Running and I have one of those love-hate relationships that makes you roll your eyes. We argue a lot. We break up. We get back together. It’s good for a while. Then I cheat. Then we break up again. Two weeks later, he calls me wanting to forgive and forget. We get back together. This is how it’s been for years.

It started back when I was a kid. I was quite an athletic child, always top of my class in gymnastics and accomplished in several styles of dance. When we had those standardised fitness tests in school, I always came out at the head of the chin-ups and sit-ups charts. I was also a very strong swimmer and played softball for a couple of seasons when I was nine or ten.

But running was a different story. We used to have to run the mile in phys ed, and for some reason I could never do it. I’d get about a quarter of the way and be in such agony that I had to lie down, on the track if necessary. My legs felt fine; it was my lungs that were screaming for me to stop. My P.E. teachers always said that it was because I was out of shape, but I didn’t see how that could be possible— I was an active child who was exercising everyday. To this day I wonder if I had some kind of asthma or other condition that kept me from completing the mile like everyone else. Even the little weaklings in my class could run the mile, but I just lay on the ground gasping for breath, my lungs on fire.

It annoyed me that I couldn’t do it, so running became this Thing with me. I looked for ways around the breathing issue. The obvious choice was to not run such a long way. I have strong legs, and I quickly discovered that I could sprint well over short distances. In high school I became quite good at the 50 and 100 yard races. I could even pull off a 400 if I had to, but that was my limit. Any more than that and I couldn’t handle the breathing.

As I phased into adulthood and left structured exercise classes behind, I started to wonder if I could train myself to run further. Over the years I’ve struggled with this— I’ve managed a couple of 5ks in my time, but nothing longer than that. My breathing problems settled down a bit as I got older, though I still struggle to some extent. When I was in my early 20s, I started to get this idea in my head that I wanted to run a marathon, to prove to Running that it was I who was the boss of him and not the other way around. I made plan after plan to run various marathons. In every case, I’d let my training get to the point where I could run about 5k, and then I’d plateau and eventually give up.

So now I’m 34, still running semi-regularly for fitness, still not breaking the 5k barrier. I had kind of decided that maybe I was just a 5k runner and there wasn’t any horizon past that.

Then, back in March of this year I discovered that we have a marathon right here in Antalya. Right here in my face where I can’t ignore it. Because I’m a location blogger, it made sense to cover the event. I got a press pass from the organisers, and Emirhan and I rode the press bus all the way around the course during the race. This was the first time I’d ever seen a marathon in real life, and I was both inspired and frightened by what I saw. Those who finished did so in great agony, and some of the unlucky ones were picked up on the course by ambulances. It made me wonder why people put themselves through it. It also made me wonder if I should take up marathon training again.

After the race Emirhan and I had a talk. He’s a bodybuilder and athlete himself, and seeing the marathon up close really made him want to do it. I shared with him the story of my lifelong battle to run. We sort of shrugged and said, “maybe next year,” but at that time we had some tentative plans to do some traveling abroad and we didn’t think we’d be here in March 2008. In any case, we made a vague promise that if those travel plans fell through, then we’d definitely do the Antalya marathon instead.

Well, this week we learned that we won’t be abroad after all. We’ll be right here in Antalya in March of next year. So I guess that means we’re officially training for the marathon now.

I’m terrified. I’m going to take some convincing. I’m not worried about Emirhan— he’s unbelievably fit and could probably run the marathon tomorrow. But I don’t want him to have to worry about me. I want to be prepared enough so that he can concentrate on his own race (which will be over much sooner than mine) and I can concentrate on what I’m doing.

This means I have to start training now. Summer is coming, and with it the 50-degree heat that Antalya is famous for (that’s 122, folks). Can I train in those conditions? Maybe, if I train at five in the morning. Am I going to encounter lung issues again? I won’t know until I start running longer distances. Maybe I’ll have to see a doctor about that. I’ll definitely have to get some new running shoes. Some good socks. Maybe a couple of cute outfits to motivate me. And I’m going to have to keep a serious eye on what I’m eating.

Having said that, I don’t want to get so obsessed with all those things that the fun gets sucked out of running. I actually enjoy running now, and if something stops being enjoyable then I just won’t do it, end of story. I already gave up my heart rate monitor because it was turning me into a numbers freak instead of a runner. So I have to strike a balance. I know that for me, my internet support network is important. I have lots of online friends who know lots of stuff about running, and I’ll be calling on them when times are tough. I’ll probably also join whatever social networks I run across. I’ll find ways to keep this fun.

I still don’t quite believe I’m up for this, but maybe that’s just because I’m tired today and even doing the laundry seems like a lot of effort. Everyone I’ve asked so far thinks I’m definitely capable of running the full distance, so that’s a good sign. I have very supportive friends. Now I just need to find it in me to live up to my half of the bargain. Watch this space. But until further notice, you should consider this an official declaration of my intention to run 26.2 miles here in Antalya on the 2nd of March next year. It makes me nervous just to say that. Yikes.

I mentioned a couple of days ago about my annoyance with fad diets… it still amazes me that even in this age of information, reasonably intelligent adults will go on fad diet after fad diet, lose weight and then immediately gain it all back again plus an extra twenty pounds, and still latch onto whatever the next fad diet is as if this one is going to be the one. As my doctor once told me, “if any diet worked, there would only be that one diet, and it would be called The Diet, and everyone in the world would be on it and there wouldn’t be any fat people.” Well said. I’m constantly baffled at the awful things people will do to their organs and systems (ketosis, anyone? my stepmother got ill from that) because they think a fad diet will solve all their problems.

The above picture is me, believe it or not, back in December 2003, just before I moved to Turkey. I was 240 pounds (109 kilograms) in that photo. I came to Turkey in May of 2004, and by the one-year anniversary of the above photo (i.e. in December 2004), I was down to 160 pounds (you can see a current photo of me on the about page).

So how did I do it? Well, I promise you I wouldn’t have kept the weight off this long if I’d lost it on a fad diet. No, it was moving to Turkey that did it, the entire lifestyle change. Especially when I first moved here, I had some friends who ran a restaurant up the road from me, and I ate there all the time because I don’t cook. I didn’t know how to ask for things in Turkish (still don’t to a great extent), and so I just had to eat whatever they brought me, which was the same thing they were all eating— lean meat or fish, rice, and salad. I didn’t know how to ask for sauce or mayonnaise. I didn’t know how to ask for seconds. So I didn’t have any of those things. I also didn’t have my car (I sold it when I moved to Turkey), so I walked everywhere. Everywhere.

I also didn’t have my scale, so at first I didn’t notice what was happening, but eventually it became clear that my big-girl clothes were falling off of me. So I bought some smaller stuff. And then two months later I had to buy smaller clothes again. And again. And now, three years later, I can’t remember what it was like to drive everywhere, to drive to a restaurant and order a giant meal with gravy all over everything. I still walk most everywhere, and I still eat the standard lean-and-healthy Turkish fare.

When I tell people how fat I used to be, at first they’re surprised, but then they say, “oh yes, of course you were fat, you’re American.” But that is their mistaken stereotype— I was never fat when I lived in the United States. I didn’t get fat until I moved to England in 1998. Gravy and creamy sauces are very popular in England, as are fried potatoes (or some other kind of potato) with every restaurant meal. I’m a fan of all of those things, and if you offer them to me, I’m going to eat them (or at least, I would have at that time). Another unfair stereotype is that English food is bland and tasteless— I can assure you that’s not the case. England has some of the most amazing restaurants in the world. I should know, I ate at most of them. It took me six years to gain all that weight, and not a pound of it was gained on U.S. soil.

So I guess what I’m saying is that although it may seem like an extreme solution to sell your car and move to a Mediterranean country where you don’t speak the language in order to train yourself to change your lifestyle and eating habits, it is one way to do it, and though for me it was an accidental side effect, I’m so thankful to Turkey and Turkish cuisine for helping me pull myself together and realise what a toll Western overeating and laziness had taken on my body. I do still enjoy my treats, but I walk them off, and I now understand the importance of moderation and balance in my meals. For me, this is a change for life.

With only a couple of weeks left until the new year, it’s time to start thinking about plans and targets for 2007. The word “resolutions” doesn’t work for me, and my guess is it doesn’t for you, either— think back over your new year’s resolutions from years past and be honest about your failure-to-success ratio of projects you started on the first day of the year. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Me too.

But ever since I was a kid I’ve always been a list-maker and goal-setter, and many times people ask me how I manage to get such a high percentage of my to-dos done. The key for me was changing the way I set my goals. Writing out a magic list of ways in which you’re suddenly going to start being the perfect you on the first of January is ridiculous. As a life coach friend of mine once said regarding the passion to succeed, “if you don’t want something badly enough that you’re desperate to start down the road to it today, right this second, then you probably don’t want it badly enough to ever complete it, period. You’re sure as hell not going to magically shoot out of a cannon on January first and straight over the finish line, if the state of your life isn’t disturbing enough to you right now to start doing something about it immediately. You’ll get an initial burst of energy from the cannon, sure, but it won’t carry you far enough, and eventually you’ll land with a thud. Better to have a system in place by which you can make small, consistent steps at any time of year and gradually chip away at those goals.”

So about ten years ago I switched from the Big December Resolution-Setting Extravaganza to a more reasonable system of writing goals down exactly when they formed in my head (be that in December or May or whenever), and measuring my commitment to them by my ability to tiptoe towards those targets in small, measured increments. At first I used to go through my list once a month and tidy it up— remove goals that were no longer relevant, cross completed goals off the list, and reorganise the remaining items by priority. But I still missed the hope and excitement of sitting down in December. There’s just something about the turn of the year that makes one want to have a fresh start. So I did what I always do and took all the parts I liked from each system and combined them into a custom plan that works for me. Nowadays I do light list management on a month to month basis, just reorganising obvious things and adding items as necessary, and I save my big list overhaul for December. I enjoy doing things that way, and for the past decade or so it seems to have worked for me. I certainly get a lot of comments about how much I get done.

You, of course, might not find my system works for you, and the good news about that is that now it’s easy to create your own custom way of working on your goals, thanks to the internet. Back in the day, it used to be that your options for practical goal list management were few and simple: pen and paper was the most likely choice. And the good thing about that system was that you could tape your goal list to the wall for easy, constant reference. Of course, you can still do that, there’s nothing wrong with it, but these days there’s no need to bother yourself with it if you’d rather hang out on the web (and let’s face it, you would— after all, you’re spending your free time reading this right now).

There are a few online options open to the serious goal setter, but far and away the best service I’ve found is the Robot Co-op‘s flagship site, 43 Things (this is not to be confused with Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, which, although a fantastic personal development site in its own right, deserves separate consideration and is not associated with 43 Things except in that the names are similar, which I’m told is just coincidence). I’ve had a 43 Things account for quite some time, they’ve been around a long while, but I just never got around to really digging through the site and discovering everything that it has to offer. But since it’s that time of year, yesterday I decided to have a look and see if I could improve on my current goal list management system (which for the past few years has been a spreadsheet I keep privately on my local drive).

I’ll admit it, I got sucked in hard. I must have spent twelve hours there yesterday excitedly getting myself settled in and organised and motivated. The great thing about 43 Things (aside from the fact that it’s my favourite price: free) is that what initially appears to be the entire site, the part where you set life goals and define ambitions, is only the very tiniest tip of an iceberg that extends up and down and all around your core list of targets, supporting you from every direction. In addition to the community aspects of the actual 43 Things site (e.g. the ability to cheer other people on, give advice on goals you’ve already achieved, or seek help if you’re having trouble moving forward on a goal), there are also four additional web sites, all related to 43 Things, which don’t require separate registration and which you can use freely to supplement your 43 Things experience. Here’s an overview:

• 43 Things: Set goals, show off achievements, get help with your obstacles, help others over theirs, cheer each other on, and get ideas for new things to try.
• 43 Places: Same basic idea as 43 Things, but all about places you want to visit and places you’ve already been— anything from countries and cities to attractions and restaurants.
• 43 People: Half social networking and half role model setting… this is the part of the system I’m still getting to grips with.
• Lists of Bests Here you can make lists of anything you want, and work through your own lists or the lists of others. For instance, one of my goals on 43 Things is to “read 50 books in 2007,” and so I’m going to make a list of 50 books on Lists of Bests and keep track of my progress there.
• All Consuming: A great companion to Lists of Bests, All Consuming details the list items you’ve consumed, and makes it easy for you to share your experiences with others and get suggestions for new items to consume. Consumption categories include anything and everything from books to CDs to films to food and any other custom category you care to invent.

You see now how I spent so much time on this yesterday. It’s a labyrinth. But once you get the hang of how everything seamlessly works together, it becomes fun and I think in the long run it’s going to help me become a lot more productive even than I already am. The one thing that was really missing from my previous spreadsheet system was the aspect of accountability and support— if I failed or gave up, no one knew, and no one was there to console or encourage. With 43 Things, it’s possible that items in danger of sliding downhill can be salvaged, because there’s the help (and let’s face it, pressure) of all those who have already accomplished the same goal and are willing to show you how they got past the obstacles.

So give this to yourself as a holiday gift— sign up here, and get excited not only about 2007, but about the rest of your life.

NOTE: neither the following post nor anything else on this web site should be construed as medical advice. I am only conveying my own experiences. As always in this life, you alone are responsible for the outcome of your own actions. If you want to listen to your doctor, listen to your doctor. If you don’t, don’t. Your decision has nothing to do with me and I am not responsible for anything that happens to you.

Back when I was a kid, maybe ten or so, I remember seeing a segment on one of those daytime TV shows, about how doctors are fallible people with fragile personalities like the rest of us. The point of the story was that many doctors feel pressured, both by their own egos and by patients who expect them to be magic answer factories, to come up with an instant diagnosis and a solution for every ailment. The result can be that patients are misdiagnosed and receive inappropriate treatment. The host of the TV show suggested that patients should use their brains when they’re seeking medical advice, and voice their suspicions if a doctor’s diagnosis doesn’t sit right with them.

As a ten-year-old girl this information floored me. A doctor can be wrong? I have to worry about this? At this early point it hadn’t yet occurred to me to question adults, never mind adults with authority. But that TV show stuck with me, and as I got older I fine-tuned my radar to the point where the very first hint of malarkey from a doctor would prompt me to bring him back down to earth in a most abrupt way (doctors hate me, but I am the queen of avoiding unnecessary treatment). In recent years the internet has made this even easier, by allowing a smart person to seek out information and have a good idea of what’s going on before ever setting foot in a doctor’s office. Again, I’m sure doctors hate this— there must be zillions of idiots every day who flock to emergency rooms convinced they’re dying of stomach cancer, only to learn that the mexican food they had last night simply didn’t agree with them. But for those who are level-headed and savvy of web nonsense, the internet can be a great source of knowledge.

Case in point: six months ago I slipped on a marble floor and put my hand out to break my fall. I landed on my thumb, which was violently yanked back under my wrist. Suspecting nothing worse than a sprain, I left the hand alone and avoided using it as much as possible. After two weeks, the soreness had not subsided, so I made an appointment at the hospital, who referred me to their head of orthopedics. I was x-rayed and examined, and within half an hour I was told that I’d torn my ulnar collateral ligament. I was then advised that the ligament would never repair itself, and I should immobilise the joint for two weeks and prepare for surgery, which would involve taking a piece of ligament from another joint and screwing it onto the relevant bones. Yikes.

Even as I sat in the doctor’s office with my hand throbbing, I was thinking this diagnosis couldn’t be right. I’m not sure where my doubts came from, because Turkey has an excellent health care system with state-of-the-art facilities and highly trained professionals, but I just couldn’t picture myself having surgery for this. I did, however, welcome the idea of immobilisation, and so I bought the recommended thumb support and started using that immediately. The doctor warned me not to be fooled by any apparent improvement that using the brace might indicate. I took his warning with a grain of salt and went home with a reminder card for my follow-up appointment.

When I got home with my brace I started trawling the internet for any information I could find about my diagnosis. As always with any topic, I found a spectrum of opinions ranging from one end of crazy (“leave the ligament alone and The Lord will heal it if it is His desire”) to the other (“forget it, it’s ruined, just cut the whole hand off and throw it away”), and everything in between. But what really spoke to me were the hundreds of people I found who had the same injury I had, and who, like me, didn’t think that surgery was the answer. Some of them had tried alternative therapies, others had relied on gels and creams, all with varying degrees of success. Very few reported complete recovery without surgery. Some had developed painful arthritis in the joint. It was all very scary to read.

But I firmly believe that regardless of general truths and blanket tenets, each person is a different case to be considered separately, and I knew that just because surgery was the right choice for many people, it didn’t necessarily mean it was the right choice for me. So I pressed on with my stubbornness. I researched alternative therapies. I also read up about doctors who are pressured by hospital administrators to recommend surgery automatically for certain listed conditions because surgery provides greater income for the hospital— someone has to pay for all those facilities and fancy machines, after all.

My greatest source of information, however, came from the mouths of people I actually spoke to in the flesh. Basically I asked every person I encountered whether they had any experience with torn ligaments. A surprising percentage had, and almost all of those rolled their eyes and gave me the knowing nod when I said that my doctor had recommended surgery. Surgery had been recommended to them, as well, and many of them had also declined. Perhaps they’d gone with physical therapy or with another treatment, but in just about every case the ligaments healed eventually despite what the doctor had said about surgery being necessary. Or, in a few cases, the person had caved under the doctor’s pressure and the surgery had actually rendered the joint more problematic than it had been in the first place.

I tore up the card for my follow-up appointment and made the decision to wait it out. I didn’t have a specific plan as such, but in general I thought I’d continue to wear my brace for six months and see how that went (I’d read about many people for whom simple immobilisation was the magic answer), and if that didn’t work then I’d cross the next bridge.

I don’t remember the exact date of the first time I forgot to put on my brace. I guess I’d been wearing it pretty faithfully for a couple of months, and then one day I got out of the shower and just forgot to put it on, which indicates to me that things were already healing— usually within a few minutes of removing the brace the pain and weakness would remind me to put it back on. I only wore it sporadically after that, until eventually it got lost somewhere (it’s probably under the sofa now). There were a few days here and there where things felt a bit delicate, but I was advised by a skier friend of mine (who has torn many ligaments in her career) that the road to recovery is never linear and I shouldn’t worry unless things seemed to be getting steadily worse.

Fast-forward to last night, sitting with my hands out in front of me, staring at them, wiggling the thumbs around and for a brief second trying to remember if it was the left one or the right one that was injured. I pointed out to my boyfriend that the range of motion is pretty much the same in both thumbs now. I gave him a demonstration wiggle, to which he responded with a warning to be careful and not overdo it. It’s so tempting to test the limits of the joint when you can’t quite believe it’s better.

And to think, if I had just blindly accepted what the doctor told me, I’d have screws in my thumb now, and scars, and possible nerve damage, and at least a year of physical therapy ahead of me. And I’d be several thousand dollars lighter in the pocket. It remains to be seen, of course, whether I develop arthritis in my thumb, but I think there comes a point where you have to weigh the maybes against the other maybes and make your choices. Those who have surgery often develop arthritis anyway, so even if it does happen in later years, it will impossible to say what exactly was the cause.

I’m not recommending that you should go out and tell your doctor where to stick his advice. There’s a reason medical schools exist, and in general doctors are competent professionals who know what they’re talking about. But one thing they don’t know, and indeed can’t know, is what it feels like to be you, and how your body feels from the inside. Learn to recognise red flags and trust your suspicions in a well-informed manner. Each of us is an intelligent, intuitive individual, and in this age of the ridiculously obvious safety advisory (warning: hot coffee is hot), it’s empowering to look out for yourself as well, because no one is better equipped to do so than you.

I’ll keep you updated on the thumb.

If you’re looking to shake your life up or hit the reset button, here’s as good a place to start as any: Hack Yourself, an essay on self-reinvention by writer Michael Montoure. I first saw this piece several years ago, and though I’m usually unmoved by the great majority of nonsense written under the heading of “self-help literature,” I found that Monture’s essay voiced, in a concise way, a lot of things we all know but still need to be reminded of from time to time. Well worth the five minutes it takes to read it. But be careful, if you’re like me you might find yourself suddenly packing up and moving to another continent because you’ve decided that’s who you are now.

And to that, I say go for it.