backtobaseball

My senior baseball league has decided to launch a 55+ division. They permit 4 players from 52-54, so I am eligible to play. I'm still unsure if I'll be able to handle the 45+ division, but I am sure I can play 55+.

Terrence just won an MMA fight while still recovering from a torn rib cartilage injury. Based on my experience, I'm extremely impressed!

I tore some rib cartilage in wrestling practice during my senior year in college. It didn't feel too bad, and I wrestled in a tournament the following day. I should have won my first match pretty easily, but my early lead slipped away. One thing I recall was that my coaches told me to stop straightening up. I had torn the cartilage more severely, and even though I wasn't conscious of it, my body was reacting. Then the worst possible thing, in terms of the long run, happened. I had a burst of energy where I escaped and took my opponent down to tie the match at the end of regulation. I made my way through the three overtime periods, still without noticing any pain, but unable to really do anything, and lost.

After I cooled down, and the adrenalin of the match wore off, I was in a lot of pain. Coughing hurt really bad. Laughing hurt just as bad. Opening doors was excruciating.

One of our assistant coaches told me he had torn cartilage wrestling during college and he could still feel it (20 or so years later). That didn't sound very good.

For several weeks, I wondered if it was impossible to heal. While I was awake, I could do my best to hold still. But every night while I slept, I would aggravate my ribs. I didn't seem to be making any progress. But gradually over the months, I did, and I was able to return to wrestling practice the next season (I spent a year after college before going to grad school).

I think it was a couple of years later that the pain was completely gone.

Some time after that, I heard that had 4-time Olympic discus champ Al Oerter had torn his rib cartilage just before his third Olympics. The doctors told him that he wouldn't do permanent damage by competing, so he proceeded to set a new world record. The pain threshold of world class athletes is totally mind-boggling!

Yesterday when I woke up, the Don McLean song 'American Pie' was in my head. Later that day I heard that it would have been Buddy Holly's 75th birthday. Holly died about the time I was conceived.

Based on this report that the Lyme disease bacteria can hide as 'round bodies', spores that can emerge after antibiotic treatment ends, my doctor and I decided to re-test me for Lyme disease, even though none of my symptoms had recurred (yet). In fact, contra-indicating the Lyme disease, I've been recovering very quickly from minor injuries, unlike two years ago when they'd linger for weeks or even months.

But I did get sick again -- respiratory, probably viral -- around July 17, just before I went in for the blood draw. That sickness lasted until perhaps a week ago (hard to tell precisely, and I'm still a bit weak). During this past week, I've started to feel just a bit of joint pain in a few places that might be indicative of Lyme

The test came back positive: PCR detected Lyme bacteria plasmid DNA in blood serum (but not in whole blood). Also, the Western blot (which looks for immune response, rather than the presence of the bacteria) showed 5 significant bands, meeting even the most demanding criteria for Lyme. (These criteria are oriented toward minimizing false positives, but as a result have a very high false negative rate. In fact, those with weakened immune systems and thus most in need of treatment are very unlikely to show much of an immune response.)

So the good news is that my body is already doing a better job to fight the bacteria than the first time around. (My doctor said that my Western blot was more typical of a new infection. We think the reason for this is that after I originally got bit, a dermatologist prescribed prednisone for the small weepy blisters that developed, which suppressed my immune system. To treat the Lyme disease, my doctor didn't just prescribe antibiotics, but also recommended supplements which strengthened my immune system and also restored my adrenal system)

This time, we're trying a treatment that's believed to kill the both the spirochetes and the round bodies: azythromycin ('Zithromax') plus metronidazole ('Flagyl'). In addition, I'm taking colloidal silver (another bactericide) and a bunch of other bactericidal herbs.

I played my first game of either softball or baseball in nearly a year last night. It went well -- I was 4 for 4, caught a couple of fly balls, and our team won 25-7 (despite being outhomered 3 to 2).

Last week I ran four 300 meter intervals in under a minute each, the fastest in about 57.5.

This morning, I ran my second 300 meter in 52.85! But I was pooped after that and ran a 63 and a 67.

I played four innings of a practice baseball game today. Struck out swinging my first time up (after two foul tips and fouling off an offspeed pitch). Popped out to right field my second time up against a pitcher with more velocity. Caught one fly ball in the outfield, and had a chance to force a guy out at second, but I was too stiff and my throw was off the mark.

This morning I was clocked at 51mph. Hard to say if that's good or bad, considering that Friday was the first day I was pretty sure I wasn't sick in 7 weeks.

We Tivo'd the premier episode of Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. Overall unpleasant, but some of the food itself was interesting.

Last night I noted that reality tv is like a fishing show where they didn't catch enough fish.

We went to see the Old '97s last night. As best as we can recall, our first indoor rock concert in over 20 years, and at that last show (B-52's Cosmic Thing tour in '89) we didn't see anyone older in the crowd. We did see Jonathan Richman in a bar 15+ years ago, and we've seen Cowboy Junkies and Squeeze outdoors in the past few years.

Surprisingly, we looked around the Vic Theatre balcony and saw many folks our age and older. Many of them departed at the end of the Old '97s first set, before the encores! We found out why when we tried to get out of the parking garage.

There were two opening acts -- Whisky Folk Ramblers and Those Darlins' -- so the Old '97s took the stage after our usual bedtime. In a 2 hour show, they played pretty much every song we wanted to hear, and nothing we didn't want. Which is pretty interesting -- not that the stuff they didn't play is that bad, but there's definitely variation in quality and the Old '97s appear to agree with us about that demarcation. We even agreed fairly well on what belonged in the encore -- a couple songs with local color, plus songs I sometimes think are the best ever such as Rollerskate Skinny.

Lead singer Rhett Miller isn't nearly as scrawny as I thought. And I don't think it was just the contrast with those pixyish Darlins'.

I had a dream earlier this week in which everyone had six eyes, arranged in 3 rows, each with a pair of eyes. For those who needed corrective lenses, the standard optometrist approach was to test just the middle pair of eyes, and then assume that the lower and upper pairs shared the same prescription. But I knew that this was an oversimpification and that many people would benefit from individual testing of each eye.

For my training session today, my personal trainer Andrew had me try the 300 workout. The goal is to do -- as fast as you can -- 50 pullups, 50 135lb deadlifts, 50 pushups, 50 24" box jumps, 50 "wipers" (alternating-side leg raises) while holding 135lbs above your head, and 50 35lb clean and presses (25 with each arm). You can rest whenever you like (and unless you've been training at it for some time, you'll need to!), but the clock keeps running.

Despite some lingering chest congestion from a cold I caught 10 days ago, I completed the workout in 23:21. My average heart rate was 170bpm, peaking around 182 during the box jumps.

Andrew said his best time is about 24 minutes, and a good time for other people he knows is 28 or 29 minutes. So it looks like I'm in pretty good shape. The great thing is that I am pretty confident that I can improve my fitness a lot more over the next few months.

One modification I think should be made is to adjust the workout for height and weight. My guess is that the workout was originally targeted at someone around 6", 200lb, probably a 30" to 32" inseam. All other things equal, the physics of vertical leap make it proportional to inseam.

Since I'm 5'5" 160lb with a 26" inseam, this would reduce the deadlift/wiper weight to 108lb, the clean and press weight to 28lb, and the box jump to 20". I definitely would have needed fewer rest breaks with these adjustments. I took 3 breaks during the deadlifts, box jumps and wipers, 1 break during the pushups and final 25 pullups, and switched arms 4 times during the clean and press.

I'm also curious what the typical rate of decline in performance is with respect to age.