Crossing the finish line was one of the most emotional moments of my life. To get there, I had to call upon something I didn't even know existed inside me. Around mile 22, it felt like my body was not physically able to carry me any further. The only thing that propelled me after that point was heart. After training through several continuous weeks of rain and snow, we had woken up to a bright sunny day in Vancouver. Shireesha and Peregrin flew through the half marathon. Ben got struck with a gastrointestinal flu 3 days before the race which wiped him out so he wisely switched from the full to the half marathon which he ran in less than 2 hours. For the full marathon, Matt and I managed to stay together for almost the entire first half, and though it was really nice to have a partner, he and I both knew he'd finish a half hour before me. You can read Matt's account here . What we didn't count on though was that it took each of us 30 minutes more than we'd planned. I...
Of the thousands upon thousands of pages of policy I’ve been reading for school lately about health care reform, one recurring theme is how primary care is going to save healthcare. With our almighty power of coordinating the care of patients, paying attention to their quality metrics, making them do preventive care, switching them to the cheapest generic meds on their health plans, and viewing the latest fancy high tech interventions with our skeptical scientific eyes, we, the simple heirs to the old GPs, favor the time tested and cost effective evidence based care over the shiny and glamorous expensive new stuff that pays for our colleagues' Italian sports cars but makes little difference in the quantity or quality of our patients' lives. In his account of the Affordable Care Act’s design and passage, one of the key advisors in the Obama administration, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother) writes of the role envisioned for primary care doctors in the Accountable Care Or...
So I am sitting here with a beer, 800 mg of ibuprofen, and a Vicodin -- the preferred cooldown regimen for us marathon athletes. I have successfully completed my peak training week with a 20 mile run today. It's all downhill from here as I taper my runs until the Vancouver Marathon on May 4. Honestly, I believe I should get some kind of extra credit for doing this in Seattle. 6 months ago, I came up with a training schedule (largely lifted here ) and entered it into my calendar and since then I haven't missed a single workout. I have run in rain. I have run in snow. I have run in hail. I have run in the dark. I have run hungover. I have run at 10 pm on a Friday night. I have run and run and run. I spent weeks planning for today's run, testing out clothing, trying different routes, sucking down different kinds of energy gel on different schedules (Clif Shot with 25 mg caffeine taken at 1 hour, 2 hours, 2.5 hours, and 3 hours if you must know). I ate pasta all day yesterday...
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