Assessing the Damage, Post-Nightfloat

This round of nightfloat is over. Hallelujah! I'm in a post-nightfloat fatigue cloud. Can't really think straight, and realize that feeling will continue all weekend. What a waste of a weekend. But on a more positive note, this was one of the more fun nightfloat weeks I've had in a while. But I'm still glad it's over!

Now would be a good time to assess the damage of the past 7 days so I can make changes starting NOW.

Here's how it went:

Miles run (completed/planned): 22/22
Long run: 0/0
Speed work sessions: 2/3 Speed work completed at goal time: 1
Swimming sessions: 1/1
Biking sessions: 1/1
Weights: 2/4

Average Daily Excess Calories: 500 (!!)
Average Daily Calorie Burn: 274
Average Daily Excess Calories Accounting for Burn: 226 (!!)

Hmmm. Successes include getting in all of my running miles and working out 6 out of 7 days while I was on nightfloat, including doing weights one day while at work (at 1 am!!) because I didn't have time before I got to work. Failures include only getting in 50% of my planned weight sessions and over-eating like a crazy person. In all fairness, however, I wasn't trying to decrease calorie intake, I was just getting back into the swing of healthy eating by starting to record calories again, since I haven't done that in months.

So, next week, I'll focus on getting in 100% of my weight sessions and decreasing my excess daily calories from 500/day to 200/day. In just a few weeks, I should be to my daily calorie intake goal of 1200/day (which is the basal metabolic rate for someone my size). And I need to get my long run in this weekend, no matter how tired I feel.

Here's the schedule:

Saturday: swim, weights,
Sunday: 17 mile easy run, weights
Monday: 10 mile tempo run
Tuesday: 5 mile bike, swim, weights
Wednesday: 10 mile long intervals, weights
Thursday: 6 miles (Yasso 800s), swim
Friday: 5 mile bike, weights

Definitely more ambitious than last week but I get to sleep at night like a normal person and I have to work hard before Thanksgiving binging!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Going Steady With My Garmin

Despite the title of my blog "running with the herd", I feel like I haven't been posting very much about running. I'll work on that. But don't worry, I have been running, I just haven't been posting about running.

On Tuesday I had a nice, comfortable 7 mile run. It was 70 degrees and sunny here in Chicago- absolutely BEAUTIFUL! One of my goals for my next training cycle is to use my Garmin more often and more effectively, so that I can target my problem areas in hopes of becoming a faster runner and eventually a Boston Qualifier (in the distant future, people, don't judge).

I've had my Garmin since I started running in 2006. Back then I used to measure distances along the lakefront path, but not so much to track pace or to use any of the fancy features that I still don't understand. But I found that having pace information on my wrist, readily viewable at all times, made me very stressed. I would run for a bit, then look at my pace and think "oh my god, I'm so slow", speed up, end up huffing and puffing and have to bail or shorten my runs. No good. Even when I told myself that I was running for fun and if I couldn't breathe it wasn't fun, I still obsessively looked at the Garmin.

And up until this year, my goal has been to run for fun only. Because if it becomes not fun, there's no way I'll keep doing it.

This may be a good place to remind my readers of what a wimp I am. I am lazy. I don't like to suffer. When I'm short of breath I (used to) slow down. When I'm tired, I like to sleep. When I'm in pain (on a training run), I generally stop. (I actually think that last one is a good thing generally, because I- knock on wood- have been injury free since I started running 4 years ago).

Then 2 things happened:

1. I spent a year with a personal trainer. My trainer (Alina McKnight at River East Club- she's AWESOME) kicked my butt. She pushed me to my limit and then some. I worked my muscles to failure every single session. I've never suffered so much in my life, and boy was it great! Initially, I was amazed at what I couldn't do (who knew jumping jacks were so freakin' hard) but after a few weeks I was amazed at what I could do. And, more relevant to my running, I realized I could suffer. I could be completely short of breath and still keep going. I embraced the suffering. And I got stronger as a result.

2. The 2nd thing relates to the first and was my half marathon PR in Rockford. That was really a perfect race experience for me. You can read my race report here, but in short I ran my heart out: didn't slow down when I was nauseous, didn't slow down when I was short of breath (well maybe a little in the last few miles) and pushed through the pain. I suffered for 2 hours and 19 seconds and I lived to tell the tale and the rights to talk about my PR until I'm blue in the face (until I get a sub-2, hopefully soon!) A combination of slow steady running for a few years, my personal trainer strengthening both my mind and body, some early pacing by my husband and perfect race conditions (including good spectators!) convinced me that I can become a faster runner.

So my running goals have changed from running just for fun, to working on becoming a faster runner understanding that it won't always be fun. And knowing that I can always go out for a slow, fun run when I want to. One of the benefits of becoming faster is that there are a myriad of slower paces that are perfectly conversational and comfortable. Who knew??

So, the Garmin. How can I best use the Garmin to help improve my running? I just learned how to set it to auto-lap at each mile, so I'm pretty much still in Garmin infancy. I'm open to advice.

One thing I can't do is use the beeping pace alerts. There's this setting where you can set a pace range you would like to run at and it will beep at you when you are too fast (dee-da-dee-da-deeee!) or too slow (dee-da-dee-da-dough). As evidenced by the graph below (distance on x axis, pace on y axis) from my Garmin training software, my pace is super variable, so I just get beeped at left and right. I try to speed up when told and then I'm going too fast, I try to slow down and then the beep says I'm going too slow. Arg!

So my question for fellow runnerds out there is, how do you use your Garmin?

What's your favorite/most useful feature that you use on your Garmin and how to you incorporate it into your training?

Additionally, I have one specific question: Is it true that you can start moving (running/walking) while "locating satellites" without messing up the signal?

In other running news, I want to give a shout out to my mom. She started running recently and has worked her way up to nearly 3 miles. Earlier this week, she went on a 2.6 mile run and was bit by a dog. Multiple times! But she kept on trucking. Amazing!

Block 5: MICU float/Nightfloat

(This is one installment in a series of posts about what I do on a day-to-day basis as an internal medicine resident. If you are interested in the others, you can find them here: Block 1, Block 2, Block 3, Block 4.)


This month I did two things, MICU float and Nightfloat.

Some of you may not know about the many rules that guide the work hours of residents. They are very complicated and frequently change but the 3 big ones are:

--Over a 4 week period, each resident should work no more than 80 hours per week on average. Some of the old school docs think we are big wimps because we "only" work 80 hours a week, but a few years ago the powers that be finally came to their senses and realized that doctors are human, and humans tire, and when we are tired we make mistakes. And we can cause big problems when we make mistakes. Despite my frequent referral to us as factory workers, us making mistakes is a bit different than when you get home and realize they forgot the fries to go with your Big Mac.

--We are only supposed to work 24 hours in a row, with a 6 hour buffer time to finish tasks. In reality, this means we can work 30 hr shifts. One of the (many) reasons that Northwestern is a wonderful residency program is that we only have to do these 30 hours shifts in our ICUs, not on our general medicine wards. Most other competitive programs have 9 months of every 4th night overnight call. How....freaking.....awful. These rules are changing again next year and soon we will only be able to work 16 hours shifts. (But I'm done this year, so what do I care?? ;) )

--We must average 4 days off in any 4 week period. Yes, that means we usually work weekends. A two-day weekend is rare in our pitiful little lives.

So, how does this tie in to MICU floating? In addition to having very infrequent 30 hour shifts, Northwestern's Internal Medicine program is ADAMANT in their compliance about this rule, which is great. We never go over hours. In an ICU setting, however, there is no way to get all the day's work done in time to get out by 1pm (call starts at 7 am the previous day). So we have extra bodies who come in at 7:30 am, round with the post-call team, and do some of their work for them. So that's what I did for part of this block. Got to work at 7:30, rounded with the post call team, helped get them out on time, then baby-sat their patients for the rest of the day while they went home to sleep. This can be kind of fun because you don't really have that much work to do (you are there for emergencies, crashing patients, etc) so it's a good time to socialize and be grateful that you are just floating and not actually in the MICU for reals! (Read the MICU post here).

The other half of the month, I was on Nightfloat again. I've written about this before (see here), so won't go into detail. I will say that this was one of my more fun Nightfloat weeks.


Below is the Nightfloat crew shooting the breeze, ahem, I mean, hard at work;) We had some good talks about what we would do if we didn't do medicine- we had votes for wildlife photographer, meteorologist, lab researcher, professor, and oil tycoon. Most of us agreed, however, that it would be best to just win the lottery and retire:)

We celebrated She-Yan's b-day twice - once at midnight on b-day eve and then when we came back at 7pm that day. We ate some pizza, we ate some chicken tenders. We had a LOT of coffee. We listened to Pandora, had 80's hour, got in some YouTube viewing. We gave each other clever (or so we thought) nicknames. Oh- and we admitted 3-6 patients each every night. No biggie.

Here's the Nightfloat resident crew:

...and the interns:

I know we look happy. And we mostly were. Just generally not between 2-6 AM. Only 1 night left!!

New England Vacation 1: Portland, ME

It's time for the last installment of my vacation posts (until my next vacay in January!). We spent our last night in Portland, ME. We'd heard that Portland was a cute town w/ lots of great food. Apparently, it has the highest number of restaurants per capita of any town in the US! People must eat out ALL THE TIME. There were no shortage of great places to eat and drink but sadly, we only had 1 night, so had to choose wisely! Based on on-line reviews and lists of best restaurants in the US, we chose Street & Company.

Street & Company was on a cute little cobblestone street just a couple blocks from our hotel. (Thank god it was so close because I wore high heels. High heels and cobblestones DO NOT MIX! How did the ladies do it in the olden days?)

We started in the lounge w/ an excellent bottle of French wine recommended by the sommelier. I'm an avid wine drinker but have really focused on North America, South America, New Zealand, Australia and S Africa for my wines. Not sure why I ignored much of Europe. Actually, I know why- I feel like a d*****bag mispronouncing wine names when I order them and I don't speak French, German or Spanish.

Nonetheless, I need to learn more about French wines. We had a wine from Burgundy. For some reason, I thought Burgundy was a region and a type of red wine. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Burgundy is indeed a region, but they produce mostly 2 types of wine- Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. We had a Chardonnay, it was yummy!

Here's Adam enjoying his Chardonnay (right). You can get a feel for the restaurant in the background. It was "elegant rustic". The open kitchen smelled great and was fun to watch.

The food was excellent. For an appetizer we had eel unlike any either of us had ever had before. The texture was like canadian bacon and it even tasted a bit like bacon. Amazing.

I had lobster for my main course. When I choose the entree, I didn't realize it was the "bust open the shell and get the meat out yourself" kind. I think I have some sort of mild ordering anxiety disorder because when the waitress told me that it was the get-the-meat-out-yourself kind of dish, I got frazzled and said that's okay when clearly IT WASN'T because I was wearing white silk! My husband was kind enough to do the dirty work for me:) Delish!











We stayed at the Portland Harbor Hotel in downtown Portland, just steps from all the action;) The hotel was super nice- I wish we had more time there because their spa services looked really nice;) The bathroom was very pretty (I'm a sucker for nice hotel bathrooms) and had a separate shower and whirlpool tub. Here I am on the entry staircase:














When we got back to our room after dinner, we had little surprises on our beds. Turn down service! This service must be for the laziest of the lazy. Apparently some wealthy folks think the effort of folding back your own blanket to hop into bed is too much work so a paid hotel employee comes to do it for them! It was kind of cute though. The little chocolate lobster was a nice touch, though according to Adam it wasn't very tasty. I was so full of butter that the thought of one more bite sounded disgusting. In fact, I felt the need to bounce around the room a little bit, trying to work off some of the butter or "push that butter through" which Adam found super amusing. Yeah, I'm super classy- I ruined my turn down service by jumping on the bed like a 5 year old. But I had fun doing it, so it's all good:)

Our last night was a relaxing end to a delightful trip. And now, I'm off to plan our next vacation: Maui in January. Any hotel, restaurant and activity recs are appreciated!

Three Cheers for Grandma M!

My Grandma and Grandpa Monson

I am lucky enough to have 3 living grandparents who are all active, healthy, fun and super supportive of all of their grandkids. One of my grandparents, my Grandma M, is having a big surgery this Thursday so I thought it'd be nice to dedicate this blog post to her. Hopefully, sending good vibes her way will speed her recovery:)


I am the firstborn grandchild on both sides of my family. This means I had a few years of one-on-one time with all the adults in my family before my little brother came to steal the limelight. My Grandma was kind enough to indulge me in many ways both before and after my brother arrived. I remember playing lots and lots of board games with Grandma as well as cards, especially Hearts and Spades. I've heard talk that I was a sore loser at board games and if I knew I was going to lose I quit early. I don't know if I agree w/ those "rumors" but thanks for putting up with me, Grandma, if they are true!

It's funny which random things about growing up one remembers. For example, I definitely remember eating Captain Crunch w/ whole milk at Grandma's house. It was so tasty! We weren't allowed to have "sugar cereals" for breakfast at home so that was always a special treat.

I also remember hearing the story about the day my brother was born. I was only 3 at the time, but I adamantly believed that I had kids as well. Apparently, I had imaginary twins. When my Grandma and Grandpa brought me to the hospital they had to hold doors open so my kids could come through after me:)

I love this picture, what a great laugh!

I also remember one day in middle school when Grandma was the first person I confided in about a boy I liked;) I have no memory of who the boy was but I remember feeling comfortable telling Grandma about it!

Even as more and more grandkids came into the picture (yes that's you Karin and Anna-Lisa), I always felt like Grandma had plenty of love and attention to go around. Grandma and Grandpa were present at just about every event- every band concert, graduation, birthday party. They even drove down to the great state of Mississippi for my brother's winging ceremony a few years back (my bro is a Marine corps fighter pilot, see right). Grandma met every single one of my serious boyfriends, in fact always invited to them to Easter, Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. She always did and still does, make it a priority to keep up with our interests and life events.



I admire many things about my Grandma. I'm impressed with how active both she and my Grandpa are traveling all over the state to family reunions, to visit friends, etc. Until recently, they frequently came into the city for the day to go to a restaurant, or just to spend time downtown. Without a doubt, Grandma knows more about the goings-on in Chicago than I do- she reads the Tribune and periodically sends an article my way that she thinks I might enjoy. And she emails and uses the Internet like a champ! So impressive!

At my wedding.

Neither my husband nor I have any interest in having children, but one of the things I would enjoy if I had kids would be the chance to be as loving and supportive a grandmother as Grandma M has been to me. I'm very lucky. I love you Grandma and good luck Thursday!!

Nightfloat Val, Get A Hold of Yourself!!

I've been really struggling to get back into the swing of things eating and work-out wise since the Chicago Marathon. Basically what happened is, the marathon sucked, I was sad about it for a week and didn't exercise and ate poorly. Then I went on vacation where, right or wrong, I generally give myself carte blanche to eat the delicious food native to the region I'm visiting. But, even for me, I went overboard (see Boston 1, Boston 2 and Bar Harbor). Then I got home and started to get back on track briefly. Very briefly. Now I'm on Nightfloat, which requires me staying up 7 nights in a row and usually involves lots of fatigue, minimal exercise and maximal eating of bad food. Case in point (and I'm not proud of this), after not eating chips for probably near 6 months, I ate a whole bag of Lime Tostitos w/ salsa over a 2 day period last week. Who am I?



Then, of course there are the lattes. Pumpkin spice, chai tea, the holiday red cups are like the Sirens and I'm OUT OF CONTROL!

I still have 6 more nights of nightfloat so I need to nip this in the bud NOW!

Let's assess the damage for this week:

Calories: bad, bad, bad- plan for that below
Miles run (completed/planned): 36.35/48.1
Long run: 0/1
Speed work: 2/2
Swimming sessions: 2/3
Biking sessions: 1/1
Weight (planned/complete): 2/2

Could be worse, could be better. Plans to improve for next week include starting to document my food intake again on mycaloriecounter.com. I have done this for a few week stretches in the past and it really helped to keep me on track. When I first started recording my calories I was shocked by how many calories I was eating even more shocked when I made an honest assessment of how many calories I actually need in a day. More on that next week when I have my first week's worth of calorie assessment. I don't think it's realistic for me to make big dietary changes during my nightfloat week, but starting to record things again will be a start.

This is how we all feel pretty much the entire week of nightfloat:


My other big goal for next week will be to get my long run in, though it may be delayed until next Sunday as I try to transition back to days next weekend.

Thirdly, as mentioned in my Math in the Morning post, I need to correctly estimate how long my runs will take so I can complete them!

Things I did well this week include doing 10 extra minutes of weights and the ease with which I finished my 5 and 6 mile runs this week. I just finished "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall (more on that later) and have been happy with the easy, lightness, and fluidity with which I ran my runs this week.

Here's the w/o schedule for next week:

Sunday: rest day
Monday: LT (lactate threshold): 8 mi w/ 4 at 10K pace, weights
Tuesday: Yasso's 800s (7.1 mph)
Wednesday: 8x 200 @5K pace w/ descending rest times (first 60 s then 50, etc), weights
Thursday: 5 miles relaxed, weights
Friday: 30 min bike, weights
Saturday: weights, swim
(Sunday: 17 miles run)

Happy Sunday to all!

Jumping on the "Thankful" Bandwagon

Lots of bloggie peeps are posting things that they are grateful for since it's Thanksgiving month and all. I'm not ambitious enough to try daily "thankful" posts but I do have a couple of things that I am grateful for on just about a daily basis.

1. My apartment. I LOVE where we live. We are right in downtown Chicago, on the lake, with a view of Grant and Millennium Park. Here's a view out our living room windows:





In addition to the view and the convenience of living only 15 minutes from work (walking OR driving), we are close to so many activities: the lakefront path, tons of restaurants, the ballet, the symphony, the opera, museums and all the free events and festivals in Grant and Millennium Park. We really try to take advantage of as many events as we can. Oh, and they are often filming movies around here which is a lot of fun!






In addition to our location, I love our apartment itself. When we moved downtown a couple years ago we looked to buy a condo but we didn't find anything we LOVED. I don't ascribe to the whole "it's always better to buy" philosophy. I think if you are going to spend huge amounts of money, it better be for something you LOVE. And with our lifestyle, moving every few years, buying is likely not even a good investment. So we found a place we LOVED that was a rental and we took it! But, we wanted it to be homey so we hired some friends to paint the place (they are professionals). And homey it is. Especially, Jack our gigantic bison photograph (taken by Thomas Mangelsen, my favorite nature photographer):) Here he is before he made his new home on the wall:





2. I am thankful that I don't have a commute. For those who live in a big city, commuting can become a huge time sucker and an important factor in life. When I hear the traffic report on NPR every morning, I am SO GRATEFUL that I can leave my apartment and walk into work in 15 minutes flat. Life is too short to waste it on commuting.

Clearly, there are a million things I'm grateful for but these two will suffice for now!