New Year's Run (and Rum)

Holiday Rum Balls

These rum balls are a favorite during the holidays and new year.  I love them because they're easy to make and require no baking.  People always think they're loaded with booze, but there's only a half cup of rum for about 50 balls.  So you'd have to eat about 12 of them to get just one shot. 

1 box of vanilla wafers
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts or pecans
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup Dutch process cocoa
1/2 cup dark rum (I use Myer's)
3 Tbsp light corn syrup
powdered sugar

Crush/chop the vanilla wafers into a fine crumbs.  Combine all of the dry ingredients and add the rum and corn syrup.  Blend well.  Shape into one inch balls, and roll in powdered sugar.  Best if made the night before so flavors can develop.

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I've been trying to get back into running.  Different doctors have told me different things, and rather than sit and sulk about not being able to run, I've decided to run just twice a week at the fun runs.  So I ran five on Saturday and six on Wednesday.

Saturday's run was fine and pretty uneventful.  In the last mile, I started to feel a tingle in my ankle, but it wasn't too bad, and I finished without any pain, and without any change in my stride.  No significant butt/hamstring issue at all.  Saturday evening, though, I realized that I was limping because of the pain in my hamstring.  It wasn't debilitating or anything, just an achiness that felt like it needed to be massaged out.  But when I tried to massage it, I couldn't really pinpoint where the pain was coming from.  Frustrating.

I thought maybe some yoga would help out, so I went on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  I think all of the warrior poses did help my hamstring, but I realized that every time I do a forward fold, I felt the pain moving into my butt.  I've also discovered, although I'm not sure if this is new or not, that when I lean to the left, I feel a tightness/strain in my right hip that is not in my left hip.  So it's my hip, butt and hamstring that's all giving me problems.

I also went on a run on Wednesday.  Six miles.  Not sure if this was the smartest move.  Pretty early on, I felt my hamstring acting up.  It has never really bothered me on my runs before (just afterwards) and although it wasn't a terrible pain, the fact that it existed at all concerns me a bit.

Tuesday I got an MRI on my lower back.  This was my second MRI in a month (the first one was on my ankle), so I thought I knew what to expect.  But this time it was completely different.  Instead of going feet-first into the machine, and leaving my upper body exposed, I went in head-first.  So for about half an hour, I was stuck in a little coffin-like enclosure.  I had ear plugs on to block the jet-engine noise and sirens emitting from the machine.  The top of the opening was about 2 or 3 inches from my face.  I've never really been claustrophobic, but this was a little too much for me to handle.  I realized it was much more bearable if I closed my eyes and tried to let my mind wander.  To my surprise, the next thing I knew, I woke up to the technician pulling me out of the machine.  I ended up sleeping through the whole MRI experience.  Thank goodness--it would have torture to have to be awake the whole time.

Tuesday's MRI is making me extra sensitive about my back.  Perhaps I'm just being a hypochondriac, but I feel like I'm noticing some new aches and pains there.  I went back to yoga yesterday (Thursday).  Several times during the session, my lower back felt uncomfortable as I was transitioning from upward dog to downward dog.  So now I'm all paranoid that something is really wrong.

Today (Friday), my hamstring still feels a little achey from Wednesday's run, and I have a tightness in my ankle that started yesterday.  Mikey and some others wanted to go on a ten-miler tomorrow.  I tentatively said that I would join them, but I'm wondering if I need some more rest.  There's also a five-mile fun run on Sunday that the club is doing.  The Under Armour store on West 57th Street is sponsoring it, and apparently they've custom printed FRNY shirts for us all to wear.  I've decided to skip the NYRR Fred Lebow Classic 5-miler tomorrow, which is particularly disappointing because it was the first NYRR race I ever ran, back in 2006.

My appointment with Dr. Babiy to get the results of my MRI is not until next Thursday.  I'll try on Monday to see if I can get her to talk to me over the phone.  Chris Stoia recommended that I see his doctor, Eric Degis.  I have an appointment with him next Wednesday. 

I'm about to head out to a FRNY Happy Hour at Vlada.  Maybe then I'll decide if I'm running tomorrow.

"You should start running..."

Saw the foot and ankle specialist today, Dr. Jessica Gallina, and her words were music to my ears.  She looked at the MRI, which had shown a tear in my posterior tibial tendon, and did a clinical exam on my left ankle.  Because I was able to stand on my tiptoes and rotate my foot in and out with no pain, she concluded that I just had some tendonitis.  What showed up as a tear on the MRI was microscopic and could have been just some inflammation, or even an MRI "artifact" (which I think is like the equivalent of a fingerprint on the lens).  She did say, however, that the posterior tibial tendon is very important, as it holds the arch up in place, and that a tear or rupture would have been REALLY bad, possibly ending my running.  But since I have no problems with my arch, it's not really a concern.  I'm very glad.

Dr. Gallina also said that if I wanted, I could get some physical therapy on the ankle, or take some anti-inflammatories.  However, as far as she was concerned, I could start running, a little bit at first, and just build my way back up.  She told me to continue to be sure I wore my custom orthodics, as they will support the arch and therefore relieve stress on my posterior tibial tendon.  If, the pain persists, I'll go back to her and try out some other courses of treatment.  One idea she had was platelet rich plasma therapy (PRP)--a process where a small amount of my blood is drawn, and the growth-promoting platelets are collected and injected into the tendon in order to help with regeneration.  It sounds serious and high-tech, but she said she had the tools to do it right in her office.

In the end, I guess Dr. Gallina's diagnosis is the same as what Dr. Metzl said to me almost two months ago, that the ankle issue is not a big deal.  However, I feel much more comfortable with Dr. Gallina's diagnosis since she had the benefit of an MRI, and really took the time to examine and explain my condition.

These past few days and weeks have been really tough.  Online information about tears in the posterior tibial tendon seemed bleak.  Not being able to go to the Wednesday night fun runs left a gaping hole in my weekly routine.  And I gained about 10 pounds since the Chicago Marathon in October.  But I'm glad I've gotten such great support from my friends and I was happy to rediscover yoga.  Just to be safe, I'm going to wait another week or so, until after Christmas, to start running again. Although I still have some trouble sitting for long periods, my butt issue is getting better and hopefully by then I will be just about healed.  Until then, I'm really happy about the news today, and I'm getting excited to get back in my running shoes!

Six weeks off...

I have not run for two weeks now, and I learned this week that it's going to be quite a while longer.

Last Friday, I went back to Dr. Babiy.  The purpose of the visit was to look at the x-rays on my ankle and determine the next steps, as well as to get my electromyogram (EMG) on my butt.  The x-ray came back negative for a fracture.  However, it did show some signs of "cortical thickening," which I guess means that the outer layer of my tibia bone had grown thicker than usual.  She said this was probably the result of my running--as the muscles pull on the bone, they cause stress on it and make the cortex thicker.  She said this was probably not a huge deal, but told me to get an MRI just in case.

The EMG is a test used to record the electrical activity of muscles.  It can be used to detect muscle abnormalities, such as when there is a pinched nerve.  The purpose of the test was to see if I had problems with the sciatic nerve, since I had reported a "pins and needles" sensation to her.

The test was sort of like the rubber mallet reflex test that doctors do, only more high-tech, and much more painful.  The doctor places these electrodes up and down my leg.  She would administer a little shock here and there to basically see how much my leg reacted.  By my foot, where the sciatic nerve is at its smallest, I would feel what amounted to a little electrical pinprick.  But as she moved up my leg, the shocks felt more and more intense, and my reflexive reaction got bigger and bigger.  When she got to my butt, it felt like I got hit with a stun gun, and my leg let out a huge uncontrollable kick.  It was kind of funny and painful at the same time.  The EMG showed that there was nothing wrong with my sciatic nerve, so it turns out that my butt issue is just a muscle problem, like a pulled hamstring or something. 

Later, at physical therapy, my PT Marina (funny, both Dr. Babiy's and my PT's first names are Marina) confirmed that the problem area was not, as I had believed, my piriformis muscle.  She did this by isolating my piriformis muscle: I lay on the table on my left, bent my right leg and raised my right leg up, while her hand applied downward pressure.  This maneuver apparently isolates the piriformis muscle, which ends up flexing out of the butt.  She poked around at that muscle, and I didn't feel anything abnormal.  The area where I felt tenderness was further outside--my glute.  So I guess Dr. Metzl was right, I just have a weak butt. 

So I've been working some exercises to strengthen it, although some of them don't really seem to be butt exercises at all.  One of them is a "pushup" where I lie on the floor and push my chest up while keeping my legs and hips on the floor, kind of like an Upward Facing Dog in yoga.  My favorite part of physical therapy is when she attaches the electrodes to my butt.  The electrodes make a tingling sensation, nothing like the EMG shocks.  She sets the machine for ten minutes, and I usually end up taking a quick nap while it makes my butt feel all warm and fuzzy.  Here's the machine:

The next day, Saturday, I went to get my MRI on my ankle.  I have to say, as great a doctor as Dr. Babiy is, the places she sends me to get imaging done are the worst.  For my x-rays, I went to a place on 17th Street, where I had to sit in the waiting room for an hour and a half!  This was during my lunch break so I thought I was going to get fired.  For my MRI, Dr. Babiy sent me to Union Square Diagnostic Imaging.  I appreciated how this place had evening and weekend appointments.  They were able to fit me in the day after I called them, for a Saturday evening appointment at 7:30 (yes, I was planning to spend Saturday night getting a magnetic image of my ankle).  Around 2:00 they called me and told me they were running ahead of schedule, and asked if I could come in at 5:30.  I gladly obliged.

Well, I got to the waiting room, and ended up waiting for an hour and forty-five minutes.  I was like, ripsh-t.  I mean, like, they f-cking tell me to get to my appointment two hours early only to wait in the f-cking waiting room for two f-cking hours to watch f-cking Animal Planet on the f-cking TV?!?!  I went like apesh-t at the poor receptionist there, who was the one who told me to come early.  Not one of my proudest moments.

The MRI itself went off without much incident.  Despite the completely unnecessary noise (like an ambulance siren combined with a tractor truck's backup beeps), I managed to fall asleep during the half hour long process.

Wednesday, I had another physical therapy appointment.  And although I did not have a separate appointment that day with Dr. Babiy, she agreed to see me after my PT to discuss my MRI results with me.  It's things like this that make Dr. Babiy such a remarkable sports medicine doc.  I can't imagine another doctor taking time out of their busy day to have an unscheduled meeting with me.  So here's another plug for her.

Well, the MRI results were not good.  I have a partial tear in my tibial tendon.  On top of that, a bone bruise cannot be ruled out.  Though she's not able to say for sure at this point, Dr. Babiy said that these types of injuries usually require about six weeks off from running.  I've already taken two, so four more to go...  Dr. Babiy also referred me to a foot and ankle specialist, Dr. Jessica Gallina, who will further evaluate and treat the condition.  She mentioned the possibility of wearing a boot.

What little information is available online about posterior tibial tendon tears does not give me great confidence.  It is also somewhat confusing.  This injury does not appear to be a common one in runners.  Instead, it usually occurs in sports that require a lot of lateral movement, such as basketball or tennis.  It could also result from a sprained ankle.  I vaguely remember twisting my ankle at some point after the NYC marathon.  But there's a possibility that I'm imagining it, or it could have been my other ankle, and I certainly don't remember it being particularly major.  My appointment with Dr. Gallina is on Monday, so I guess at this point, there's no real point to stressing over it.  It's worth mentioning that while all this is certainly bumming me out, I am glad I sought out Dr. Babiy for a second opinion after Dr. Metzl told me there was nothing wrong with my ankle.  I'll let you know what happens after my Monday exam.

Last week I went to yoga five times.  Yesterday, I realized that I need to get back to doing cardio, lest I continue to balloon up.  I went swimming for the first time in months.  Hopefully, by the end of six weeks, I'll at least be able to develop my stroke.

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I made a couple of chicken dinners over the past week.  The first one was a five-spice braised chicken and daikon that I made in my pressure cooker.  I just threw the chicken and daikon in the pot, along with some scallions, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, rice wine, Manischewitz, five spice powder, star anise, and sugar.  In the picture below, the daikon looks a little like scallops.  I recently discovered that I can make brown rice in my rice cooker, so I'm making an effort to eat more brown rice instead of white rice.  And I've been on a collard greens kick of late, so that made a nice pairing.

The next night, I made pan-barbecued chicken.  For the barbecue sauce, I used ketchup, soy sauce, sesame oil, grated ginger, sugar and Worcestershire sauce.  My cast-iron skillet did a great job at giving the chicken a tasty caramelized crust.  I served it with a vinegar-based nappa cabbage coleslaw (I was excited to use, for the first time in my life, coriander seeds in this), and some not-so-homemade Bush's Baked Beans.  Oh, and some leftover brown rice and collard greens.  Dessert was a delicious Betty Crocker carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.  Mmmmm......

Foam rolling, running pants and dumplings

After Thanksgiving, I was eager to begin running again.  The Front Runners indoor track season started the week before Thanksgiving, and I was just starting to get into it.  Front Runners meets on Tuesdays and Thursday evenings at the Armory Track, a 200 meter indoor track in Washington Heights

Tuesday's workout was 6 x 800 meters, with 400 meters of jogging after each set.  Koach Kelsey divides the group into three or four smaller groups, roughly based on speed.  Although last year I generally ran in the "fast" group, I've been self-selecting the second group this year so as not to get sucked into the fast people's vortex and overstress my butt and ankle.  Plus, I think the fast group this year is quite a bit faster than the fast group last year (and I'm slower, haha). 

My first four 800s went pretty well.  I was wearing my brand-new racing flats that I had just bought earlier that day (the Brooks Racer ST 4).  It was my first time ever running in racing flats and my feet felt so light.  Peter and Stephan were in my group and we took the front of the group, taking turns at who among us would be in the lead.  First four sets: 3:14, 3:09, 3:09, 3:06.  On the third lap of the fifth set, I began to feel my left ankle acting up.  I let up a little bit on my last lap, finishing in 3:09.  As I started my recovery jog, I realized that I was limping.  After one loop, when the pain in my ankle didn't let up, I decided to call it a day.

I didn't really think much of it.  Having completed five of the six sets, I felt I had a pretty decent workout.  But as I sat and watched the rest of the group do their last set, I couldn't help but feel a bit left out.  It turned out, Peter and Stephan were probably holding back for the first five sets, and flew through their last set at around 2:50.  It looked so fun to be running that fast, and I really wished that I could have joined them.

I know it was a good idea, no matter how difficult, to sit out that last set.  The next night, I went to the Wednesday night fun run.  Two miles in, I got the pain in my ankle again.  I ended up just jogging/walking around the top of the reservoir--another disappointing four miles.  It's starting to get discouraging.

And because I was unwilling to admit defeat, I went to the Armory workout on Thursday too.  I actually did not feel any serious ankle or butt pain at all.  Then again, the workout was really short, and I was not running nearly as fast as I would have liked considering the distance--12 x 200.  My 39-41 second splits were fine, but I knew I could go quite a bit faster.  I started to wonder whether I needed to take some more time off.

I had scheduled an appointment on Friday morning to meet with a new sports medicine doctor.  I liked Dr. Metzl, but I just wanted someone else to take a look at me and tell me if anything was wrong.  I pretty much picked a new doctor at random, typing in "sports medicine new york 10011" into Google.  The first result was walking distance to my apartment, took my insurance, and could fit me in within a few days.  So I booked a date with Dr. Marina Babiy.

First off, Dr. Babiy spent at least 20-25 minutes analyzing me, compared with about five minutes for Dr. Metzl.  She she asked me 20 different questions about the pain I was experiencing, made me walk in front of her, tested my reflexes, had me press my leg against her hand in different directions in order to pinpoint the pain, and observed my back to see if the butt issue was linked to my spine (since the sciatic nerve going down the leg originates in the spine).  Dr. Metzl didn't do any of this.

At the end of the exam, she told me that although the pins and needles sensation that I felt could be indicative of sciatica, it was more likely that I had a muscle or tendon strain in my butt.  She scheduled me for an electromyogram (EMG) to rule out the sciatica.  Regarding the ankle, she said she did not see any major inflammation, so that it was probably a sprain as opposed to a stress fracture.  I didn't tell her that I had seen Dr. Metzl a few weeks earilier and he didn't see anything bone-related or serious.  Nonetheless, she ordered x-rays on my ankle.  She said that based on the EMG and x-rays, she will determine if more imaging is necessary.

In the meantime, she prescribed 800mg of ibuprofen twice a day, physical therapy, and lots of icing.  She also said no running for two weeks, at the end of which we will reassess the situation.  I am bummed, but two weeks is not that long, and it's somewhat comforting to know that additional testing will be done.

The convenient thing about Dr. Babiy's office is that not only is it close to my house, but she also has a number of physical therapists on staff.  So I was able to go to physical therapy right after my doctor's appointment (and I only paid one copayment!).  The PT that I saw, Steven, taught me some stretches for my butt and had me use a foam roller.  He was surprised to hear that I don't own a foam roller, nor have I ever really used one.  I have to say, after trying it in physical therapy, I wondered how I could possibly have gone for so long without it.  It felt so good...like it was simultaneously soothing and intensifying my pain at the same time...  I had to buy my own the very next day at Jackrabbit.

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A few weeks ago was John's MacConnell's birthday, so I had him and a small group of runners over for dumplings.  By the way, John's working of a new website, http://www.runningpantsinc.com/.  It's still a work in progress, but right now he's using it to show off his new running pants man / lightning bolt character.  Here he is:

The website also has an ever-changing running haiku of the day, and you can submit your own running haiku.  You can also request a running pants man temporary tattoo.  And my favorite part of the site is the area where readers post pictures of their body parts adorned with the running pants man tattoo.  Can you guess which body part is mine?

For John's birthday, I made chive-and-pork, and napa-cabbage-and-pork dumplings.  Both fillings also included shitake mushrooms, ginger, scallion, little dried shrimps, soy sauce, sesame oil and Franzia.  Here are the fillings:

I always have a good time stuffing dumplings with friends.  I think it's more fun to have a dinner party where everyone is helping out, rather than having one person stuck in the kitchen the whole time.  The dumplings below were made by me and John.  He made the fancy crimped ones in the midde, and mine were the pleated ones on the sides.  They tasted even better than they looked.  :-)

Run, Cook, Eat, Drink, Live.

I think recovering from my marathons is going to take a little longer than I had hoped.

Saturday morning was my second run after NYC.  My first run, on Wednesday, felt pretty good.  I had only done 3 miles, but didn't feel any discomfort (other than tired legs, which I would have expected three days after a marathon).  My plan was to rest for a few more days, and do the full 6 mile loop Saturday morning.

That didn't quite go as planned.  Pretty much as soon as I started, I felt there was an issue with my left ankle, which I didn't feel at all on my run just a few days prior.  I originally intended to just tough it out, since I was running so slowly anyway and didn't think it would be a problem.  But about a mile and a half into my run, I realized I was limping.  I turned off of E. 85th Street and decided just to run around the top of the Reservoir instead, reducing my run to 4 miles.  During those last two miles, I ended up walking twice and jogging the rest of the way.  It was a little disappointing, but I really wasn't terribly upset since it was clear that my body just needed some more time to recuperate.  At this point I'm thinking I will take this week easy--maybe just running a few miles on Wednesday and doing some cycling or yoga on the other days.

After the fun run, I went with Derek to the Cook Eat Drink Live, a food and wine festival that was being held this weekend in NYC.  The event took place at The Tunnel on 28th Street.  Going there brought back some memories of my crazy clubbing days, a dozen years or so ago, dancing at the Tunnel's Saturday night Kurfew party full twinky candy ravers.  The line getting into the food festival reinforced these memories, as it snaked from 28th Street, down 11th Avenue, and ending in the middle of the 27th Street block.

It was worth the wait, though. Upon entering the space, we were confronted with hundreds of stands offering free samples from NYC restaurants, wine producers, gourmet food purveyors.  There were also live cooking seminars and demonstrations by celebrity chefs, cookbook authors, expert mixologists and the like.  We had planned to go check out a seminar or two, but pretty much spent our entire three hours there stuffing our faces with food and drink.  I discovered that I'm not a big fan of Cabernet Franc, and that Derek can drink Riesling all day.  And Fragoli strawberry liqueur is gross.

The best part of the day, of course, was just eating all of the samples.  There were too many good ones to list, but my favorite was Spoonbread Too Restaurant, a soul food joint that I've actually been meaning to check out.  Their "sample" plate included collard greens, mac and cheese, peas and rice, fried fish, and a huge, juicy barbecued chicken wing.  Derek didn't really care for the chicken wing and he thought I liked the food only because they gave us the most.  I ate his leftover wing.

While we were waiting in line to get to the Spoonbread table, we passed the Eileen's Special Cheesecake table, so of course we couldn't resist.  They were giving out these cute little bite-sized cheesecakes, so we grabbed a little cherry one and split it.  It was so good that we had to grab a blueberry one too and split that one.  Yummmm...  They sell a mini-cheesecake, which looks like it's plenty for two or three people to split for dessert, for only $3.50 in their store in NoLita.  I think that's so much of a better deal than a dinky little cupcake somewhere else.  And cheesecakes, I think, are the quintessential New York dessert.

The one bad thing about the festival was the entree items and the desserts were all together, so it felt like we were having a million little meals back-to-back-to-back.  My favorite post-dessert appetizer, then, was a green papaya salad they were serving at the Planet Thailand table.  The salad was very assertively spiced, in a way that trendy Thai places usually do not.  I remember going to their restaurant, in Chelsea, many years ago but had forgotten about them.  After eating this salad, I'm thinking of giving them another try.  (It also helps that their website has a coupon for a free glass of wine or cocktail.)