Students at Liberty find none

I apologize, I've been neglecting you all something awful this month! Between a longer to-do list than usual at work and planning for Gina's wedding this weekend (my best friend's getting married!!!), things have been a little crazy.

I promise to get back to something like a normal blogging schedule next week, but I wanted to share an issue that's been driving me nuts personally and professionally since last Friday: Liberty University kicking their chapter of College Democrats off-campus. I just blogged about it over at State of Belief for work, so I'll send you their way to read the full post:

James Madison must be exhausted. The poor guy just can’t catch a break – with all of the government interference in religion (the faith-based initiative-turned-partnership) and religious interference in politics (Propositions 8, 102 and 2), he’s probably been rolling over in his grave nonstop for years...[read the full post here]

And now (well, soon)...back to your regularly-scheduled dose of There Is No Spoon.

Take your workout outside: Part IV

Since I'm running 21 miles this weekend, it seems like a good time for Part IV of this series, focusing on off-the-road tips for current and aspiring long-distance runners. These will help keep your body (and your morale!) in top condition.

1. Get your body the nutrients it needs. As a former obsessive calorie-counter (who still obsesses about it sometimes), I have to tell you that you can't worry about eating too much if you're in serious physical training - especially the first time you're training for a long-distance race. Your metabolism is increasing, you're exercising significantly more and your body needs extra fuel to handle everything you're putting it through. If you don't eat enough, your workouts won't be successful. Period. If you're used to counting calories, use a tool like mapmyrun.com to track how much you're burning, so you know how many extra calories you need to eat. There are all kinds of complicated formulas for figuring out the perfect ratio of carbs to protein to fat for runners, but I just listen to my body. I carbo-load the night before a long run, usually with an obscene amount of (whole grain) pasta. By the time I get out of the shower afterward, I'm usually craving either a cheese omelette or a burger, which is my body's way of telling me it needs protein to rebuild the muscles I spent the last few hours tearing up. When I get hungry again, it's usually for something carb-y, because my body's realizing that I pretty much depleted those stores, but I try to toss in some type of protein too. I'm eating less this time around than I did the first, but still significantly more than I was in January, when 20-degree weather kept me inside most days.
2. Sleep tight! One of the keys to a good run is a good night's sleep beforehand. Running 14 miles on Saturday isn't going to be much fun if Friday happy hour lasts till midnight. (Not to sound like your mother, but alcohol in general is not the runner's friend in large quantities - it's dehydrating, and you're not going to run well if you're hungover.) Everyone's needs are different when it comes to sleep - I function best on seven or eight hours to begin with, so when I'm training hard I try to get eight or nine hours a night. My social life suffers, but my body is much happier!
   
3. Psych yourself up to avoid psyching yourself out. New distances are daunting, and no matter how ready your body is for them, a mental freak-out can trash a workout before you make it past mile 1. There are certain numbers that just sound scary (10 and 20 were the worst for me, the first time around), even if they're only a mile or two more than you've done before, so it's best to prep yourself mentally to keep your head from getting in your body's way. Something I started doing at about eight miles last year - and continue to do now at 16+ - was to mentally review my route a couple of times a day for a day or two before a long run. As mentioned in Part III, I generally map my routes at mapmyrun.com before I run them. That gives me a visual, and since the site lets you view maps in street view, satellite view or a combination of both, you can pick the visual that helps you most. I like "hybrid view" - the combo of street and satellite - and use it to remind myself where both on-street turns and physical landmarks will be. That way I can say, "Okay, when I cross that path to the marina parking lot, I'll be at six miles. When I hit the end of the airport fence, that's nine. That water fountain by the memorial is 12," etc. Keeping a general outline of your run in your head - whether it's in the style of an actual map or turn-by-turn directions - can keep your brain focused and let your body do what it already knows it can.
4. Listen to your body. Even for avid gym-goers, an intense outdoor regimen will put more strain on your body than it's used to, and you need to learn to listen to its cries for help in all areas. The most basic of those is fuel, as mentioned in #1. Then there's physical stress and injury. I can't imagine a training program ever being 100% discomfort-free, but if you pay attention to the low-grade aches and pains, they're less likely to become full-blown problems or injuries. If something hurts, figure out why. Most of the time you can probably do it on your own with basic rest, refueling, stretching, icing/heating and poking around on the web for information. But if it's been a week and nothing is helping, see a doctor - one who specializes in sports medicine is probably the most helpful if you're sure the issue is directly related to your training. Sometimes, a symptom you think is normal turns out to be a chronic problem (keep reading for an example) and you need to take unexpected steps to reverse it.
5. Give your body a break. My average weekday involves 10 or more escalators, which I generally pound up and down as fast as I can, one to two miles of walking, which I tend to speed-walk since they're part of my commute, and some 9.5-pound weight lifting when Nala decides to dash out the door every time I come in. Kitty-lifting aside, all of that adds up when you're running 35+ miles per week for months on end, and there are days that I leave for work feeling like I'm all but hobbling, my legs are so tired. I'm not a particularly patient person, but since I try to do #3, above, I make myself stand still on escalators (on the righthand side only, in D.C.!) when my legs are screaming at me to give them a break and pull my walking pace back to more of a stroll. And although it doesn't seem like much, it helps, and my shins especially thank me for the difference.
   

Okay, the example promised in #3: I coasted through most of my first round of training, both mentally and physically. Yeah, I was sore off and on. Yeah, I had some miles when variations of "Why am I doing this?" played on a loop in my head. Yeah, I spent (post-long run) Saturday afternoons collapsed on the floor, reading, watching movies, icing my knees and shins and stuffing my face in my quest to reach a net calorie count of at least "zero" for the day. And yeah, my social life was close to non-existent for a few months. But for the most part, it was pretty easy going.

Until last September, when I'd been training continuously for six months, and my calves started cramping up when I wasn't running. I'm not prone to muscle cramps in my legs, but I assumed it was just because I was reaching the peak of my training, and my body was tired and more than ready for the tapering-off portion of Operation: Run a Marathon. But when I woke up crying in the middle of the night (yeah, really - and I kind of wanted to scream, too) from a particularly painful spasm in my left calf that just wouldn't let go, I stopped thinking it was normal or would "just fade." I poked around on running message boards, WebMD and my best friend's knowledge of animal nutrition (more of veterinary medicine applies to people than you might think!) and figured out that I probably had a potassium deficiency.

Too much potassium can kill you (I'm sure that's been featured on at least one crime-scene drama), so supplements are hard to come by and a bad idea anyway. I researched potassium-rich foods, then stocked up on spinach, bananas, potatoes - it's the skin that's really rich in potassium - and the low-sodium V8 my boss' wife's doctor had recommended when she had a similar problem. And it worked! A few days after starting my effort to flood my system with potassium, the cramps eased up, then disappeared, and I was able to run my 23-miler, my longest training run, pain-free.

I'm back at the most intense month of training (this time for Rock 'n' Roll Seattle), and once again, my calves started getting tight after workouts, but this time I knew what to do. I'm stocked up on spinach and potatoes, alternate between orange juice (450mg of potassium per 8 ounces!) and low-sodium V8 (it's disgusting, but it works) and snack on raisins most afternoons. And guess what? I haven't woken up in pain even once!

The bottom line for successful long-distance training is to be smart, be safe, stay up-beat and keep your eyes on the finish line. Because when you get there? Baby, it's worth every step.

Wanna go Dutch?

In the interest of intercultural education, I wanted to share a great article from the New York Times Magazine that not only gives an American take on Amsterdam and life in the Netherlands, but that also presents social welfare from a very different perspective than the "They're trying to make us all socialists!"-type paranoia emanating from most conservative politicians and pundits throughout the last few months. From contributing writer Russell Shorto, "Going Dutch: How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State" is a study in contrasts - mostly those between the Dutch perspective on what it means to be a member of society, and the American.

There are two main questions Shorto answered from both the Dutch and the American perspective in his article, whether he intended to or not:

1. What about quality of life?
2. What about everybody else?

Number 1 is a question taken very seriously by citizens of welfare states, with mandatory vacation minimums and a culture that isn't centered around work. The monetary price the Dutch pay for a society that considers this question is one that would make any American jaw drop in sheer terror: the income tax in the Netherlands is 52%.

Shorto opens with his horror upon hearing this number, and after briefly trying to calculate whether or not I could pay my rent and still afford to eat on 48% of my current salary, I was in complete sympathy with him.

Actually, Shorto continues, it's not so bad. (What?!) Because income tax is one of the only taxes the Dutch pay. Social security is included rather than tacked on, state and local taxes don't exist, real estate taxes are much lower, etc. Not only that, but you get a heck of a lot of that 52% back in installments for various things from the government (not to mention the virtually free health care): child benefits, textbook accommodations, government-subsidized housing that carries none of the stigma it does in the U.S., vacation money. Wait, vacation money? Yup. Shorto says:

In late May of last year an unexpected $4,265 arrived in my account: vakantiegeld. Vacation money. This money materializes in the bank accounts of virtually everyone in the country just before the summer holidays; you get from your employer an amount totaling 8 percent of your annual salary, which is meant to cover plane tickets, surfing lessons, tapas: vacations. And we aren’t talking about a mere “paid vacation” — this is on top of the salary you continue to receive during the weeks you’re off skydiving or snorkeling. And by law every employer is required to give a minimum of four weeks’ vacation. For that matter, even if you are unemployed you still receive a base amount of vakantiegeld from the government, the reasoning being that if you can’t go on vacation, you’ll get depressed and despondent and you’ll never get a job.

And that's exactly the sort of quality-of-life issue that American society essentially ignores, expecting everyone to create the type of life that suits them best for themselves. The thing is, we don't. We can't, if we want to first make a good impression, then move up, in our chosen fields. I'm not saying I think the government should pay me to go lie on a beach, but in the U.S., the reward for time put in and a job well done is more work. And that kind of live-to-work attitude is a problem.

People with lower salaries may feel less obliged to stay at their desks after standard office hours than those making six or seven figures after bonuses, but the pressure to work increasingly harder in order to continue to prove oneself is society-wide in white-collar jobs. Being a workaholic is fine - if it's what you want to do. When it becomes so much the norm that no one blinks when junior staffers who barely make enough money to eat regularly work through lunch, check work email from home and have stress levels that are through the roof, something is seriously out of whack.

According to Shorto, the professional mentality that goes along with enforced vacation time and not checking email from home on the weekends isn't lax in comparison to ours - instead, the time away from the office (and all office-associated issues) seems to keep people noticeably more fresh, focused and productive when they're actually in the office. Food for thought, don't you think?

Next up, number 2, "What about everybody else?"

The vacation pay example given by Shorto is the sort of thing that Americans love to rail against in social welfare systems, saying it's ridiculous, encourages laziness and forces the hard workers to pay the "idle poor" to sit around and be unemployed. We're a work-oriented culture of do-it-yourselfers (Can you think of another country where the translated equivalent of "DIY" would make any sense at all?), and we hate thinking our hard work is helping someone else get ahead when we never feel like it's gotten us far enough ahead to relax.

But does it really matter who else the money generated by our work is helping, as long as we have what we need (and some of what we want)? Yeah, it grates against the American work ethic and sense of fair-play. Then again, how fair is it that affordable insurance, and therefore basic health care, is inaccessible to somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million Americans (that's more than six times the population of New York City, by the way)? Or that the vast majority of our public schools don't even begin to adequately educate our children, and the cost of a decent education has been sky-rocketing for decades? If we had a solid education system and health care that worked, I sincerely doubt I'd spend much time worrying about how many single mothers were receiving welfare benefits from my taxes.

Socially, the American system becomes more inadequate every year, which is laughable for a society that's widely considered the epitome of a developed country. We don't need to turn socialist - the Netherlands has a long history of capitalism (the Dutch East India Company, anyone?) - to support our citizens with effective social welfare programs that address basic rights and needs. Welfare, at its most elemental level, is intended to make sure that people are faring well. And isn't it one of the most fundamental responsibilities of a government to take care of its people?

So what about quality of life? Well, I'd like a better one on several levels, with universal health care, public education and Social Security leading the pack. And what about everyone else? I see no reason my work and income can't benefit society in general as long as my family and I aren't lacking for anything ourselves.

No, we shouldn't adopt the Netherlands' or France's or the United Kingdom's social welfare system as a whole - we're a different country, with a government that functions differently and a population that needs different things. But I think the country that showed the modern world how to make the democratic republic work can figure out how to establish a safety net of social welfare programs for its citizens without compromising its national character. Don't you?