Wednesday nights are usually communal dinner nights. No one volunteered to host, so there didn't appear to be a dinner happening. I emailed Megan to see if she would be interested in dinner: I would stop by Whole Foods on the way to her house and we'd cook over at her place. Megan had commented to me that guests don't just head over and knock on her door, so I thought it'd be fun to nearly do that.

Work disagreed.

Late in the afternoon, I wasn't finished with my tasks, and it was clear I wasn't going to be able to have dinner and finish the project images I need to complete. I called Megan up and told her I had to bail.

BUT!

Kris would be out on Friday night, and Friday nights were when we had massages, maybe I could bribe her to come over, take Kris' place and have a massage while I played with Mirabelle for an hour, how about it?

I think she took about .2 microseconds to decide and declare I was the best friend ever.

Yay me!

Note to self: when someone suggests you taste what's inside a sealed gel cap, at least have a glass of water handy when you bite down.

Otherwise, that fish oil is going to leave quite the aftertaste.

Tonight we ran the Stanford Dish Loop for training. I've walked this loop a few times, but run it only once, last season also for training. Last year, I was told we were running counter-clockwise around the loop, so I promptly ran clockwise. I have no idea how I mixed those two directions, but apparently I went the easier way: counter-clockwise starts with one ginormous hill that basically thrashes your legs, making the rest of the run more of a mental workout than a physical one.

I struggled with the middle third of the run, having severe cramps on the backside hill, and having to walk up most of it. The backside of the run, however, once I reached the top, was smooth sailing at a nice, fast, comfortable pace.

The nicest part of the run was when Brynne told me to look up, hey, you can see the City from here. It was faint, but visible. I'd never seen San Francisco from Palo Alto before. It was quite lovely. I wish I had had my camera.

Google has a program where you can set up new search results to be emailed to you on a regular basis, say once a day. I have several set up, because I find them interesting. I also have a couple set up for research purposes for a couple projects I'm doing.

One of the alerts is the term "migraine" from which I receive anywhere from three to three dozen notes, all in one email, a day.

The first one on today's alert read:

Migraine may protect against cognitive decline
Reuters.uk - UK
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women with a lifetime history of migraine have
less cognitive decline over time than women without migraine. ...

My first thought was, hot damn! Finally, something positive to come out of these torturous events.

I scrolled a little farther down the page, and came across this alert:

Migraines could lead to brain damage
Hindustan Times - New Delhi,Delhi,India
Researchers have established the fact that migraine can be a progressive
disorder and frequent sufferers have an increased risk of brain damage. ... 

Great. Just great.

Do I have a choice? I'd like the first, please.

Reading the article, though, doesn't sound like the first is actually incongruous with the second. The study shoes the rate of decline is less for migraineurs with aura, but the decline is still there. Possible reasons are diet changes, adequate sleep and other trigger avoidances that cause people who have migraines to be healthier overall (minus the headaches).

It's almost as if we're shown early in life how being blind, nauseous, and frail can be, and we adjust to minimize the reoccurances of those reminders.

Or something.

So, today at Velocity Sports, we hooked up to the sleds, but not to push or pull them. Instead, we used them as anchors. Kris has used the sleds before in a workout. I hadn't, and took a while to figure out the harness. It was a chest harness with the hook in the back, and broad straps along the shoulders.

Unfortunately, when I put it on, all you could see was boob. It was like my breasts reached out and smacked the casual observer who looked in my direction. Even Bryanne looked at me and inadvertently said, "Whoa."

Using the sleds as anchors, we attached ourselves to long bungee cords, sprinted forward twenty yards, touched the ground, ran backward twenty yards, repeated for four reps, then did 20 pushups, the whole set then repeated four times total. The sprint forward was easy until the last five yards, the run backward even easier. I don't run backward particularly well, so I enjoyed actually being able to run backward for once.

After the first set of four reps of four sprints plus pushups, we were to do another set with situps instead of pushups. Kris commented that he didn't feel the bungee cord was providing much resistence, and asked if he could run to the wall, another five yards beyond our current stopping point. Bryanne suggested, instead, that he move the sled back three yards, so that he feels the resistance sooner. He shoved the sled back. Bryanne added more weight to the sled since Kris was going to be pulling it more, and we lined up to run again.

When we start these runs, I'm usually able to keep up with Kris for the first run or the first few steps. As we started on the first sprint, Kris was on the far side, Bryanne in the middle and I ran on her other side. We ran the first twenty yards together until a "GAK!" and Kris disappeared from our peripheral.

The bungee cord had provided Kris more resistance than he had realized and, in a cartoon dog reaching the end of his leash moment, when he reached the end of the cord, it stopped, and he did, too. Quite suddenly.

We had to stop for a long time, unable to do anything but laugh.