This Looks More Like a Descent....

The punishment for Mystic-Leg-Press Hubris, apparently, is back pain. Two days after impressing myself with my own leg strength at the gym, I tweaked my back badly enough (moving a bed) that I've only been able to work out twice in the last two weeks (my house has also been plagued by a nasty, lingering, flu-like virus, which we've all had to one degree or another).

All of these things are making me cranky.

It's not like I'm running out of time to train for the Rainier climb. But I'm also training for the Vermont City Marathon (my second marathon), which is at the end of May--about a month before the climb. And I'm kind of assuming that the marathon training will do a lot to get me ready for Rainier.

But this is Week 6 of an 18-week marathon training program, and I'm supposed to be building my weekly mileage from 24 miles to 44 miles.

So far, I'm going backwards. Planned mileage in parentheses.

Week 1 actual mileage: 12 (24)
Week 2 actual mileage: 22 (25)
Week 3 actual mileage: 11 (22)
Week 4 actual mileage: 10 (29)
Week 5 actual mileage: 9 (30)
Week 6 actual mileage: 0 (26)

It makes for a sad picture:

Alien Presidents: The Card Game

Sorry to disappoint my many fans of high-altitude adventure and/or everyday life-threatening illness, but this post has nothing to do with mountain climbing and nothing to do with childhood cancer. But it does have something to do with the charm of eight-year-old minds.

Today Fergus decided to create a card game called "Alien Presidents". Not only did he make up the rules (such as they are) but he created each card from scratch and did all the scoring (thus earning us a modicum of homeschooling points).

I won't go into all the details, but basically each player picks two cards at a time, each of which has a certain number of points associated with it: add up the points on your two cards, compare your points to those of the other players, and the person with the most points wins that round. Then everyone discards (or "disgorges," as Fergus sometimes says) one card, and picks a new card for the next round.

Each card features an "alien" version of current US political figures, and discards go either into a "Graveyard" stack or an "Evolution" stack. When we played it, we always discarded to the Graveyard. It's worth noting, however, that when all players ran out of new cards to pick, we were free to pick them from the Graveyard--a process that seemed eerily familiar when I pulled the Dick Cheney card out of the stack.

I have no idea how the "Evolution" stack might work.

Here are the "stats" from some of the cards, if you want to create your own deck (each one features a drawing of the "alien" in question, but you'll have to imagine those):

Name: BARACK OBAMA
Points: 54
Spaceship: SITH RIDE
Planet: SITH
Species: SQAKE

Name: DICK CHAINIE
Points: 105
Spaceship: ZARTRON
Planet: WEIRDO
Species: INSECTOPUS

Name: GEORGE BUSH
Points: 93
Spaceship: ZOK DEATH SLOOP
Planet: DIGPLOOM
Species: ROBOID

Name: KARL ROVE
Points: 82
Spaceship: SNAIL STRIKER
Planet: QUORG2
Species: SNY ("Snee")

Name: JOHN MCANE
Points: 71
Spaceship: QUORGETIC BOUNDER
Planet: QUORG
Species: FLYCTOPUS

Name: CONDELISA RICE
Points: 69
Spaceship: FANTASY SHOOTER
Planet: ZOKK
Species: FRIZARD

Name: HILARY CLITON
Points: 15
Spaceship: SIXSIX ENSOCKER
Planet: SIXSIX
Species: ROBONITE

At one point during our game, Fergus eyed the Graveyard and said, "I'll discharge George Bush as waste." And look, I'm not one to launch into political commentary in forums like this one, but....

Oh, it hardly seems necessary, does it?

Alien Presidents (C)
Age: 8 and Up
Teaches: Second-grade addition (with "regrouping"), not to mention contempt for U.S. politics.

"Late Effects"

From a recent article in Newsweek:

Childhood cancer is not the killer it once was. Seventy-five percent of kids diagnosed with it go on to have long lives. But survival comes at a cost: two thirds of patients suffer from lingering effects, sometimes from the disease but more often from the medicines that cured it. "Childhood therapy is often stronger than adult therapy," says Dr. Robert Hayashi, a pediatrician at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "That can wreak damage on a growing body." Radiation and chemotherapy may stunt physical and mental development. Survivors may find themselves unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes, or exhausted by the smallest tasks. Time is also known to work against them. "As these patients get older," says Hayashi, "they start to show symptoms that may have been silent for years."

First you spend three years keeping your kid alive; then you spend the rest of your life worrying about him. Full article here.

"You're Not The Only One"

Now this is interesting.

"Peach" has cooked up a groovy blog-writing / book-publishing / fund-raising hybrid thing that's kind of fun. Check it out.

Has anything happened to you?

Well, yeah, of course it has. So write about it already, and send it to Peach. The deadline is February 29th.

If you're lucky, it will become part of a book, the proceeds of which will go to support War Child, an organization that...

"...works with children affected by war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Our work with former child soldiers, children in prison and children living and working on the streets gives them support, protection and opportunities. To make sure we provide them with what they need we involve them directly in all our decision making."

Your submission does not need to relate to any of the themes that spin off of this kind of work. Mine, rather predictably, was a blog post I made (elsewhere) last spring about Fergus' leukemia and the fear of relapse:

Wet Shoes, Dropping Shoes

We had a wet snowfall yesterday, and as I left the gym. picking my way to the car through the slush, I started thinking about the end of treatment, and how Lauren and I will live with the possibility of relapse.

In short (because it was a short walk to the car), it comes down to what may be a minor distinction:

Lauren will spend the time waiting expectantly for the Other Shoe to drop. I think there is some comfort for her, or self- protection anyway, in holding onto a sense of inevitability about bad events, as if they are the flip side to the many good events in her life. I won't say this is some sense of a higher power at work in her life; it could simply be a sense about the sheer chance of bell curves. But it's a powerful, semi-inevitable power at work.

I, on the other hand, will fear relapse pretty much all the time, but if it happens I don't think I will feel any larger forces at work, not even chance. The earth will just fall out from under me--because of the specific, terrifying actuality of relapse. And then we'll move on and do whatever needs to be done.

These comparisons (accurate or inaccurate as they may be) washed through my mind as I got out my keys and unlocked the car. I'm not sure where they came from; I guess they are always there, and they simply bubble up when there aren't a lot of distractions around.

Then it hit me, as it sometimes does, like something half-forgotten: You have a child with cancer. It's an astounding, surreal thing to feel all over again. Your son has leukemia.

Re-absorbing or re-feeling that truth quickly discombobulated everything I had been thinking.

The truth is, I don't know how I'll feel when he goes off treatment, as we sit around waiting for something to (not) happen. Cancer is so big, so hard to get your head around, that it's hard not to think of larger forces at work. Or anyway, of forces that work mysteriously, with little predictability. I don't know if the forces are part of the fabric of the universe or just part of the fabric of my son's bone marrow. But the shoe will dangle. And it will be out of our hands.

Posted by robbo on April 13, 2007 2:05 PM

But this is just what I had lying around. SURELY YOU CAN DO BETTER. So go ahead.

Thank you so much to Angus for pointing this project out.

ALMOST a New Tent...

I don't think I've ever bid on any eBay item before, but I ALMOST became the proud owner of a 4-season North Face tent the other evening ("no holes but no poles").

Unfortunately, I was out-bid at the last minute, as I slept, by my new nemesis, "Goretexsteve."

Sorry, you were outbid. This item sold to gortexsteve for US $198.25.

Damn You, Goretexsteve.

Correlation, Causation, Chemicals, Congress, Cancer

You might know her as Don Imus' wife.

Pause.

But Deirdre Imus is also deeply involved with the Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer and, near as I can tell, someone who is convinced that health begins with a relatively chemical-free life. Today she is celebrating International Childhood Cancer Day with an article about chemicals, cancer and political will, over at the Huffington Post.

I'm not totally convinced by her chemical absolutism, but is it rather shocking to read this:

In 1976 Congress passed the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) with the goal of protecting the public and the environment from the harm caused by toxic chemicals. Three decades later, most of the 80,000 chemicals used in commercial products today have never been evaluated for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

And this:

In 1998, the PBS series Frontline aired a story, "Fooling Mother Nature," about toxic chemicals and their affect on humans. Dr. Christopher DeRosa, a director at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) stated the obvious. "If you start to look at all the data together, you start to see a convergence", said Dr. DeRosa. "It is time for public health action...we may not have a smoking gun, but there are bullets all over the floor."

Even more shocking to me (despite the small sample size), is the cord blood study that she refers to, the Executive Summary of which says:

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

This study represents the first reported cord blood tests for 261 of the targeted chemicals and the first reported detections in cord blood for 209 compounds. Among them are eight perfluorochemicals used as stain and oil repellants in fast food packaging, clothes and textiles — including the Teflon chemical PFOA, recently characterized as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board — dozens of widely used brominated flame retardants and their toxic by-products; and numerous pesticides.

Look, I don't know what caused my son's leukemia. Recent research on twins seems to indicate a two-stage cause: an initial genetic predisposition (perhaps created very early after egg fertilization) and a later environmental "trigger" that sets off the uncontrolled growth of the leukemic cells.

We have wondered about that environmental trigger.

Was it something in the soil where he used to play "Bob the Builder"? Our house at the time was near an old smokestack....what sort of chemicals would a woolen mill spew into the air? And how long would they linger in the soil?

Then there was the T-Shirt-dying warehouse across the street. Foul smells would sometimes emerge from that place, and strange colored smoke that stained their own roof red.

Happily, we've moved from that town.

We've concluded, though, that the most likely cause was the flu that Fergus came down with 10 months before he was diagnosed. I had never seen him so sick. In fact, he looked so bad that (embarrassingly enough) I took his picture.



It was Christmas, 2003. He was three years old. By the following November, he was a boy with leukemia.

But there's no way of knowing if this was the trigger. In fact, I think we had avoided giving Fergus a flu shot that year because, well, three years old just seemed too young to be injected with whatever it is that comes inside those hypodermic needles.

But if we had given a flu shot that year, would we be wondering whether the shot had been the triggering event?

...Or was it some other, more subtle, trigger--like maybe exposure to of one of those 80,000 untested chemicals that Deirdre Imus talks about?

Frankly, we'll never know. For Fergus, it's too late to matter. For other kids, though? It means all the world. And the bullets are all over the floor.

Clueless Shopping

Among my many deficits when it comes to climbing real mountains is a nearly complete lack of equipment. I have some nice, heavyweight Merrell boots (and they're in remarkably "like new!" condition) that I bought fifteen or twenty years ago, but JohnTheClimbingMentor says they are not really stiff enough to wear with crampons and, oh, I might end up with a touch of frostbite. And, as my brother-in-law will attest, my little tent (a state of the art lightweight tent in 1977) has such a foul smell that, when he borrowed it back in 2000, campers in adjoining campsites were making jokes about it.

This was in Michigan, where smell is no laughing matter.

And then there's the question of sunglasses.

From what JohnTheClimbingMentor says, spending time on a glacier at 14,000 feet without special mountaineering glasses is asking for a fine case of snow blindness. This is not always a good thing when you're walking around on icy inclines somewhere up in the jet stream, surrounded by bottomless crevasses.

In fact, the intensity of ultraviolet rays increases 5% for every 1,000 vertical feet of elevation gain. So, you know, I'm convinced.

So I get my eyes examined, by a real eye doctor, and I start shopping for "real" mountaineering glasses, ideally ones that I can later use when I'm, you know, turning the compost pile and stuff. So now I've narrowed it down to two fashion choices: the Denali and the Zermat.

The denali says: modern fellow, reads a little non-fiction, hopes to drive a Miata one day.

The Zermat (which sounds like the Swiss town of Zermatt, one of my father's most memorable ski destinations) says: retro fellow, James Joyce on the mountaintop, hopes to eat pemmican and whale blubber one day, prefers "Touching the Void" to "Into the Wild," uses archaic diction about modern subjects ("I brook no quarrel with Thom Yorke's approach to popular music"), hopes to own a vintage pickup truck one day.

Guess which one I'm leaning toward?

Mystic Leg-Press Breakthrough

Just a week ago my standard leg-press weight was 170 lbs. But at the gym last night I had some sort of mystic leg-press breakthrough, and suddenly I am leg-pressing 230 lbs.

Maybe my legs are nervous about this climb too?

Vermont Winter = Rainier Summer?

It's been a relatively mild winter here in Vermont, thought we're having a bit of a cold snap at the moment. It was three degrees (F) yesterday morning when I got up. Still, that's not all that cold for a morning in early February (in Vermont)--but cold enough.

The thing is, the wind was coming up, and by the time I got off the bus in Burlington the wind was gusting to 30 MPH. That brings a wind chill of about twenty degrees below zero.

It was a looong 12 minute walk to my office in that wind.

My face hurt. It just plain hurt.

The wind made me grimace, and I had to remind myself to pull my lips back over my teeth because they hurt too. And I worried, irrationally, that they would shatter into little bits, like safety glass.

Man.

I know it will be June when I'm up on Rainier, but doesn't it get weather like this? Even in June? I mean, doesn't it basically stick up into the jet stream?

All I can find right now is a current forecast for the Rainier summit…it says the low tonight on the summit will be minus 13, with 44 mile-an-hour winds. That's a wind chill of minus 50 degrees.

It's no walk to the office.

The Mountain is Out

I woke up today to someone shaking my foot, vigorously. And again.

What? What?

It's my wife, and she's whispering forcefully: "Get up."

It's 6AM. One of my days to stay home with the kids.

I stumble out of the bedroom and she's waiting for me in the hallway, an anxious look on her face. I think: what is it? A death in the family? Has one of the leukemia kids relapsed? Is our son okay? Or is it just something online about the presidential race?

In fact it has snowed overnight, the roads are not really plowed yet, and the car is stuck at the bottom of the hill. She could call AAA for a tow, but she thought I might want to give it a try. We live in Vermont, after all--we're not supposed to call AAA. A half hour later I'm home with the car, and Lauren has given up plans to go work out at the gym.

And at this point you're thinking: What does this have to do with climbing Mount Rainier?

Well, there are a lot of reasons I want to make this climb, but one of them has to do with childhood cancer.

And while our 8-year-old son completed his leukemia treatment (2-1/2 years worth) in June of 2007, even still we live with its threat. Its presence has woven itself into our lives. We wake up with it. It hangs over us like--well, like Mt. Rainier hangs over the Seattle area on those clear days when they say:

The mountain is out.

An early awakening, a look on a spouse's face, a boy with a fever, a phone call from our son's clinic--these little moments are filled with awful possibility.

I don't want to overdramatize, but I hope we (all) can get out from under this mountain some day. Until then, it's waiting to be climbed.

Another Long-Run Sunday

Sundays are "long-run" days for those of us training to survive marathons and mountain climbs. Today's goal: a nine-mile run through the idylls of rural Vermont. Today's actuality: A nine-mile run/walk (1 hr and 41 minutes) featuring slippery roads, a light snowfall, worrisome knee pain, and troublesome hills. I did learn that running with a water bottle in hand when it's 27 degrees outside has some advantages: instead of the water getting warmer and warmer with every mile, it gets colder and more refreshing. Happily, it never quite froze. I guess this bodes well for the refreshing quality of Mt. Rainier drinking water.

Because It’s There

Look, we've got a mountain to climb, but…

Bergschrund?

Serac?

On Belay?

I've got a lot to bloody learn.