FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE, UPDATE FIRST, RANDOM, LONG DIGRESSION TO FOLLOW:
I apologize for the radio silence! Truth is, I just haven’t wanted to talk about cancer much lately. I’ve come to realize the best way to fight it, is to try to forget you have it. But an update is in order, so here we go … I’m at the tail end of my 3rd chemo round. This one’s been a little bit tougher (the first week lows were just a little lower, and it took me a little longer to come out of them). The scan I got prior to this round was a bit disappointing too (it’s no secret we were hoping to see some progress in terms of the tumors shrinking), so the mental aspect of the fight has gotten tougher too. But we’re doing okay really – working, writing, exercising a bit, and enjoying family time. And rest assured we’re keeping the faith that God’s gonna turn this thing around. A couple of recent wins: 1. We’ve been blessed to connect with another international expert in thymoma – this one specializing in clinical trials. A shout out to Logan’s (Briton’s boyfriend’s) family, MooMoo, Amanda & Dave for the hookup and to God for stepping in with a truly random example of serendipity; 2. I was fortunate enough to get the first vaccine dose yesterday (again, truly God just making it happen for us), so my 4th round of chemo is pushed back a week to Feb 1. Meanwhile, my oncologist has started exploring clinical trials and has ordered genetic/molecular testing on my biopsy samples to look at possible “targeted” treatments. I’ll get a PET/CT scan at the end of my 4th round (last week of February probably), and we’ll go from there. Finally, for those wondering about Tegan, she does indeed need knee surgery (kind of extensive), but she’s getting around well with the brace, and the ortho said there’s no rush. And now, digression time …
In the spirit of forgetting I have cancer, I offer the following random, bold statement ……… I hereby throw down the gauntlet and challenge the fastest human to ever live, Usain Bolt, to a footrace. I’m sorry, what was that?, you may ask. Put down the bottle, you may say. There’s help for people like you, Joe, you may cry. For how in the world can a 51-year-old, 5’10, 180-pounder, who’s never been a real runner, who’s never been fast, who has torn cartilage in one hip, a torn meniscus in the opposite knee, and who currently has a few aliens in his chest and more than a few unwanted visitors in his lungs ever utter such a ridiculous statement? A fair question, no doubt. After all, my greatest running feat is that, back in 1984, I broke the 9th grade record for the shuttle run—remember that part of the fitness test where you ran back and forth with the erasers? (In the spirit of full disclosure, my friend (that’s you, Z) beat my record about five minutes after I set it.) Allow me to explain …
This challenge was actually birthed about eight years ago, when I came up with another ridiculous idea, the “Five 5s.” Looking for a simple way to measure and achieve a legit combination of speed, endurance, and strength, I decided I would train to do the following:
- Run a sub-5-second 40-yard dash
- Run a sub-5-minute mile
- Complete a 50-mile footrace (just survive, no time limit)
- Do 75 consecutive pushups (legit pushups with absolutely PERFECT form)
- Do 15 consecutive pullups (dead-hang pullups, no kipping)
And the trick to the challenge would be to achieve all of these goals within a reasonable, unbroken time period (say, 1 week)—i.e. be in condition to accomplish all 5 goals at the same time as opposed to training for one at a time. I liked the simplicity of the idea and the symmetry of five different goals, each with a 5 in them. The Five 5s—catchy, huh? I envisioned branding the challenge with t-shirts and hats, maybe going viral with my 14 Instagram followers and 2 YouTube subscribers from New Zealand. And, I thought the challenge was reasonable. The pushups and pullups were gimmes with a little training, I thought, and the 50-miler doable with a LOT of training. The sub-5-minute mile and the sub-5-second 40 … I wasn’t sure, but I thought I still had enough juice to get there.
Not long after I came up with the idea, I mentioned it to a high school buddy who’d converted himself from a DIII middle linebacker to a marathoner later in life (that’s you, Keith). He laughed—the kind of spontaneous, uncontrollable, laugh-in-your-face kind of laugh. Then he offered a stern warning: “You start running 40s—like really trying to run 40s at your age—and something’s going to fall off.”
I ignored his warning and jumped right into speed work, running 200m/400m/800m intervals in my yard. I mounted a sand-filled trash can on a furniture dolly and began using it for sled work, hoping to find some explosive power in my backside. Within a few months, I was the proud owner of fresh xrays and an MRI that showed I had a sports hernia, a labrum tear in my right hip, and arthritis and bursitis in both hips. The orthopedist gave me some frank advice: “Change your lifestyle. Take up cycling or swimming, or we’ll see you back here for a hip replacement by the time your fifty.” As for the sports hernia and labrum tear, he suggested separate surgeries.
I declined both surgeries, electing to dive into a quagmire of “conservative” treatments—countless PT hours, various stretching techniques, core training, massage, and even dry needling of my groin (nice!). Over the course of a few years, both injuries slowly improved—but mostly I just got used to feeling like my legs were 75 years old.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve never officially been a runner, but that’s not entirely true. Yes, my main sport growing up was baseball (not much actual running at shortstop), but somewhere in my twenties I started running, and over the years I’ve probably collected 100+ race t-shirts. In short, I may not be a “real runner,” but I’ve put in some miles. Actually, as I type this, another thought pops into my head: but deep down, aren’t we all real runners? I mean think about it, the first thing a baby wants to do as soon as he or she learns to walk, is to walk fast—then run. Our ancestors, in the roles of both predator and prey, were always running. Most of us forget it somewhere along the line, but we were all are born to run.
And there’s no doubt, in my mind, I am a runner. When I run fast (well, fast for me), I’m perfectly aware that I look like a large chimpanzee with bunions. I’m also aware that I occasionally scream when I’m really pushing it, alarming passing motorists, dogs, and kids on bikes. But regardless of how I look or sound, I feel fast. In my head, I’m a cross between an Olympic sprinter and a Kenyan marathoner. And, no matter how badly I don’t want to run on any given day, no matter how bad my body hurts before and after, I seem to reach my heights of clarity, inspiration, and peace when I’m putting them up and down as fast as I can. In fact, at risk of spilling a little melodrama here, it’s not a stretch to say running saved my life many years ago, but that’s another story.
The result of the injuries I suffered eight years ago was that I did indeed change my lifestyle. The doctor basically told me to stop running, but that simply wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to stop, and I haven’t. What I did do was cut way back on miles—the thought being that I might stretch the running years I have left out as long as possible. No more walking out the door for a ten-miler. No more signing up for half-marathons at the last minute just to bag another cool t-shirt. Although I kept doing long adventure races (a different beast altogether), I accepted that my marathon days were in the past, and I dropped the idea of one day running a 50 or 100-miler. As for running a sub-5 second forty, that part of the Five 5s challenge died very quickly. The truth is, despite my shuttle run dominance as a fourteen-year-old, I was never sprinter fast—I doubt I could have run much faster than a 4.8 or 4.9 forty when I was at my young-man’s fastest (I have a feeling that the single most exaggerated fitness metric in the world is an athlete’s 40 time).
But one element of the Five 5s still loomed large in my imagination: the mythical mile. The original idea was to train for, and measure, strength, speed, and endurance. Well, if there’s one single fitness metric that requires all three, it’s the mile. It’s short enough to blow your hair back, yet long enough to make you cry. To run a fast mile, you need speed, power, and the mettle to suffer. One mile. 5,280 feet. 1,760 yards. As fast as you can. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. And despite the metrication of track and field events over the years, the mile still means something. Ask anyone you know (especially here in the U.S.) how fast they think they can run 1,600 meters (just shy of a mile) and they will likely reply, “I dunno, how far is that?” But ask someone how fast they can run a mile, and chances are they can at least give you a guess.
And so, in fits and starts, I casually started training for the mile. I kind of did what the doctor ordered. I stopped running distances altogether. I don’t think I’ve run more than 4 miles at one time in several years. In fact, today, my typical run is a scant 2 miles. As for speed work, I kept up the 200, 400, 800-meter intervals, but I resisted ever reaching a full-on sprint. I mixed in a few unorthodox training sessions, as well, including running the 15 and 20-meter Pacer Test (yes, the same one our kids run in P.E. at school—you ought to see their faces when they’re in my truck and the Pacer Test song pops up on my song shuffle), and the Bruce Protocol Stress Test (the standard treadmill test given to evaluate cardiac function). Side note: back in 2016-2017 I went through a high-stress period where I started having occasional chest pains. Everything checked out, but I when I told my doc about the interval training I was doing, he recommended I take the Bruce Protocol Test just to make sure. My first thought (an incredibly stupid one, of course) was that I didn’t want to take the test until I could really kick ass on it. So, instead of rushing out and getting tested, I spent the better part of a year conducting the test on my own treadmill, pushing the heart/lung envelope, training for the very test I was supposed to take to make sure I wasn’t going to die running.
So, where does Usain Bolt—a born runner, if ever there was one—fit into this story? Well, a few years back I came across a The New Yorker article that posed the question, how fast could Bolt, the fastest sprinter on the planet, run a mile? As it turns out, running geeks, track and field experts, and exercise physiologists have been debating this question for years, and, surprisingly, there’s little consensus. The Average Joe (that’d be me) tends to imagine Bolt, who topped out at over 27 m.p.h. when he ran his world-record 9.58 second 100-meter race, could easily run close to a 4-minute mile. In fact, this Average Joe would have probably guessed Bolt, in his prime, would have stood a chance at the mile world record of 3 minutes 43 seconds if he’d dedicated his training to that distance. But it’s apparently more complicated than that, as I should have known. After all, aren’t I the one that said the mile takes strength, speed, and endurance? Bolt is a 6’5”, 200+ lb masterpiece of fast-twitch muscle fiber. He was born to run fast, and, according to the experts, that speed holds up to about 400 meters (1/4 mile). But past that distance he’d be a shark on dry land. In fact, scouring the various articles and internet bulletin boards for a sensible opinion on Bolt’s imagined mile time, it doesn’t take long to realize that the more expertise an opinion-giver has in the fields of track or exercise physiology, the slower Bolt gets. Most “experts” are on the fence whether the fastest man on the entire planet could run a sub-5-minute mile.
But wait, I’d read that over 23,000 U.S. high schoolers break the 5-minute barrier each year. Are you telling me if Usain Bolt showed up at a local high school track meet anywhere in the country, he’d likely finish in the middle of the pack in the mile? Apparently so. So, I thought, if I could somehow whittle my mile time down to 4:59, I’d possibly be able to beat the fastest man in the world.
Of course, there’s one problem with this challenge. I can’t run a 5-minute mile. In fact, in the few years I spent messing around with the mile, I never broke 6 minutes. In my defense, I was in my late 40s, and I only timed myself for real (on a track, accurate distance) one time. It was a hot, windy day a few summers ago, and I clocked a 6:17 at the local high school. In better conditions, if I red-lined the engine, I think I could’ve hit 6:10. During this period, my best two-mile time (on hilly, dirt roads around my house) was 13:54 … a 6:57 pace. It’s nice to know those times put me in pretty good shape for my age. In fact, if I’d joined the Army and took the standard fitness test, my two-mile time would have put me in the 90th percentile for men half my age. And, when I finally went in and took the Bruce Protocol Stress Test for real (with a cardiologist administering), my time translated to a VO2 max of 58. VO2 max is the highest rate at which you can transport oxygen (via blood) to your muscles so that your muscles can produce energy aerobically—basically how efficient and strong your heart and lungs are. 58 put me in the “Elite” category for my age.
That’s all well and good, but for those of you who don’t run, let’s be clear on a couple of points. One, there are probably a dozen 6th graders at the local middle school who can run a 6:17 mile, and two, the difference between a 6:17 and a 4:59 mile is very, very . . . dare I repeat, very, large. There is a vast ocean between 6:17 and 4:59, and that ocean grows rapidly as one ages. It’s one thing to drop a minute and eighteen seconds off your mile time if you’re starting at a 10-minute mile, or your 25 years old, but when you’re twice that age, and you’re already close to maxing out your God-given potential … well, you get the picture.
And of course, here I am now. No need to recap my current situation, but let’s just say it doesn’t set up well for a fast mile time! I’ve been trying to get after it a little bit during the second and third weeks of each chemo round, but it hasn’t been pretty. I’m fortunate, I suppose, that I’ve been able to walk and bike at all. A few weeks ago, I went out for a 3-mile walk with Christie and Graber. Another side note: after years of coaching Aedan in football and soccer, hearing fellow coaches screaming “Graber” and calling him that myself, Aedan is just “Graber” whenever there’s sports involved. Anyway, Christie walks like a cheetah, so she was way out ahead of us. Graber graciously stayed back as my pacer. About halfway in, I looked at him and broke into a trot. We “ran,” side-by-side, for a solid two or three-hundred yards. Granted we were moving about as fast as a toddler can crawl, but damnit, I was running. It was freaking awesome. A BIG thanks to God for granting me the simple joy of running those few minutes. Since then, I’ve had a couple 3-mile walk/5-mile bike ride workouts. Not exactly hard-core, but it’s something.
So, suffice it to say, some dreams never die. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say if our dreams die, we might as well go with them. So, I’m holding onto this one. I know there’s a chance I may never run a “fast” mile again, but I’m gonna keep after it. And one day, God willing, somehow, somewhere, I’ll run into Usain Bolt. And if I do, maybe I’ll square up on the big man and issue my challenge. You never know, maybe I’ve been holding back … maybe my fastest mile is still to come …
Peace, love, and thanks to all …