Leda pre-diet
The domesticated cat is an absolute miracle of evolution. Cats in the wild are fully solitary creatures (except the outlier lion). Tigers, leopards, bobcats, lynxes, cougars, jaguars, the Middle Eastern wildcat from which domestic cats are believed to be descended…..all these lead solitary existences once they leave their litter-mates.
Leda getting the belly rub
So while it makes complete sense that dogs, which naturally are highly sociable animals that frequently live in packs (wolves, African wild dogs, etc.), would adapt themselves well to living with humans, there’s nothing in a cat’s behavioral history that would suggests it could ever make a good pet.
Leda helping Aaron program
Instead cats were historically kept for their main function as mouse-catchers. In fact, in the Middle Ages in Europe cats were persecuted for their perceived association with witches. There’s a theory that the persecution of cats indirectly facilitated the spread of the Black Plague (Yersinia pestis spread via fleas carried by rats) due to the strong temporal association with cat eradications, but the spatial association within Europe appears to be weak.
Leda offering her chin for scratchies
Cats of course have long been held in high esteem in Egypt, where they earned bonus points for killing cobras as well as vermin. Egypt still has some of the largest cat populations in the world.
Leda conspiring
Cats certainly are perfectly capable of a solitary existence if a social opportunity is not available. But as our dear Leda here demonstrates, cats are flexible, adaptable creatures who can form very strong bonds with humans when they select to. The key is to socialize cats to humans while they are still in the malleable kitten stage. The more human handling they have in their first eight weeks, the more likely they are to be comfortable around humans — both familiar and unfamiliar.
A young Leda intrigued by the toilet bowl
As Joey C and Brit Z can attest, Leda is a highly affectionate creature. She greets me at the door when I come home from work, she loves laps and cuddles. There’s only one human Leda doesn’t care for: she is deathly afraid of Bob.
Leda’s BFF Cricket
Umstead….that sounds familiar
When I was a child I would tell people I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up. I would then return to smothering my face in my cat’s belly, or cantering around the house jumping over intentionally placed obstacles, making sure I corrected my leads in the corners. My interest in animals persisted through high school, and when I got to Stanford my freshman year, I had decided that I wanted to be a wildlife veterinarian, something that would combine my loves of creatures, science and medicine, and adventure in the woods. Stanford didn’t work out, and transferring to Amherst College for my sophomore year was the best decision I’ve ever made. But Amherst was a decidedly non-professional school. There were no Business, Law, or Medical schools, not even an Engineering program, which were all deemed too career-track. Amherst was about philosophy and broad liberal arts learning, focusing on how to think rather than learning a trade. English was the most popular major. I loved Amherst, I took classes in Art, Art History, Religion, Creative Writing, Biology, Jurisprudence, Russian Literature, it was all cranially expansive and exciting. I thought about going pre-Med (I was a Biology-Russian double major anyway), but the pre-Med kids didn’t seem like my ilk. The pre-Med kids were the ones who quibbled about how their exams were graded and seemed driven by resume-building. They were the triathletes of the academic world. Other than pre-Med, there wasn’t much career-building support at Amherst, and there certainly wasn’t a pre-Vet track. I had no idea there were requirements for veterinary school, and was far too wrapped up in philosophical questions to bother with such practical details.
Although I agree with Amherst’s high-minded philosophy in concept, most of Amherst’s graduating seniors are utterly unprepared for the real world and have so little clue what they’re going to do with their knowledge of Kant and Herodotus that the majority fall into Wall Street and finance by default. I thankfully avoided that fate, and am so fortunate to have slithered my way back to the natural sciences and gotten my PhD in biology. I won’t go into the whole circuitous route from Amherst to the NIH, but here’s a brief synopsis: after Amherst I worked for a Diabetes newsletter, then I backpacked around Southeast Asia with a high school friend for six months, and then I got a job at RAND Corporation doing consulting work in the field of global health. Then I made what I consider the second best decision of my life in getting my PhD at Penn State with Eddie Holmes, and then I took a post-doc at the NIH.
But as I toured NC State’s animal hospital, watching veterinarians perform an angioplasty on a dog, I had this immensely gratifying sense that I had finally ended up where I belonged. I was 36 hours into my marathon interview as a candidate for the Infectious Disease cluster hire at the NC State veterinary college, which was all going splendidly. And I had this feeling of relief that I would have been a terrible veterinarian: I would have hated dealing with sick, hurting animals, watching them suffer. I’m not nearly practical-minded and details-oriented enough to operate in a hospital, where policies have to be meticulously adhered to. But as I conversed with the veterinarians I realized that we all played our own roles: they were good with scalpels; I was good at thinking about the big questions, things like the spatial dynamics of the pathogens they were encountering (was canine influenza endemic in North Carolina, or were they simply seeing spillovers from other areas?). I wasn’t supposed to be a vet after all — all those endless requirements for admission did a good job of weeding out people like me who have difficulty with too many rules and would never be able to follow procedure in a clinical setting. Rather, I had arrived at the College of Veterinary Medicine through my own circuitous route, and had experiences and skills that would complement the activities in the clinic. I could never have planned it this way, but things seemed to have a way of sorting themselves out.
To clear my head the morning of Day 2 of interviews, I put on my running shoes and ventured beyond the Comfort Inn. I quickly encountered a whole network of trails through the woods, first through Schenck Forest and ultimately landing at a huge park called Umstead. I had to hurry back for my breakfast interview, but I trotted back with a relief that Raleigh had a nice set of forests near the veterinary college. This might work, I considered.
The West Virginia ponies are back! No, no more Chompers. Timberline Stables has new management, and a whole new crop of ponies. But they’ve caught on quickly to the carrot game. The time when Chompers nibbled on Aaron’s ski seems to have had an indelible effect on Aaron’s confidence in horses’ ability to distinguish between carrots and, say, fingers. So he leaves the carrot delivery to me.
This is our longest stay in West Virginia to date — 10 days. We took our laptops and worked from the Chophouse M-F, taking a mid-day break each day to go out for an expedition. My IT band has still been squirrelly since HS40, so I’ve been doing an ‘activity’ of running and walking. I go through cycles where I take my running more or less seriously, and summer tends to be a time when I let my hair down and back off. The woods are full of activity — woodpeckers in chase, swarms of tadpoles, bees bumping over wildflowers — not a bad time at all to slow it down and pay closer attention to what’s around you. Aaron seems to have been stung by one of those bees, and has been on a mileage tear — no doubt a good sign that he’s finally kicking the last of the Lyme. It seems to be a particularly bad tick summer, and several of my friends from State College have already been treated for Lyme. One of the really nice things about West Virginia is the lack of ticks here. It’s the only place you can run through the tall grasses without a feeling in the back of your mind that tiny fangs are sinking into your flesh.
There are some perfect trails for newbie mountain bikers out here — jeep roads, grassy double-track, and singletrack that are just tough enough to challenge you without making you want to get off your bike and walk. I’ve even been scanning Craigslist for lady’s mountain bike prospects — quite a large number of people out there with nice bikes trying to offload them.
I’ve also been experimenting with the Hoka trail shoe as additional protection for my fibroma. Overall, my verdict is that I’d rather not to have to wear them (I’ve always preferred minimalist gear — the old definition of ‘minimalist’, before it meant ‘vibrams’), but given the fibroma problem it’s definitely a safer and more cushioned way to go. Because of the IT band, I haven’t had a chance to really test them flying down hills, but so far the results are auspicious. Missteps seem to be less punishing.
I have the Lurray Triathlon Aug 16, and the Pony Run in Montana the week after that, so at some point I have to be able to start running regularly again. But neither of them are events I’m taking very seriously, and I know better than to rush an IT band. I’d rather be healthy and under-trained than in shape but hurting. I signed up for the Women’s Half Marathon lottery, but there’s a side of me that’s a bit fatigued of that event. Not that I don’t love it to pieces — I would still go and volunteer. But last year I thought I was moving to Minnesota and imagined it was going to be my last WHM hurrah, at least for a while. I’m glad I’m still in DC (I would have been miserably cold in Minneapolis), but I feel like I’ve kind of punched out at that race, and psychologically I’m ready to let the WHM go for a bit. Maybe it’s just hard for me to get psyched for a fast race when I have so many lingering issues — my fibroma, IT band, hamstring, low weight. It’s hard to get in a racing mindset. I’ll see which way my gut is going come decision time, but these days I’m far more concerned with whether the ponies get their evening carrots than whether I break another record.
‘Hello, Weight Watchers.’
‘Hi, I have a question. Can you sign up for Weight Watchers to gain weight?’
‘Um, I’m not sure.’
‘I mean, watching your weight could refer to gaining or losing pounds, right? It’s not called Weight Losers.’
‘You know, I’ve been on this job eight years, and this question has never come up.’
‘It would be the same principles: setting goals, being disciplined, paying more attention to what you eat, being more organized about food.’
‘Let me ask my manager.’
My mom had recently lost 10 pounds using Weight Watchers and never felt better. I was inspired by her determination to take control of her diet. And I was humbled by my Highland Sky experience, where my utter depletion proved that my lazy skeetering at the boundary of healthy weight can kick me in the butt if something suddenly goes awry. Maybe if I’d had a little more cushion (literally) to begin with I would have been better able to handle the sudden depletion from the sickness.
‘No, Weight Watchers is only for losing weight. I’m sorry.’
Foiled.
I slumped.
No one wanted to the poor marmot!
I’ve been making noises for a year now about Getting my Act Together and getting back to the magical 120. Below 120 I become injury prone, emotionally volatile (I sobbed at the end of Rio — the parrot was flying!), and I sleep poorly because I have to get up and get snacks in the night. But for all my noises for all these months, I’ve only slipped further down the scale. I haven’t been committed. In fairness, my mission has been thwarted by a stretch of tooth sensitivity, which limited my intake of sweets (even OJ) and cut off a large source of calories.
But this Summer:
Change is Gonna Come. No more slacking, just more snacking. Operation More Marmot has begun!
Stay tuned for the prizes and incentives for meeting monthly goals (I haven’t come up with them yet, but I will). I don’t need no stinkin’ Weight Watchers. I don’t need no stinkin’ internet (because 99% of things you find on the internet related to human weight are terrifying). My cat Leda has hit her goal weight of 10 pounds. With the full inspiration of the Kitty, but by the end of the Summer of 2014…..
-I will not cry during cartoon parrot movies
-I will not fit into the suit I bought last August that was an absurdly low size and I was convinced was a waste of money because I thought I was just in a weird temporary low point but I desperately needed a suit that looked fit my current shape for my Glasgow and Minnesota interviews, so I bought it anyway.
-I will not have to eat a prophylactic snack before bedtime.
Highland Sky 40 mile race
Canaan Valley, WV
June 14, 2014
‘Aaron, my stomach hurts.’
It was 2am, a week and 4 hours before Highland Sky, and Aaron was still half-asleep. ‘Maybe it will pass,’ he offered.
I’ll spare further details, but the next 48 hours my bathroom was a pyrotechnics of gastric fluids. The different colored Gatorade and Pedialite tinged my gastric fluids with a remarkable array of fluorescent pigments. I’ve had Southeast Asian stomach ails, I’ve had African stomach ails, and nothing has approached the intensity of that Macomb St stomach bug. I’m not sure what bug was in my belly (I suspect it was from a burger I ate at a restaurant Thursday night that was undercooked), but my body was so determined to expel it using all orifices, including through my nose, and with such force, that my back ached for days. The first time I tried to drink something, I took a couple sips of ginger ale, was so proud of myself, and then blurted out Aaron, I think I need a bucket……before heaving all over the hardwood floor on my way to the bathroom.
‘Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes!’ It was Monday morning and hadn’t eaten for days.
‘I’m not making any pancakes,’ Aaron explained, ‘until you prove first that you can eat some jello.’
Fair enough. If I lay perfectly horizontally I could eat, because as soon as I tried to lift my head I got queasy. So Aaron had to spoon feed me like a baby bird. I got down a couple spoonfuls of red jello with effort.
‘So, like, exactly how much jello do I have to eat before I get my pancakes?’
Aaron laughed, and whipped up some big pancakes, which I devoured (well, 1.5 pancakes, but that was more than I’d eaten in days). The pancakes were a turning point in my recovery, and soon I was getting down crackers and bits of cheese and later some applesauce. When I was finally rehydrated and peeing normally, I weighed myself: 111 pounds. I’ve been struggling keeping my weight up all spring. I like to be at least 120, but I’ve had all kinds of abdominal issues all spring that have kept me in and out of doctors’ offices, and I’d slumped down to 116-ish. I looked too skinny in my Delaware Marathon photos a couple weeks ago. Ironically, the fatty hamburger and fries I had eaten at Burger 21 was as part of Operation Fatty Marmot was the likely culprit of whatever bug had emptied my insides.
Our fridge was spilling over with food, because one moment I would be able to eat a certain food, and then for the next days I wouldn’t touch it. After my great initial pancake breakthrough, I think it’ll be another couple of weeks before I can eat a pancake again. Fortunately, there is an amazing pizza place just down the street from us (Vace) and I was living off of their slices. By Tuesday my cat could sleep on my belly without me writhing in pain, by Wednesday I was walking, and by Thursday I was back at work. My poops remained extremely pale, which Google told me was the result of having barfed out so much of my bile. I remained extremely tired, and opted out of the Thursday morning swim. But when Thursday evening rolled around, I tossed my running stuff into the Jeep. My creed has always been that if I can walk, I can run.
~ ~ ~
Well, dagger legs are better than barfing, I suppose. I was fifteen miles into Highland Sky. I had decided to run non-competitively, slowly, and see how far I could get, on the basis that my appetite had been restored, at least in part (I couldn’t yet do Sheetz, but I could do pizza). But I had underestimated how tight my legs had gotten during those days of lying on the couch, and how weak they had become during their inactivity and malnourishment.
Even still, I had enjoyed myself for the first half of the race, running with some kind folks who chatted with me. Highland Sky is one of my favorite races, on my home turf in Canaan, and it was nice to just be out there. Rick Gray gamely tolerated my company during my favorite stretch of the race between AS #2 at the end of big first climb and AS #4 at the start of the dreaded road section. Running with Rick made that section particularly delightful, as Rick was exactly the kind of guy I like to run with — someone who exudes a comfortable knowledge of what he’s doing out there. But the ensuing Road Across the Sky was not kind on my IT bands, and by the time I got to the Sodds I was very uncomfortable running down hill.
Hey, you should stop running. You’re too skinny! There was a group of about twenty riders on horses in the Sodds, and one of the guys thought he was very funny. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m skin and bones!‘ I wanted to retort. ‘Because I puked out five pounds along with my Shigella or maybe E. coli or maybe Salmonella. I *know* I shouldn’t be out here on these wobbly little stick legs. So maybe YOU should get your fat ass down here and run, and I can ride that pretty horse of yours back to Canaan.‘ But I was way too tired for any sass. I just stared ahead and willed my wobbly legs up the hill to AS#7.
At AS#7, I made myself at home on a rock and sat eating watermelon and swigging ginger ales, taking in the beautiful view up there. I was hurting and hadn’t much desire to gut out the rest of the course. But I had dropped at this very aid station back in 2011, and I knew I couldn’t drop there again. Furthermore, I was still holding 5th place for Last Shwag. And, god, all I could think about was how Aaron had sufferfested through the race last year with his Lyme disease, and how lame it would be to drop. So I ushered myself off the rock and limped along.
The rest of my race was my own version of Sufferfest. Getting down the ‘butt slide’ was so painful on my IT I almost hyperventilated. Several other runners showed deep concern, but I assured everyone I was going to make it to the finish. On the last stretch of road my IT screamed even to walk, and it occurred to me that I might not get to choose whether I finished or not. My thoughts flickered back to Brian Greeley and how two years ago he’d made me look back like 50 times on that road to make sure no 6th man was coming so he could hold onto his 5th place Last Shwag. I hurt so bad, I didn’t even care if I got passed at this point. I just did my sad walk. But shortly after passing the ‘1-mile left to go’ sign I noticed another woman approaching behind me.
No, no f-in way. I am not getting passed in the last mile. I hadn’t been running the race competitively at all up to that point, stepping aside the whole race to let people pass more easily — men and women alike. But I had hurt so bad for so long, I had been through so much — from the days of puking to this screaming IT band — my competitive flair kicked in. With a new surge of adrenaline, I ran the last mile in. Fortunately there were no downhills. Well, until the very last 50 meters to the finish, a steep downhill that I managed by turning sideways and pony-galloping down the hill.
Aaron was waiting at the finish line, having had a bit of a Sufferfest himself with nasty heel pain. I was awarded with a fatty Patagonia jacket (Last Shwag), which I absolutely cherish (so warm!). It turned out Boots was the woman in 6th, and she came in a minute later for a stellar performance of her own. Priya came in, and Tom and Kirstin also found their way to the finish line (albeit via a self-designed course).
one of these finishers looks happier than the other…..
My friend Kathy was reported ‘missing’ at one point, but emerged as the last runner to make it under the cut-off (a point of great pride). I think the tougher the race, the more camaraderie everyone feels at the end, and between the bright sun and the fact that none of us had to run anymore, there were high spirits all around. In the delirium of his post-run high, Luke invited me and Aaron down to Richmond to ride his ponies. Luke, we will be taking you up on this offer.
it’s a waxwing party in the bogs
Aaron and I enjoy hosting all the Wussies at the Chophouse. We particularly liked the post-race bird watching activity with Tom and Kirstin on Sunday morning. We didn’t see any woodpeckers, but there were bobolinks and cedar waxwings and beautiful yellow warblers. All the hues are brighter in Canaan than in DC. I think we should start a Wussies for Warblers sub-club.
