Cultivating My Garden

I've not been doing much (any) cultivating, but the theme gives me an excuse to post a photo I actually took myself. (My friend Sunshine inspires me to expose some of my own pictures to the light of cyberspace--more to come, I hope.) Cultivating one's own garden, that is, tending to one's own back yard, is the final recommendation of Voltaire's Candide, a work that has long held a fascination for me because when I had to pass a French language competency test in order to get my MA, I was unbelievably lucky to be given a passage from Candide to translate. I was unclear on the precise meaning of many of the words and phrases (all those idioms!), but upon recognizing the familiar story was able to present myself as smarter than I was.

What has this to do with running? Thought you'd never ask. I confess I never was quite clear on the meaning of cultivating one's own garden. Did it mean you should lock out the world and ignore all its problems in favor of getting your fingernails dirty? Or did it mean that by tending to what you could have some sway over you'd be making your contribution to a more orderly world? These questions become relevant to me when I relate them to my personal patch of clay, i.e., my aging body. How selfish am I to spend so much time running it around, feeding it, resting it--that is, cultivating it? Does my own well-being contribute to the well-being of the world at large, or does my well-being have all the global importance of dirty fingernails? The answer, like most answers do, probably lies somewhere in the middle.

My running goes well. I've been able to swim lately, too, a real treat after a long hiatus mandated by my shoulder injury. But I've been unable to ignore the medical establishment entirely. About a month ago, well before my May 6 marathon, I began noticing an odd sensation in my chest. I determined that my heart was skipping the occasional beat, and now and then seemed to be fluttering a bit, too. I did what any reasonable runner would do--I ignored it. I noticed the sensation sometimes when I was lying in bed in the morning, and then at other odd times during the day. It never seemed to occur when I was running, which was one reason I felt okay being in denial. After the marathon I called in the medicos. After an inconclusive EKG they gave me a Holter device (recording heart monitor) to wear for 24 hours. That was last week, and I haven't heard that any dire conclusions were drawn from my (surely very boring) 24-hour-long line of heartbeats. I am scheduled for a stress test June 26, so will see where that leads, if anywhere.

In the meantime I am continuing to live my usual life, which necessarily includes running, biking, walking, and now swimming. My doc said, "If I were you I wouldn't do the heavy exercising until we investigate further." After she spoke, I became very still. She looked at me, heaved a sigh, and said, "You can do whatever you want; I'm just giving you my opinion."

Well, here's MY opinion (hope my son the doctor doesn't give me heck). After looking online for every possible cause and possible consequence of my symptoms, I think I may be suffering the combined results of fatigue from overtraining, side effects from the numerous pills I've gotten in the habit of gulping down morning and evening, and stress over an ongoingly exciting (read scary) employment situation. And it's not impossible that my caffeine intake has been a little higher than it should be (I'm a caffeine wimp--a cup o' Joe that's three-quarters decaf can wind me up like my granddaughter's wackiest top).

What I'm doing: I'm still exercising steadily, but am not going at it like a Christian gearing up to meet the lions. (I've become the kinder, gentler obsessive-compulsive.) I have weaned myself from St. John's Wort, which I've been taking steadily for the last year or so as a buffer against the above-mentioned stress. I've cut my weekly Claritin dose from seven pills to three (excuse me while I blow my nose. Twenty times in a hour. Hey, no big deal). I've traded in my mega-vitamins for a lower-dose one-a-day kind that doesn't have 50 different ingredients including every mineral ever mined. I've gotten stable, steady work lined up, at least through the end of the summer. And I've cut my caffeine intake to one cup of green tea a day.

I'll be talking to my doctor after the stress test, and am hoping she'll be able to give me some concrete information. In the meantime, I'll see you out on the Ohlone Greenway, where I'll be biking (slowly) or running (gently). If you don't see me out there, it's because I'll have decided to stay home and cultivate my own garden. I may actually do that as soon as I figure out what it means....