.  I guess that happens when you don’t have a built up tolerance from running or biking outside every day.  I watched all the distance relays and hung out with everyone some more.  By the end of the day, I was exhausted.  On the bike, I’d gone 45 minutes over an hour, and despite feeling much easier than the trainer, was enough to make me not want to move for most of the afternoon.

Today I went out again, but took it easier.  I was definitely more tired today and felt more normal as compared with pre-surgery rides.

As for my knee, I was out of the saddle several times and really hammered up some hills without any real discomfort.  I might have felt something this afternoon walking around, but I can’t be sure.  I do know, that if my knee could handle what I did today and yesterday, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do at least some running.  Sometime soon, the same thing will happen with biking outdoors and I’ll just start running on a whim.  It won’t take much to push me over the edge.

I finally broke down and got a new bike.  For awhile, I’ve been worried that the rear cogs are so worn that someday I’ll go up a hill and the chain will just rip off.  I tried a few new bikes out at the bike shop, the first one being a Specialized aluminum frame.  It felt like my old one, nothing really special about it.  But, I tried a Giant TCR-0 with a carbon frame and it felt like a rocket.  It was an unused 2006 and I think I got a pretty good deal on it since equivalent new models of just about every manufacturer go for about $1000 more.  I’d been to bike shops quite a bit in the past few years and I don’t often see anything older or discounted.  It seems most owners keep a limited stock.  The components had been switched up and have a combination of Shimano Ultegra and 105.  I really don’t need the way high end components since I don’t care too much about saving some fraction of an ounce of weight.  As it is, the bike feels like a feather compared to the steel Bianchi.  Since my shoes and pedals were a mess, I went ahead and replaced those.  Hopefully I’ll be able to try out the bike before the weather crashes this week.

If I can bike or even run outside more often it will provide more of a balance to my life.  I really can’t just hole up and work all day — there’s got to be a balance to the equation.  The recent discussion about goofing off boosting productivity probably has some merit in it.  Biking or running isn’t really goofing off, but it provides the same release.

I still haven’t tried running yet. With a lot of work for school, the immense overhead of returning to running is just too much. With past running injuries, there is so much time that is needed for walk/jog, cross training, and way more stretching and icing to deal with potential comeback injuries. When work subsides some, hopefully within a month or two, I should have more time to try running again. With the biking that I’ve done, I’m fairly confident that my knee will tolerate some running. Otherwise, I’ve got a feeling that I would have some pain on the bike.

My bike got a flat from the resistance trainer this week. I find that odd. The tire rubs against a smooth surface on the trainer, so it wasn’t punctured. I have a feeling that the rubber tube degrades over time and eventually the glue and seams that hold it together come apart. It was probably a pinch flat: as air slowly leaked out, the underinflated tire was pinched by the rim, causing a small tear in a seam. I did notice this week that the resistance didn’t seem as much as usual although I had recently put air in the tire. This morning it was flat, and five minutes after putting in more air, it was flat again. After a tube change, the resistance seemed more normal, but I always get real paranoid about stuff like this when biking. Sooner or later, something’s going to give. It’s why I like running: no equipment to rely on.

It’s almost as if with biking, some of my stress-induced injuries that would occur with running get transferred to the bike. With running or biking, there is a single entity performing the activity with the same probability of some kind of failure. With running, it’s just me, but with biking, the bike and I are sharing the task. Sometimes I break down, and sometimes the bike breaks down. In most cases, the bike can be fixed a lot faster than I can.

I’m still considering getting a new bike, but haven’t looked into it too much. I would like a carbon fiber frame, but that jacks up the price significantly. I know Trek has a fairly wide range of relatively affordable carbon fiber bikes, but it seems that some are better than others, so I’ll have to do research. The aluminum frames I’ve ridden feel kind of twisty while the steel-framed Bianchi I’ve got is solid. The components on the Bianchi are about ground to dust so I’ve got to get something that’s fairly robust. I figure that shelling out a bit of dough will be worth it if it’s something I’m going to use every day. Like the computer monitor, I would rather pay a bit more for something that’s good and that will work well and hold up than get something cheap that will break down. If I start running again, I’ll probably not bike as much, but I would probably still do it to help ease the impact of just running and doing nothing else.

For now, I’ve got no reason to rush anything, and when the time is right, I’ll look more into running again. I do think that time is coming soon.

Now it’s one year later on a similarly cold day and I’m on the other side. After a long period of pain and wondering what I had done to my knee, to the cartilage tear diagnosis and buildup to the surgery, the weeks of non-weight bearing, the months of wearing a brace, and finally biking again, I’ve come nearly full circle. A few of the guys on the team asked yesterday when I’ll be tying up the ol’ running shoes again. One even asked about racing plans. Not so fast…

My goal is to start once the weather gets warmer — the cold is probably one of the factors that led to my problems in the first place. The worst of all my previous running injuries started in the winter. I really also don’t care for freezing my butt off outside when I can bike inside. A part of me doesn’t want to start at all in fear that I’ll be in pain. I would almost rather just have the hope that I can run again versus the fear that I’ll never be able to.

I have a hard time believing it’s been a year since all this went down. I feel a lot better now than I did then, especially knowing what was wrong with me. I waited for months until the pain and irritation got so bad to go to the doctor, but there wasn’t a day that I wondered why my knee gave me such trouble. I remember clearly the day I hurt it, getting into the car and feeling unbearable pain each time I put in the clutch. Stairs were a nightmare, and even extending my leg when sitting down was pretty bad. At the least, I know what happened and I’ve tried to get it fixed. It’s possible with advances in stem cell research that I could get an injection that would regrow my lost cartilage to its pre-tear state. I could go back to running as if nothing ever happened. Now, I’ll be satisfied if I can get out the door a few times a week for a couple of miles.

I’m really starting to face the reality that I’m getting older. I know I’m not that old, but most of the doctors I’ve seen for various running injuries have told me that I’m not an invincible high schooler anymore. Stuff is going to wear me down more than it used to and I’ve got to pay attention.  My coach calls them “old man” injuries. I even get called “old man” when I occasionally drop by at practice.

I guess this just boils down to the fact that I wish that I didn’t have to worry about coming apart at the seams. Ray Kurzweil goes on about how much of a PITA it is to give our bodies constant attention and to still have them break down on us — that a better solution is needed than just advances in medical technology. I really can’t stand to have to dedicate so much time to bodily upkeep when I could be doing something else. Imagine how many more interesting things we could be doing instead of having to sleep, eat, drink, brush our teeth, and handle other annoying bodily functions. They always seem to get in the way when I want to put my attention elsewhere.

Though uploading my consciousness into a computer as a program sounds like a radical idea, it would certainly take care of most of these annoyances. The question would then become one of experience: would existing as a computer program provide the same sensory experience, satisfaction, and overall quality of life as in a real body? I’m not sure. At this point I would have to say no, but maybe a few more years of aging will change that.