Marathon Me

I now have super powers previously only dreamed of. I am capable of seeing an alarm clock in the middle of the night, I can wake up and let the dogs outside without bumping into walls, I can see the scores at the football games on the opposite side of the stadium, and leap small buildings in a single bound. Okay, I lied about that last one, but the others are all true.

Last Wednesday I went in front of the laser for PRK Laser Eye Surgery. This is a similar procedure to Lasik and the lasers that burn away reshape your eye are the same. The main difference is in Lasik they cut a small flap in your cornea and fold it back and then zap your eyes. In PRK they grind/shave of .46 microns of your cornea then zap your eyes, finishing up by putting on a clear contact lens to protect your eyes from dirt and debris. I would need to wear the contact for about 7 days.

I’ve worn contacts off and on for the last 20 years or so and never been a huge fan. The times I’ve actually slept in them have been highly irritating upon waking. So the thought of leaving the same pair of contacts in my eye for a week wasn’t exactly appealing.

I wasn’t a candidate for Lasik because my corneas were too steep, but since PRK uses the same melting laser process I figured it would be okay.

I checked into to the clinic Wednesday morning after signing my life away; apparently it’s possible by having laser surgery that I could be causing Global Warming and massive famine among other possible side affects. As the doctor was going over the procedure I yawned, and he mentioned that the Valium must be working, but no I was just tired, I hadn’t received any Valium. The doctor remedied this situation and Valum-ed me up. He thought that since I was so relaxed I must have already had my Valium. He said that a lot of people are really nervous and the Valium helps them, but that its main purpose was to make you sleepy so you take a nap when you get home for a few hours. Fast forward to about 90 minutes later and I was fast asleep. Plus one for the Valium.

After getting hopped up (toned down?) on the Valium, they gave me a sexy blue hairnet to wear. Let me tell you I was fighting off all the nurses at this point … Or maybe not. They led me into the operating room and then went all David Banner on me, shining a laser line down the center of my face.

But instead of turning me into the Incredible Hulk, they made me hold a huge stuffed dog. So this is me rocking the hair net holding a big stuffed puppy. Good times, good times.

The whole procedure took less than ten minutes from the time I went into the operating room until I was all done.

After lying down on the gurney and holding onto Under Dog, they fitted me with Clockwork Orange devices to hold my eyelids open. Luckily I wasn’t subjected to crazy images of violence, just a bright white light.

The first phase involved putting, what I will call a grinder, on my eye. This was the weirdest part as my vision just went black while they grinded off the .46 microns of cornea they needed to remove to be able to zap my eyes. Then it went bright white as the began to polish my eye ball. This was like looking into the sun, while a smaller sun was rubbed back and forth across my eye ball. The best I’ve been able to represent it is like this:

Here is a short video Shelley was able to take before the technicians gave her the Stink Eye and made her stop.

My right eye took about 13-14 seconds of “lasering” to fix. The laser makes a series of clicking sounds as it turns rapidly on and off vaporizing part of my eye. My right eye would take about 7-8 seconds as it sucked less needed less work to make it better. After words they finish by rinsing your eye out with a very cold sterile saline solution to sterilize the eye and to reduce the swelling. This didn’t bother my right eye at all, but when it was time to do the left eye, I heard a nurse say

Nurse: This one just ran out, and this one is almost frozen
Doctor: Should be fine

Then my eye got really, really cold and it felt like I had a brain freeze right in my eye. It didn’t feel pleasant at all. But it only lasted for about 2 seconds and then it was over. Shelley drove me home and I took a nap. At this point I couldn’t read my BlackBerry or look at a computer screen.

Thursday morning I went in for my post-operative check up and my vision had gone from:

Right Eye: 20×400
Left Eye: 20×200

to new and improved eyes:

Right Eye: 20×50
Left Eye: 20×30

But it was still slightly blurry. My vision basically looked like this for the first day or two:

I was able to read the screen in short bursts after taking my laptop screen resolution down from 1680×1050 to 800×600. It was quite funny to see fonts this large.

Friday night I was able to read Christopher a book at bedtime, but I had to keep it to a fairly short book.

By Saturday morning I could read the paper in short bouts. I could do 2-3 minutes of reading with a 2-3 minute break in between. Saturday evening we all went to the Texas Longhorns football game against the local High School team Florida Atlantic University and I was able to watch the game and see the players. My eyes were so good I was clearly able to see all the bad calls and helpfully shouted out to the refs letting them know when they had gotten it wrong. Just a small service I provide at games. By Sunday I was able to read the paper all the way through without issue.

Today I have perfect close vision and my long vision is almost perfect. I’m hoping that one more good night of sleep and I’ll be all set. My eyes will have had 6 days for the corneas to grow back and clear up my vision. I have a check up in the morning where I get to remove the protective clear contact lens and then it will be all me.

Each day I gain some new super power like reading the alarm clock, but sadly I am still unable to see through my wife’s clothes, and I’m pretty sure that was part of the ad I had seen, but maybe I’m confusing that with something else I’ve recently ordered that still hasn’t come in yet.

All of my friends who have had the surgery done all love it, and I think I’m rapidly approaching the same conclusion. It’s so nice to be able to see clearly without glasses and without having to worry about contact lenses and all the other hassles. I’m just hoping that 10 years down the road I don’t go blind as a horrible side affect.

Tags: General // 2 Comments »

Tomorrow at about 9am I will go under the knife? in front of the laser. While I am slightly nervous right now, tomorrow I should be relaxed:

I will administer 5 - 10mg of Valium in pill form 20 minutes prior to your procedure. The Valium will help you relax during the procedure and also help you sleep easier when you return home.

I will be getting PRK surgery on my eyes tomorrow and will shortly thereafter if all goes well, be able to do something I haven’t be able to do in 20 years. See without my glasses or contacts. Wooo-hooo.

Several of my friends have been kind enough to point out that while I know personally at least 10 people who have done this and loved it, they know someone for whom it didn’t go well. The way I am looking at this is my friends have been nice enough to identify the statistical outliers that prove my procedure will be safe and flawless. That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

My best friend had the surgery done last year (which is why I am going to the same place tomorrow) and has been very happy with the results. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but always said I would wait until Steve did it so I would know it had finally become “safe enough”.  Steve did it about a year ago (right before the start of Longhorn Football Season) and I am doing roughly the same time.  I started setting aside the money in my flex spending account so that I could use pre-tax dollars to pay for it, save about 30% and stick it to the man!  Take that “The Man!”

So this will probably be the last post from me for a day or two, but hopefully if all goes well and I can still see on Thursday I’ll drop by with an update.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Tags: General // 5 Comments »

Yesterday I posted about Dara Torres’s crazy stretching routine that enables her to kiss ass even in her forties. Then our good friend Bethany responded with the following:

Did you hear that story about how much it costs per day to keep her in shape like that?
If you didn’t, trust me, it might give you a coronary.
-BDawg

So of course I was intrigued, and set out to find out how much it costs. As many of you know, I am all for buying something if it will help (outside of performance enhancing drugs), and have purchased almost every bizarre little gadget from GPS devices, Back Nobbers, Foam Rollers, TP Massage Balls, those ridiculously large yoga balls you sit on, to “The Sock” and everything in between.

However, what I learned, was that it isn’t as simple as watching an infomercial and sending in 4 easy payments. Alex added:

In a nyt article before the Olympics, it said that she spends $100,000 per year for her entourage of stretchers and personal trainers.

$100,000!?!?! That’s crazy. Being your dutiful servant I tracked down the New York Times Article in question, it included this now infamous picture:

Since most people don’t know how to read, present audience excluded of course, everyone just looked at the picture and was amazed that anyone can have a stomach like that, let alone a 41 year old mother. Numerous blog posts popped up railing against using Dara as a role model for women and what she has had to put herself through.

The f-word blog has this to say:

The magazine’s coverage of Torres notes that to achieve her world class performance, Torres employs three coaches (head, sprint and strength), two stretchers, two massage therapists, a chiropractor, and a nanny — at the cost of at least $100,000 a year. The daughter of a doctor, Torres led a privileged childhood life — her childhood home had 10 bathrooms. Her current husband is an Israeli surgeon and she receives considerable funding and financial advantages from her sponsorships from Toyota and Speedo; money she has earned from modeling, TV work and motivational speaking; and a private sponsor for training expenses. For Torres, working out is literally a full-time job and she has the battle scars to prove it. She’s had surgery on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers. She is, as her own father describes, not a type-A personality, but rather a “type A + +,” which helps to explain why, while attending the University of Florida in the mid-1980s, Torres earned 28 N.C.A.A. all-American swimming awards — the maximum number during a college career — but she was also bulimic.

You read that right: Torres’s retinue includes a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach, two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny, at the cost of at least $100,000 per year.

$100,000 a year. More than most families make in a year she spends just to work out. I’m pretty sure I would be a lot better athlete if I could make it my full time job, and was able to burn 100k for all the extra people. But I don’t have illusions that I’d ever be Olympic caliber, but it sure would be fun to have no financial worries and just be able to train and workout and see how good you could actually be.

I think the ideal would actually to be an action movie star. Someone like Matt Damon who make millions per picture and basically has to be in shape for a lot of his roles. Maybe not Matt Damon, since he also has to get fat for some roles, maybe Christian Bale. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’d like to be like Christian Bale. Come to think of it, Shelley would probably like me to look more like Sr. Bale as well.

So there you have it, if you got a spare 100 grand and a lot of time on your hands, you can get a lot faster.

Tags: General // 6 Comments »

I found a cool tool to help you create maps, which is very useful for tracking which states you’ve run in a visual way. This website allows you to enter six different groupings of states and pick the color and it will shade them in and create an image for you.The above image is what I generated. It shows the 43 states that I’ve run a marathon in. I’ve got 7 states and DC left.

Remaining states: Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Washington DC.

Hopefully all 50 will be done sometime next year. I really need to work out that schedule.

Tags: General // 4 Comments »

As I get older and it takes longer to recover, I know that I should be stretching more. But I just can’t stand it. Intellectually I know my recovery would most likely improve as would my times, but I hate it. The above video shows what Dara Torres goes through in order to continue competing at an Olympic level even in her forties.

She spends 8 hours a day doing resistance stretching, and it looks like it takes as many as 3 people to fully work her out. I think I would be way more into stretching if someone else did it for me, as I am basically lazy. The people I know that do Yoga all love it, but I hate it. I am assuming that at some point you reach the tipping point where the stretching becomes enjoyable once you start sucking less getting better.

If anyone wants to volunteer to stretch me out, let me know. Haha.

Tags: General, Training // 6 Comments »