jonfirestar

Update: I honestly don't know where this week has gone to. I'm still busy with work so there's that and it's really hard for me not to simply turn off after work. Some good stuff happening there. I've been doing my runs but today was my first miss, but due to unavoidable life stuff that didn't leave me with the time today. I knew this was going to happen today and my plan is to see how things go if I run Friday and Saturday. If I can do back to back runs that'll make it much easier to shuffle things around. i've been working from home all year so far but I need to head back to the office soon. Not sure if I am ready for it yet and I'm injury wary these days

And yet celery pales in comparison to the fiber content of raspberries You'd need 20 cups of celery to hit your recommended daily fiber intake and just 4 of raspberries. Actually drinking breakfast is something i've been thinking about. It's much easier for me to drink first thing in the morning than it is to eat. yeah I have a prescription for what I assume is the same kinda thing with a different name. The fiber supplement is honestly the only thing I've ever tried that has a tangible effect on my body.

Yeah, I've never had to deal with anything like it and it makes me feel like I've got a ticking bomb inside me. But yeah there are ways to mitigate the chance. That translate down to some dietary guidance. Plenty of water, unsurprisingly. And loads of fibre. Fibre just helps keep things clean. It's really hard to get fibre in your diet. Surprisingly hard. Stuff just doesn't contain much and the guidelines are around 3x what a typical diet would provide. Then there are really surprising things like the amount of fibre in raspberries. It's insane!

Hey Ghost Yeah, I know what it is these days. The TLDR is that my gut is full of holes. The less pleasant version is that I've got small pockets in my gut that formed after some damage (often just general wear and tear most people will form some). Whatever the cause these pockets are just prone to getting infected. Once that infection gains a foothold it's firmly entrenched and slowly takes over. So over a slow course of several months I'll feel worse and worse until finally my body's defences are overwhelmed and I fall off a cliff edge. This is, apparently, quite dangerous and can lead to sepsis. That is how I nearly ended up in hospital early this year. I was bedridden for close to three months.

Bit annoying isn't it? And me too. I pop awake.

Update: Well as I've already mentioned I've been having trouble sleeping. I'm having issues going down. I'm not sure why it's not run away thoughts or anything. Just a general restlessness when I try and sleep at night. And I've been waking up really early. That's the time of year lol. It was less of an issue when I'd plan to be up that early but I'm just getting up with the sunrise, Which at the moment in my part of the world is at around 4:45am No, blackout blinds don't make a difference. My body just knows... So yesterday I was really just exhausted. I did go for my run and it didn't go at all well. That's okay though, the challenge is all about consistency and not about how those workouts go. In fact it's my firm belief that no matter how good or how bad any single workout goes, it makes almost no difference. Consistency is key. My run was a little shorter and a lot slower. One thing I didn't have trouble with is food. I was just hungry and ate so much more than I normally would. I'm also good with that and okay with it. I feel like I needed a refeed but it's also not the kind of habit I want to get into. I'm really looking for a healthy balance. I ate less today but still more than I have been. Three meals. This is good. Feeling hungry like this is honestly not something I've had for years.

Thanks Shaar! I'm doing well, overall, ups and downs, you know, but overall things are good and getting better. Doesn't it just! I think it's just a reaction to the stress I'm under but it's good stress, if that makes sense.

Truth

Okay fair enough, I do know they didn't completely die out but there were so many back in the day. For myself, while I love creating stories, I found that it added a bit of pressure that I didn't always want to deal with. Especially 2018/2019 when my mental health took a really bad turn.

Well, the problem itself turned out to be extremely simple and perfectly obvious once I figured it out but it's not something I'd ever encountered before. It was just an arp table overflow on the dhcp server, but the symptoms were driving me crazy. I had appropriated a server to test on and that one was working just fine but the one my colleague was trying to work on just wouldn't work. Then I went around clearing up some weird traffic (which I suspect was caused by some strange interaction between lacp and ipmi that was causing a lot of L2 traffic to be sent to the vlan that I was looking at that shouldn't have been there at all) and it started working. Only to then run into the same problems about 30 minutes later. It was only once I realised that the dhcp server was seeing packet loss to itself that I got on the right track. It makes sense, there are many thousands of bits of tin that use it. I'd filtered out arp on my tcpdump, that probably didn't help. Problem took many hours to find. The solution, replace a number with a bigger number in a proc file. Thanks Lizz, I got pretty emotional while I was writing that. I do miss him a lot. Please dont' look to me for recipes! I'm so apathetic towards food right now that everything I'm making is extremely simple. So it was just burgers, but the meal was just amazing. Alas no, my sleep over this week has been atrocious. Although I slept better last night.

Hey Maggie, long time but following. This, is normal. There is only so much you can take before you just stop caring. That is just a normal human reaction. Don't beat yourself up over it. I can appreciate how draining it can be to deal with people who want a solution but aren't actually willing to do anything to work towards it that isn't someone just handing them the perfect solution. Worse if they get angry at you for it. Everyone has told you this but focus on what is the right thing for you to be doing to improve your own life. It's the only one where we have any semblance of real control anyway. These things exist because there are people who need it. Don't let the abuse that others do to the system prevent you from using the help that's available. Apply, if you qualify, take it. You don't need to feel bad about it and you don't need to justify it further. Good to see you Maggie

Please tell me I did not miss this! Either way, I'm here.

You too Ghost! It's taken me forever to get out of my own challenge. Yes! I agree, it would be awesome if they did come back.

Hey, better late than never I'm following along. It's good to see you are feeling better about things. I guess I missed your story pieces back in the day. I had my own at some point in time. I'm always a sucker for those.

Hey, mate. I finally made it out of my challenge thread. So obviously ended up here. I want to remind you before we start that you gave me express permission to nerd out just as much as I like 😜 but I'm not going to pretend I read everything lol. Yeah, I feel you man. This has been a bit of a kick. Ahh you didn't mention your dodgy knee. About strides then. Know idea if you are doing this or not but don't launch into them. The goal isn't to sprint the distance as fast as you can, the goal is to *get* to your top speed. Instead increase your speed over the distance until you hit the top and then come back down. It's a minor detail tbh, but it'll be easier on your knee than if you are just sprinting. This is neuromuscular training more than it is 'fitness' training. Approaching it with that in mind can be helpful. I cannot think of a more fitting tribute Okay okay, so I collect more data than what's ever going to be useful... but whether or not you want it to go up and down having that data would still be useful to understand exactly what's going on and give you great insight into whatever it is you decide to do at any given moment. I just find it really interesting. Being bothered to do it is much harder to solve. Of course I find data fun and so I've got way too much. Weighing yourself before and after a run is quite interesting. That said. I've never tracked food, at least not sucessfully. You can't be accurate enough for it to be worth it. Even when I knew exactly what I was eating it was because I was organised. I knew what I was going to eat and that's what I ate. These days I guestimate at best. That's where the weight graph comes in. If the line is going the wrong way, just eat less or more. Way easier than food tracking. Oh well that's what I've got for now

You, Lizz are an amazing and wonderful human being. I cannot even begin to express how much I admire and appreciate you. I'm also feeling sad and emotional today, but it's okay. that's really all I've got tbh. It's okay. Try and focus on the positives. The negative feedback loop doesn't help anything.

Update. Oh another weird day, we had another death. This one is less personal to me but one of my wife's family members and she's really torn up. They are in Floridia and right now it doesn't look like we're going to be able to get out there. I'm feeling a lot better today. I did eat breakfast, and lunch and dinner lol. I've been thinking about food a lot, which is actually encouraging. The dinner I made today was exceptionally good. I don't really find it so much fun anymore but I'm still a decent cook. Today I amazed myself. I think a lot of the credit does go to Hez for doing the shopping. Anyway long story short I don't feel this way about food much anymore. I generally don't care what I eat on any given day. I'm still doing the cooking because I've always done the cooking, but any effort I put in is entirely for a want to give my wife something good and healthy rather than any interest in the craft itself. I'm taking this as a good sign and with gratitude. No run planned for today it's due tomorrow. I did take a walk. It's three miles and something I'm doing on days I'm not running and don't have anything else to do. It's three miles because that's how far I can walk on my lunch break on a leisurely walk. Since I still work from home (it's because I'm ill so often, surprise) getting out every day is vital for my mental health. So I make that happen. I was struggling to even walk for a while but now thankfully I no longer have that issue. I really don't want to just complain about being sick. I'm beyond tired of it. It's why I have a hard time with talking to anyone. I really miss Mr_Wills today. He was always someone I could just chat shop with. You know give me something other than, being sick to talk about and I would have been talking to him about the stuff I found this week because it's weird computer stuff and he would have been interested. I should probably stop right here.

Thanks, any and all suggestions are welcome. Always. Interestingly a few years ago, before I first got sick, that's really close to what I was eating and had been eating for breakfast for several years. It was even lazier though. Overnight oats, with milk and yogurt, and PB. Honey rather than Jelly since I'm not a fan. Just thrown into a jar (no stiring) and by morning it'll combine together enough that it barely takes any stirring at all. I feel your distaste of extra stirring! There's a bit of a mental block. Probably because it all started with me simply not being able to eat the breakfast I'd been eating for years. I mean I'd put it in my mouth and then want to spit it out. Funny how your body can communicate you know. My body was actually telling me 'you've got a massive infection in your gut. Don't feed it.' I'm supposed to only eat clear soup in those situations lol. Ahh sorry this is why I have such a hard time coming back here, you know. I've literally had only one thing to talk about for more than two years. Thanks. Slow going but it's going.

Update Oh if I had hair I'd be pulling it out with the stress of today While I won't attempt to explain what I do for a living more than saying I'm an IT guy who builds bits of internet infrastructure. Currently I'm in the middle of the biggest release of my career! I expected things to break, but sometimes things break in new and unexpected ways. And today right as I was about to report in to my team 'I'm done start testing' everything fell over. After spending the whole day digging through the things I'd done and then hours of reading network traffic trying to figure out why it wasn't working I found the problem was something that I didn't do at all. Actually it was a pre-existing issue that had gone unnoticed for quite some time. It was also something I'd never seen before. Ahh anyway that's a brief glimpse of where my headspace has been for the last week or so. I think and hope I can finally put this to rest tomorrow. Still the running has been happening on track. Things are improving albeit not quite as linear a fashion as I was kind of expecting. Still overall things are going well and I'm slowly getting faster and faster. My fastest and best feeling run happened over a week ago and that's a little annoying but I'm just happy to be getting out there. I'm still struggling to fuel myself correctly. That was a struggle I had today and I think some of my issues could easily be solved just by getting on top of this. I really need to have a breakfast that I can just grab out of the fridge. There is very little chance of me having it if I have to make it first. That's the simple, brutal truth. I went 18 hours without eating anything and then did a run, still without eating so it's little wonder I felt like I'd bonked hard. Since I started this challenge a couple of weeks ago my weight has dropped over 7 pounds. I want to lose that weight but it shouldn't be dropping quite so fast.

Hey Sky! It's great to see you too! How have you been? One of these days I'm going to go and catch up on everyone's challenges but I've been insanely busy since I posted my challenge

Thanks. It was nice enough Update. Still feeling in a bit of a funk but good things are nonetheless happening. I took things pretty easy today and even managed to eat myself some breakfast.

I'm not beating myself up about it I'm just thinking aloud about how I should approach things. I don't really have the answers right now. That's why I'm simply starting by eating breakfast Always great to hear from you, Julie. Thank you so much. That means a great deal to me. Yeah I've got to come up with something like that. I recently overhauled my entire diet trying to clean things up a bit. The net result is now I'm not eating nearly enough. It's hard, at least for me, to strike a balance. It's a work in progress. I guess.

Update: I've honestly been in a bit of a funk this week, I've been feeling a little drawn out. I think I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm probably not eating nearly enough. I'm getting hungry again and i've currently got a genuine appetite but my entire relationship with food has been altered over the last few years to the point that it's pretty easy for me to simply not eat. So I'm essentially intermittent fasting right now but without anything near a big enough break in order to actually fuel my activities. I really don't know how I want to approach this. Counting calories doesn't appeal and how can I eat intuitively when my intuition is not to eat? I ate a candy bar after my run today because I had sugar cravings and it was available. I know this was not a bad thing to have done but even with it when I juggle up total calories in my head I'm coming in well under 2000 calories and that really isn't enough. My weight also took a bit of a sharp slump where it's been edging downwards slowly for a while. Did a run on Tuesday and today. Tuesday's run was decent if not as good as Sunday but today's run was pretty awful. I'm taking it on myself to eat before I run. Or put another way I'm going to eat breakfast. Fasted cardio is one of those things that seem good on paper but isn't particularly effective.

Yeah that's a thing. I can say it's a lot easier when you are able to hold a faster pace. Relearning how to ultra shuffle is a bit of a pain. I really hope that I can pick up pace relatively quickly after this but time will tell. It's better to run more miles slower than fewer faster.