Sorry! It's Not Covered Under Warranty

The pain is back in my upper front thigh areas and hips.  It seems to be in more in the hip joint; deeper this time and it has me somewhat concerned.  I ran 3.1 miles yesterday on the "dredmill".  I thought I would be okay after doing a fast paced walk of  5.5 miles last Friday night.  I felt good after the walk and had no problems.  I managed to do a total 75 miles on the bike this weekend with no problems.  But last night as the night wore on and I started feeling a bit of pain in those areas again.  Then this morning I woke up and literally crawled to the foot of my futon.  OUCH!  The pain's back!

I stretched and it seemed to help a bit.  I'm walking a bit bowlegged-ly today.  I keep telling myself," Think of taking small steps; small steps."  Normally during lunch on Thursday's I go upstairs and see what the oil painting class is painting.  But no today.  NO climbing steps today; unless I have to.  I'm almost dreading going home to where those three flights of stairs await me.  OUCH!  Sorry if I'm sounding a little whiny here, but this is new to me.  I usually can just brush off most pain; get up and get on with life.  But this is affecting how I walk which is frustrating!  I hope I'll be okay tomorrow and this weekend for some bike rides.  I promised Diane I would ride with her for the Salt Lake Cycle Century on Saturday. 

But I can't help but ask...What's going on here?  Is it running on the dredmill?  Is it the way I'm running?  Is it the newer pair of shoes?  Or is there something else going on?  I'm fine after biking.  I didn't have any problems before the half marathon while I was training for it.  So what's going on?  Was there something during the half marathon that happened to my body that I didn't notice?  Maybe I'm just falling apart, and I'm going to need some assembly required.  Old age is setting in, and darn it; I'm stuck.  

Hmmmmm....I'm thinking I may have to go to the doctor's office for a visit.  Darn it!  I'm going to call in and see about getting it checked out.   I can just see the Doc saying to me as if I was a car or an appliance (my imagination running wild here..),"Its just your average wear and tear on the body.... Sorry that's not covered under the normal warranty.  You didn't think to purchase the extended warranty with the special exclusion clause, did you?  So, sorry."  And me thinking to myself... "I'm totally screwed!  Gee, and I paid the $25 for the office visit to hear this?!?"

Howling Wind + Stairs + Etc = No Sleep

So last night I lay in bed awake staring at the clock on my nightstand. I know I need to sleep and Lord knows I'm tired but the cards seemed to be stacked against me. The wind was furious last night; at moments it sounded like a freight train approaching. At other times, it was like having a large semi-truck driving opposite on a two lane highway. You would get the noise and then this quick suction. The windows were rattling hard in their frames and I had the fear that I was just moments from flying glass. The whole apartment building was creaking and groaning. And maybe it was my imagination but it seemed as though the building was swaying with each creak and groan. Finally a neighbor with a car alarm (set way TOO sensitive) turned it off at around midnight. Then there was a full moon, and this HUGE full moon was really cranking out the light. It was almost like having a beacon light shining in my window.

At about 3AM I got up to try to walk around and get my mind off worrying about sleeping. See if I could just relax and get a mind set to be tired. I looked outside the sliding glass door to a scene of tree branches whipping around, boxes and papers streaming through the air, and narrow elongated clouds below the full moon. It rather reminded me of those scenes in the horror flicks just before someone gets murdered. Yep, this was definitely sleep conducive! I also noticed that one of my wind chimes was blown to smithereens! It used to have several smaller chime tubes below a large medallion. Well, now it was just one large medallion on a string.

While I was walking around I also noticed that my legs were getting stiff from my earlier feat of moving 20+ oil paintings from my friend's upstairs studio to my car, drive a few miles and then up to my third floor apartment. Who needs the StairMaster? That's a gym workout right there! It felt like 100 trips up and down and back down, but I'm sure that it was at least 20 trips total. All of the unsold paintings are now safely en scone in my humble abode but are leaning waiting to be hung. So thus my mind gets on this tangent of how to hang 20+ framed oil paintings in my small one bedroom place. Yeah, this is working on getting me ready to go back to sleep...NOT!

I took a couple of Advil hoping that it would help with the stiffness of the knees and maybe help me to sleep too. Well, I finally did managed but strange dreams came again. This time Matthew McConaughey's mother kept trying to fix me up with Matthew. I was managing her Southern-style restaurant in Souix Falls, South Dakota where I was constantly avoiding getting ate by these alligators that she had imported for "atomshpere". We, Matthew & I, finally did go out on a dinner date where we quickly discovered we didn't have anything in common. It was rather comical because we were both trying to figure out how to break it gently to his mother that it wouldn't work out between us.

With all this is it any wonder that at 5AM when my alarm went off, I reset it to sleep in? The gym I considered a forgone-- not a good idea --conclusion. But hey! There's always tomorrow, right?