The Freakazoid Does 7 Miles!

6/17/07

I was a total badass today and did the SEVEN miles!  I must admit it was tough to hammer it out but I just could not, would not let myself quit.  I also came across a pretty good distraction while I am running-weird but it works.

A little background of my mental habits: I am a anesthesiologist so I train for and often encounter life and death situations-and I have to handle them. Not that my job is hard-core all the time, but certainly tough, critical, fast-paced situations are something I have to deal with-or it is very likely someone will die.  The longer I have practiced as an anesthesiologist, the more I find myself playing out traumatic situations in my mind.  Sometime I will flash back on those times when I have been in critical situations in the OR or ER.  Good or bad, those experiences are with me forever.

To compound this, I am a naturally paranoid person. I always think about what I would do IF…if a tornado happened right now…if I was held at gun-point…if war broke out.  I think about my survival plan in advance.  I think my medical training has corrupted my mind that way, after all, in the OR, I have to think about and pre-plan for what I would do IF…if the patient stopped breathing…if the patient went into an life-threatening heart arrhythmia…if the patient started to bleed heavily during surgery.  Jeremy calls me a “freak freakazoid” when I am in this mental mode-I call it being prepared.

So today, as a rounded the lake, I wondered what I would do if I was in the middle of that lake with Juliet.  How would I get her to shore safely without either of us drowning.  I imagined myself pulling her as I swam, keeping her head out of the water.  My plan got a bit elaborate but guess what?  I wasn’t focused on how much my legs were hurting.  I was almost unaware that I was running.  I was ruminating on some powerful images and it totally distracted me from my run.  It worked and kept me moving.  It also gave me a little boost as I imagined myself saving my daughter, swimming hard, getting her to shore.  Yeah, I am a freak from the planet freakazoid.