WWJD

No, no, don't worry. This isn't an evangelising post. Well it is, but the J is not Jesus, but Jason, as in Jason Murphy, our favorite race official.

As you may be aware, la belle just came back from the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinnati. It was a warm(ish) but wet day, maybe between 17 and 21 Celsius. Great running weather we suppose and she put it to good use, running a 3:23:53 (or thereabouts). First time sub 3:24 and a personal best. Yey.

Pretty good splits, very consistent and near-as-dammit even splitted the whole thing. Fourth AG too. All-in-all a good day out. Training was not perfect and this result clearly shows that long runs are over-rated; the fewer she does, the better she does. Any fewer and she'll be taking to the start-line smoking a Gauloise and eating poutine and still get a PB!

As you may also be aware, it was a trip fraught with difficulties; a cancelled flight on the way out, a missing suitcase that turned up just in time for the trip home, hotel problems and most of the museums and art galleries in Cincinnati were closed on Monday, the only day she had left to take in the sights of Jerry Springer's former stomping-grounds.

There was one last thing. The Flying Pig has a no-double-dipping policy for it's awards. Nice. So as at least one of the big-time place-getters was 35, la belle reckoned that, according to the preliminary results, she should have been in line for a nice little gong, no?

However, the preliminary results were just that, preliminary, and before she'd eaten her way through the recovery tent, she'd been dropped by one place. Which on the face of it was odd as whilst PBs and BQs are always by chip-time, gongs are by gun-time.

A little digging (what's a gal to do when Cincinnati is all but closed?) showed something odd. The lady who was 3rd AG did not ping all the mats!

Huh?

That's right. Runner #5307 (I have no problem naming and shaming at this point) had 6.8 mile split, missed the half and 20 mile mats and pinged the 25.2 mile and finish mats. As she had some split times and a chip-time, she also must have pinged the start-mat.

#5307's first 6.8 miles were at nearly 10 minute per mile (or there-abouts), so after an hour, she was something like 14 minutes in arrears to la belle, who as previously noted was stoically knocking out 7:45s (per mile). Her final mile was 7:20 or so. Her final time was a scorching 3:21. So, she covered the remaining 18.2 in 2 hrs 06 minutes. This isn't a bad pace, 7:00 per mile or so, coincidently the same pace Denise Robson and I were knocking out on our Tour de Dartmouth at the same time.

I can't work out where she must have passed la belle, as running at least 40 seconds per mile quicker and being fourteen minutes down after 7 miles, it should have taken her over 21 miles to catch her (14 mins = 840 seconds/40 seconds = 21) ! This assumes they started together, which they likely didn't. If you say the speed differential was 45 seconds, #5307 could have caught her in 18 miles (18 + 7 = 25 miles), but you tend to remember being passed in the finishing straight and sprinting it out for the place, and she doesn't. These pace times are necessarily extrapolated as she didn't have those splits.

When contacted by the timers, who'd noticed this anomaly, she said she ran the whole course but her chip fell off and she was carrying it on her watch-strap, hence it didn't register on the mats. The timers were temporarily placated, but then they then found a finish-line picture from their own cameras that showed #5307's chip clearly on her shoe.

The map is above (larger version here). There is no evidence from the mats, that #5307 was ever any further east than than the apex of that big bend in the Ohio River.

For a while, the timers didn't think they had grounds for DSQ, but we argued (in a couple of emails) that if she couldn't be placed on the course, then there were no grounds to assume she had run the distance.

The last we heard, however, #5307 has been DSQ from the results.

This is as it should be.

Those mats, you see, aren't split-time mats per se. Sure, that's how we think of them and your average runner thinks they are there so their times can be texted to friends, family and colleagues and simulcast to people following them on Athlete Tracker (who hasn't spent the last Sunday in August, or the Patriots Day morning glued to their computer?). As nice as that is, that's not why they are there. They've been there since before when SMS was only a brand of cycling clothing!

They are lap audit mats and there because Rosie Ruiz cut the course (and spectacularly so) at Boston in 1980! She denies it, but the fact remans the only person who vouched for her being on the course was a dude running in a Superman suit. In 1980 BAA didn't have hard-and-fast eveidence that Rosie was, or was not, in Framingham or Wellesley or on the Newton Hills or on the subway. So lap-audt mats were introduced. They confirm you did, in-fact, run the entire course.If you didn't ping all the mats, it's pretty good evidence you didn't do the course, and if you didn't do the course then you should not appear in the results. And if you ignore the evidence of the lap-audit mats, as the Cinci timers were thinking of doing, then why go to the expense of having them? Speaking of Boston, this was a BQ time, and not any old time, this was a first-day sign-up time.

You can miss a mat, but when this happens we ask, did your splits make sense? If you missed a lap and clocked a 2:55 per k average, it's clear something is wrong. In this case the times were believable, but fast. Running a 7 minute mile, #5307 should have been fighting for the win and would have been third. So, was it believable? Perhaps, but one's incredulity was being strained by this point; missing mats, chip not where she said it was, blazing fast times. Occam's razor and all that.

So justice, in this case has been served. It's not about the gong, which la belle may, or may not receive, it's about the principle.

Now all we need to do is write to the Columbus half. She won there last year but, curiously, she has no 10K split-time.......

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Il buono, il brutto, el cattivo

Oh well, been out of it for a while, in more ways than one. Instead of one monster blog-post that rambles on for days, I'll try and get back up to speed in bits and pieces.

Before we begin, some mellow tunes to listen to and hopefully become today's earworm. Firstly, I Am The Photographer by Memphis. Their sound has been described as having a "lush, easygoing and melodic sensibility" and whose music "jangles and shimmers" with the Smiths as a reference point.

That's better, isn't it?

To continue mellowing out, try a little of Alexander's Truth.

I'm not sure where this one is coming from. More than a bit of an Enrico Morricone vibe, that's for sure.

Il buono, il brutto, el cattivo pretty much sums up where I've been coming from recently.

Some twat hit my nice, brand new Smart car three weeks (or maybe two) after getting it. I know, I know; I'm starting to sound awfully possessive over an inert (in a conscious rather than a kinetic sense) assemblage of metals and plastics, but for the one time in my life I get something "nice" and this is what happens. This is why you don't get the good stuff; you'll only get crapped on from a great height by Lady Luck masquerading as a diarrhetic Larus argentatus.

Anyway, I was behind him, we were both turning right out of the IWK car-park onto Robie Street when he reversed into me. Nope, doesn't make any sense does it? I remember sitting there watching his reverse lights come on and thinking he must be going through the gears trying to find Park because there's no sane reason to reverse, before he came back at me! Anyway, he 'fessed up good and proper. The damage isn't bad, just a Deerkiller-esque dent on the bumper and I'm in the process of getting the repairs done on his insurance.

As rakish-looking (and performance un-limiting) as the dent may be, I don't want it on the car!

A week later, I took Joshua to Science Fair regionals at SMU, on the back of his performance at the school science fair. It was a bit daunting when we arived to set up. Here's Joshua with his store-kit solar rover and a clock from my bathroom that runs on water and lemon-juice and next to him, again in the sustainable-fuels section is a kid who's Dad had built him a water-wheel and a windmill.

Oh dear, so this was the competition. Note to self; next time a little more on the creativity, a little less time in the science-section of Scholastics! We set up, ran his presentation through the safety and ethical checks; no radiation, no poisons, no gigawatts of power and no animals were harmed in the making of this poster (something I have never, ever, been able to say before), and firmly decided this would be a learning experience instead.

Instead, he won the Junior Sustainability prize! This was a shock to all concerned, not least Joshua who didn't even go up to accept his prize at first. He was so convinced that he wasn't third or second, and neither was the kid next to him with the home-made water-wheel, then were was no way he'd be first. The way he tells it is he tuned out after they awarded the silver and didn't even go up at first to get his prize when he was named. They had to call him three times!

Funny aside, there was a real NRC-IMB vibe to the fair. Out of fifty or sixty entrants there were four or five ex- or current IMBers.

Anyway, Joshua walking off with cold, hard cash was one in the eye to a somewhat cruel comment that he only won at school because the competition was weak and/or they were marking low! Instead, all the judges praised him for his enthusiasm and overall presentation skills. All goes to show, sometimes the high-falutin' science means naught if you can't present it well.

So bravo Joshua, but no you're not spending the $150 first-prize money on Lego (it's going in your RESP). We're (well, I am) = already planning next year's project. This time, with actual data! And no Joshua, not the funny-looking chap from TNG, I mean numbers!

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Ninja!!

So, I had to replace the Deerkiller with something. Perhaps we can define the term "had to". As much as I am not a car person, with work and home and triathlon, a car is definitely useful. So "had to" it is.

But what? I decided on a Smart ForTwo. I knew the car fairly well as La Belle has one. Good on fuel, nice-looking, mostly recyclable, low emissions. Works for me.

It's a gas model, because they don't import the diesel into the US market any more. The US has very stringent emissions regulations which essentially bars the Smart ForTwo diesel from the North America market. The whole thing smacks more of politics rather than concern for the environment, as the emissions standards for gasoline engines are far more lenient and don't even come close to the diesel ones. But hey, you can't argue against the EPA so lets just go with what's on offer.

Black throughout. What else? White was available, but can you see me in a white car? The name came naturally; The Ninja; black, sleek, stealthy and fast! Yup, fast. Way better acceleration than the diesel, and with the semi-automatic gear-box (you change gear, the car does the clutch by itself, so no nasty clutch-control to trip stall you out) it's really easy to speed in this puppy; gotta be careful with this one!

When I picked it up, it only had 20 kms on the clock, it didn't occur to me to take a pic until I'd done a couple of miles

Still, my long run on Sunday was 30 kms!

I could have got a "previously enjoyed" diesel, but getting the absolute best fuel economy wasn't a priority for me. This change in car was more about reducing my own personal carbon foot-print and reducing my fuel costs. The numbers the car was sold to me on are not real-world according to the Smart forums (fora? What is the correct plural?) but the car will likely burn ca. 1L fuel more per 100 kms than the equivalent diesel model, but even this 20% relative increase in fuel consumption still means The Ninja will burn 40% less fuel than the Deerkiller! Reducing emissions and costs. And, to be honest, the hypermilers are kinda kooks anyway. They mean well, but they always come across as being a bit, well, off.

Parking is a hoot. It's 7" longer than La Belle's diesel, most of which is extra trunk space (and when the trunk is that small, any increase is significant) but it's still about as long as a Hummer is wide. Unfortunately, the word is parking nose-in to the kerb is illegal, which is a shame. Still, at the condo we squeezed two Smart Cars into one parking space.

Together, we're not much longer than the Mercedes C class in the adjacent bay! Speaking of Mercs, The Ninja looks boxy but it's drag coefficient is the same as an S-class.

Or indeed, squeeze two cars into the place of one outside one's favourite coffee shop

You can see the differences in styling between the '06 and '10 ForTwos. I've seen it written that the first generation '06s were styled more like concept cars; quite futuristic. The '10s are a little more down-to-earth and with two cup-holders dare-one-say, a bit more North American? You can see this mostly in the interior, but you can see here how the '06s rocket-ship silhouette has become a bit bulkier!

Funny how life comes around. Back in the UK I nearly bought a yellow Fiat Cinqeucento, very similar in lots of way; small, 700cc engine. It was nominally a 4 seater but very nominally, and optimistically.

Finally got a Fiat Uno, same kind of deal, but a larger engine (999cc) and a legitimate 4 seater. Not this one, but very similar.

Anyway, here I am, 20 years down the line, with a very similar vehicle to the one I was looking at 20 years ago. Given the way The Ninja drives (very well thank-you), and the Uno drove, it makes me wonder how the substantially larger bodied Cinquecento would have managed the highway with the same sized engine as The Ninja!

Of course, the problem is the boys. Well, they're never a problem, but a two-seater does pose a challenge. The answer is either we go in two Smart cars, or join Halifax Car Share (or rent) for the rare times I'll need to car both of them independently. Using two Smarts uses about the same amount of fuel as the Deerkiller alone. Not to mention travelling in style! Or, of course, get the bus, ride or walk!

Vroom, vroom

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Farewell, adieu, hello.

It was about time to say goodbye to the Deerkiller. Here we are with 6 months left to go on it's MVI and you could pretty much see daylight through the rocker panels. Which was funny, seeing as I'd just (well 18 months ago) paid $600 to get them fixed seeing as it'd failed the MVI on the basis of them alone. Not to mention a marginal emissions test. Oh, and the brakes. In short, a car that usually cost about a $1000 in repairs a year to keep it on the road. The only reason the last bill at Midas didn't quite reach these giddy heights was seeing as how I "forgot" to go back and listen to what they'd really found. To me the real story was how a $45 summer special oil-change turned into $400 dollars worth of ball-joints.

If she was a human being, the surgeon would have come to the doors in blood-stained scrubs, wearily taken off their surgical mask and said "we tried everything, but the rust had spread too far, I'm afraid.... she's gone" Da da daaah! She'd cost me nearly her blue-book value in repairs to this point and it was clearly only going to get worse. It was, in other words, clearly time to let her go to that farm in the country where she could frolic, care-free in green fields with other clapped-out Hyundais.

As much as I ranted and wailed about her, let us not forget not only was this a car I didn't want in the first place but had been foist upon me not once but twice, she performed sterling work. That trip to Montreal was clearly a huge risk, but she passed with flying colours, getting us there and back without once calling CAA. She never once, except that one time two years ago, refused to start in the cold and ice and snow. To my British friends, I do mean COLD. Not quite plug-your-car-in-cold (as my friends in QC and all points west will attest to), but cold enough should these temperatures occur in Britain, questions are usually asked in parliament.

Then there was that time I had to move and she quite literally held all my possessions (or at least those I wanted to keep).

Yup, if you ever wanted to eyeball the exact internal volume of a 2000 Hyundai Elentra, there it is. Once I'd strapped three bikes to the bike-rack, I was good to go, and was gone. Get a new plan Stan....

Let us not forget, the three bikes; The Carrot, Old Bess and the Kona Fixie, combined, were worth more than the car.

She's been to all the races, here was the sight in my erstwhile rear-view mirror as we left Guysborough last year. FYI, Guysbrough is now in July this year, just so you know.

and she was also the backdrop to one of the best "atmosphere" pictures I ever took at a race.

Admit it, it kinda sums up your life doesn't it?

My pet cow also liked her, but Moo is a sucker for a road-trip!

Speaking of races, there was that deer on the way to TD Riverport in 2008, getting up-close and personal with the genus Odocoileus and putting the arse in virginanus! The deer, of course, was shrugged off with nary a worry, leaving her with a rather raffish dent....

which allowed for easy identification in a line-up!

Spot the difference?

That head-light cluster was always on shaky ground after that, and gradually worked itself loose. However, it only fell out three years later, about a month ago actually, after I got a bit too aggressive clearing a foot or so of snow off the bonnet. I kinda got fed up with the brush and used my snow-shovel, which although plastic was enough to take the cluster straight out!

The fix? Duct-tape of course.

Not any old duct-tape either; the original repair was with a length of duct-tape I found wrapped around an old puncture-repair kit in the glove-box! Ha! The resourceful cyclist strikes again.

I got $300 for her, a mere 5% of what was paid for her three-and-a-half years ago. This was as a trade-in on a significantly different car. Sure I could have got more, say $500, by selling it through Kijiji or similar but this way I was spared hordes of large gentlemen in oily t-shirts and boiler-suits traipsing around and telling me in excruciating detail exactly how crap it was and why they should only give me $300 for it, and why I should feel lucky to get that. Oh, and have them know where I live when something vital dropped off.

A trade-in wasn't exactly a Viking funeral. Come to think of it, it wasn't really the viking funeral of legend either. I've been to one of those, or at least the archaeological remains thereof

I wasn't born that far away you see.

Anyway, I felt the Deerkiller deserved the apocraphyal viking funeral of lore; cast out to sea on a flaming raft whilst hoards of large men in furs and horned helmets sang mournful dirges in minor keys before toasting her soul with strong ale quaffed from the skulls of their vanquished enemies before retiring for the BBQ of all BBQs, but it was easier to arrange the trade-in and as for the whole thing of setting a flaming car adrift - more easily condoned by DFO and Environment Canada, both of whom I believe take a dim view of sending automobile flambés adrift asea without a permit.

Not much of an eulogy, or indeed a send-off, but she deserved something.

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The one in which I strike a blow for dope-free age-group sport in Nova Scotia

So, I got some of those blood-results back and whilst I'd like to keep the clinical chemistry and endocrinology data to myself for now (the amount of bacon I eat and my method of birth control are my business alone), I don't mind putting up my blood values.

Yup, following such luminaries as Brad Wiggins and Ivan Basso, I'm putting my haematology on-line for all to see. This way you can all be satisfied that my coveted 2nd place overall in the 2010 Run Nova Scotia 40-44 age-group was on the basis of hard work, natural ability and talent. Or large amounts of bacon, beer and luck. Let us not also forget, of course, the ability to suffer, or as Phil n' Paul would have us say, dipping into the suitcase of courage. Of course, I have less of a suitcase of courage as a purse of wussiness. It's a particularly small purse of course, more a clutch really, and very tastefully decorated with sequins. Your choice. I know Anne Gripper just said that putting your blood-work on-line wasn't worth the hassles of armchair haematologists pouring over it and coming up with elaborate conspiracy theories, but I'm an armchair haematologist who loves conspiracy theories, so here goes!

The print-out looks like this;

Yes, it's pretty small and blurry, so the pertinent numbers are

WBC (x10^9/L). 5.1
RBC (x10^12/L) 5.01
Hgb 158 g/L
Hct 46.9%

My haematocrit (Hct) is tad high, 47%, a mere three points off a two-week holiday courtesy of the UCI for the benefit of my health. Still, it's better than that time I did a DIY Hct in the fish physiology lab at the AC and came up with 51%. Twice! From two different fingers!

Lest you think I'm microdosing CERA to stay under the testers' radar, the haemoglobin concentration (Hgb) is right in the middle of the accepted range. White blood cells (WBC) at 5.1x10^9 cells per millilitre are 0.1% of the red blood cells (RBC) at 5.01 x10^12 cells/mL. They didn't do reticulocytes, since they were doing health check on a sad, fat 41 year-old referred because of his age and not a ProTour (sorry, World Tour) cyclist referred for the suspicion of nefarious, performance-enhancing short-cuts, so we can't do an off-score. Nevertheless, the Hgb and the RBC:WBC are pretty good indicators I'm not doing EPO (no extra haemoglobin) or transfusing red cells (no extra red cells) but I can't conclusively rule out an autologous transfusion of whole blood without the off-score. However, I invite you to come around and check my 'fridge. Plus, my hatred of 18G needles is greater than my hatred of running a 10k at full tilt.

We still have to explain the somewhat elevated Hct. The conspiracy theory is I'm using my erstwhile contacts in the research world to keep me supplied with rEPO and have done so since before the DIY Hct test in 2008. There have been no anomalous changes in Hct over the years, so the BioPassport folks are just peachy. Either that or I just have a high-ish Hct; perhaps I'll need TUE from the RNS competition committee before I can do Cabot Trail again! Or maybe we can invoke Occam's Razor and say it's maybe just due to dehydration. It didn't work as an excuse for Pantani or Landis, but it's worth a shot. Speaking of shots; JD? Just kidding. Or perhaps the twin I swallowed in utero is making a come-back. Just remember, as silly as it sounds, those last two have been legitimately offered as a defence for an adverse analytical finding! Or maybe we just need to invoke the silly; living at altitude! The condo is, after all, on the 12th floor; live high, train low and all that.

Anyway, there's my haematology in it's raw, naked and bloody glory and I hope I've demonstrated that however slowly I may run, I'm not using PEDs to do it.

Rami? Over to you?

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Maître Jacques

You'll remember a few months ago I revisited the old myth that you "shouldn't buy a cycling magazine with Lance Armstrong on the cover" and how this was linked, in a small way, to me stopping buying CycleSport magazine. It was a multifactorial discussion and the Lance-factor was minimal compared to the magazine's cost, the internet ( and cyclingnews.com in particular - free, so very free) and the fact you couldn't beleive anything you were reading any more.

It's depressing to watch those old cycling videos from the late 90s, the height of the EPO era, and hear Phil and Paul's commentary and realise how in ten years they haven't changed! They still steadfastly ignore doping and still prefer to believe that great changes in "form" are always, but always, down to hard work and natural talent. I mean, listen to them commentate on the 1999 LBL and talk about Festina barely mentioning the mere trifle of a fact that ten months previously they'd been kicked out the TdF before it started because Willy Voet was caught with a car-full of drugs. They tried though and their commentary might lead the uninformed to believe that Willy was a rogue pedlar of PEDS operating outside of the system. And these people are the English languages voices of the sport?

It feels like the chain has turned full circle. Yet now it's hard to even open a website (sorry, Cyclingnews) for the same reasons I couldn't part with my hard-earned $12 CAD a decade ago. The European racing season has started, and we're on a countdown to the Spring Classics. No offence to the Grand Tours, but the Classics arguably offer the best month of racing. No sitting in during these races, they're all raced to be won and let the devil take the hindmost.

Yet everyone is leading with Contadoper's acquittal and then return to racing; on subsequent days no less. This story managed to relegate Retirement 2.0 down a couple of lines, but it's still all there. I steeled myself an opened a "reactions to Armstrong's retirement" story. Cedric Vasseur was quoted as saying the haters are motivated by jealousy and that "it's easier to support the second-placed rider - just think of Poulidor".

What, Armstrong is our generation's Anquetil? Puh-leeze! Any more of this drivel and I'll just have to get my cycling news from Cozy Beehive!

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Run that body down

Decrepitude, senescence, degeneration. Call it what you will, it all seems to be happening to me right now; the events of the past few weeks have left me feeling that I'm living Paul Simon's Run That Body Down!

On a macro scale, this weekend was three years since that slightly alarming vertigo/collapse/vomiting episode at the running club that Sunday morning. Or to use the succinct analysis of a running buddy, on that day "you scared the living crap out of us" . It took me a while to come back from this; not so much physically as mentally. The labyrinthitis (for that is what it was) cleared in about a week, but then there was the matter of the pericardial effusion and falling through the health-care system cracks and I was essentially scared off running for all of 2008.

When I finally came back, a couple of things happened. In the very first race I did, the first 'cross race of 2008, I decked out hard on a gravelly corner and got those stitches. Yey!

Also, I found that the ca. 9 months I taken off had taken a toll on my recovery time; it just took a little longer to recover from a hard work-out or a race. When I was 20, sleep was an Etchasketch. Tough race on Sunday? Go to bed tired, and one quick shucka shucka shucka and on Monday morning everything was back to normal. Race? What race? I know the physiological basis for this but it always seems to be that a prolonged time off exercise (in the order of months off, rather than a day off) accelerates the deceleration of recovery times!

Finally, it seemed in 2008 my running buddies all took huge leaps forward in their training and started to hit some truly amazing times. I was always barely hanging off the back of this group during my "good days" and when I came back, the elastic was so much longer and was snapping far more often. The French expression for dangling off the back is jouer le accordeon. In English we call it yo-yoing because it's easier to say yo-yo when you're dangling off the back then finding the extra puff to squeeze out the addition syllables in accordion!

As a consequence, poorer recovery and getting shelled out the back a whole bunch more, I'm running a tad slower that I used to. This is most evident in the marathon where, although I'm still running open-men BQs (usually), I haven't broken 3hrs since I came back; 3:05 is the best I've managed I think, a good seven minutes off what I was running and a shocking 13 minutes off my PB. I think the half suits me more now, but even there I'm a minute or so off.

So this was where I was living until this past fortnight, with the 25km+ Sunday runs beating me up more than they ever used to. Then I took a blow to the head last weekend (eight days ago) in a silly prat-fall at home and I took myself off to ER to get checked. It looks like early February is my ER time! They saw what was originally called an anomaly on my lateral c-spine; a small broken-off bone-spur around C5. The radiologist however said this wasn't anything to due to the fall; it was just a "degenerative change", a normal part of the aging process and within the normal range of someone my age.

My age! MY AGE? I don't feel my calendar age, I don't look my calendar age and I sure as hell don't act it! X-rays are, apparently, no respecter of age and told the (ahem) naked, unvarnished truth. Bastard electromagnetic radiation. I hope the inverse square law makes you feel inadequate. I was free to leave ER, with a clean bill of physical health but with my ego, unlike my vertebral discs, ever so slightly crushed.

Good things come in threes, naturally. So in hindsight, that appointment with my GP for a flu-shot wasn't a good idea. He looked at me, looked at my file, did the needle-in-deltoid thing, looked back at my file again, did the math and said "so, 41 eh?". Before I knew it, I was leaving the office armed with a requisition-form for blood-work, essentially cholesterol, HDL/LDL and PSA, all based on no pathological indicator other than my age. See comment above about the radiologist.

Sigh. So it begins, the indignity of male middle age. Routine blood-work is so, well, routine, but how long before statins, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers become part of my repertoire?

Here's the thing. As with the degenerative bone-spur on C5, the harder you look, the more things you'll find. I believe studies have been done on this. Good job they didn't image my knees last Sunday, or they would have booked me into ortho stat! For example, I altruistically had a routine cardiac echo for a study on bike-riding and cardiac function, they found a PFO. Nothing life-threatening, 30% of the population has one, but most of them don't know it and it never bothers them as it's a post-mortem finding. Anyway, just another finding, albeit thirty years early and it was a cardiologist, not a pathologist, who made the note in my file.

The human body is an amazing thing. However, it's fanatasitcally complex, in part because if you stop to think about it, it's almost haphazardly put together. If it had been intelligently designed our chests or abdomens would look more like a car engine, with laid-out straight lines and tubes that clearly go where they should with a minimum of deviation or wastage. We'd all look exactly the same, with I suppose, some allowance for scale. Oh, and if we were designed our retinas would have the photoreceptors on the outside and the nerves on the inside rather than having to reverse engineer in a punctum caecum and have to do some fancy processing in the visual cortex so we don't see the hole. While we're at it, the recurrent laryngeal nerve wouldn't loop itself around the aorta as it goes back to whence it came either, but like the recurrent laryngeal nerve, I digress.

So, instead of being ideal physical specimens, we merely approach the Euclidean ideal of an ideal body. We exist, as a species, on an anatomic and metabolic continuum. Given my recent history of outlying radiological findings (the echo could technically be considered a radiographic finding, even if no tungsten nuclei were harmed during the production of the image) my worry, quite naturally is how does my approximation of the human body match up with the Gaussian standard metrics of the human body? Which lets face it, were probably drawn 50 years ago using white male farmers from the American mid-we (who needless to say, have contributed little to my genotype. At least I'm a guy!). Will my cholesterol, HDL:LDL and PSA fall within 2SDs of the norm? And what does that norm mean anyway?

Here's hoping I can put a stop to the rot, for now. If not, the next stop on the senescence train is bifocals!

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