The Loathing of This Not-So-Long Distance Runner

I'd like to write a real post for you, but I have to run.

Not figuratively. For reals.

One foot in front of the other, knees up, arms pumping. Ooof. I'm breathing heavy thinking about it. Medic!

I'm still stumbling through my training program to help me stumble through a 5K in Baltimore to raise money on behalf of Li’l Diva and Cure JM Foundation next month. With only a few weeks to go, I can say without qualification that when I keel over that finish line I will leave one sweaty but fit corpse.

You may recall that I've had flirtations with jogging before, usually after unsuccessful bouts of buttoning my pants. Nearly of all of these fitness fits ended with not-so-subtle reminders from my body that running is best left to refrigerators.

However, our real family runner, My Love, had knee surgery a few weeks ago following advice from her doctor that the bottom half of her right leg might randomly fall off. This would require us to change her name to Peg.

As a result, I'm taking her place. I'm also working on an apology letter to the National Asphalt Makers and Layers Association.

I've been adhering to a running schedule that I found online (because everything on the Internet is helpful and true) that gradually lengthens my distance and running time in hope of turning this couch potato (honestly, I'm more of a "desk doughnut") into a 5K competitor. Three times a week, I’ve been slogging around the track at school near our house and, as of today, I can confidently report that [checks pulse] I'm still alive.

Running has definitely increased my stamina. I now only require CPR every other run. It hasn't helped with my memory or math skills, though. I've lost count of my laps several times. Sadly, each time my goal was running three.

Yet somehow this past weekend, I managed 2.25 miles (3.62 kilometers for the metrically inclined or 7920 cubits for those building flood arks). It didn’t feel good but I’d be seriously concerned if it did.

The one thing all my huffing and puffing has produced, aside from yellow stains under the armpits of several T-shirts, is a smile on My Love’s lips. Every time I roll my eyes and groan "I'm going for a run," her entire face lights up the way mine does when party hosts offer me beer. Of course, these days My Love is on a lot of Vicodin.

Whoa. Look at the time. Let me throw some sneakers on my feet, Band-Aids on my nipples and Vaseline between my thighs. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I write.

And obviously, I have some real issues with chafing.

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Our family is halfway to our fundraising goal of $20,000. Please throw a few tax-deductible dollars our way to help Li’l Diva and other children with juvenile myositis kick this disease’s butt.

Donate to the Uncools’ FirstGiving page at http://tinyurl.com/JM-donate-online.

$50K Closer to Curing Juvenile Myositis

It’s official.

You have helped Cure JM Foundation win $50,000 to research the cause, treatment and cure for juvenile myositis, the rare autoimmune disease that Li’l Diva and our family has dealt with for the past 10 years.

Your votes, tweets and shared Facebook links helped us receive almost 9,000 votes in the latest Chase Community Giving contest. That put us in 20th place out of more 4,000 (yes – 4,000!) organizations vying for the money.

Not bad for a handful of concerned parents and family members volunteering their time to help the few thousand children in the United States affected by this mysterious disease.

Your kindness to my family and our larger Cure JM family in the past four years has helped us win $300,000 in grants, raise about $50,000 in donations and spread awareness throughout the digital world and beyond.

You wear it well, friends.

Thank you, again and again. Not just from me, but from the children your caring will be helping soon. Here are a few of them:

 

If you’d like to do more, please donate to Cure JM by supporting my “run” (and yes, the quotes are warranted) in Baltimore next month on behalf of Li’l Diva. The goal widget is now posted on the blog home page if you want to check out our progress in reaching our goal.

A Vote for Normal

My Love is perplexed which is annoying because that’s my household specialty.

“How does Cure JM only have 2,800 votes in the Chase Community Giving contest? It only takes a minute and a few clicks on Facebook. I’m not expecting us to win $250,000 again but we should be able to get to number 11 for the $100,000,” she said to me last night after an hour of conference call brainstorming with other parents of kids with juvenile myositis.

She looked at me.

“Hey, I’m trying,” I said. “I’ve Facebooked. I’ve tweeted. I’ve emailed people. Now I’m hitting people up via instant message. I never IM people. My online friends are thinking I’ve been replaced by a pod person who will next be trying to convince them to try some tasty soylent green.”

:: crickets ::

“Soylent green,” I said. “It’s people.”

:: crickets leaping to their deaths::

Then I threw my daughter under the bus.

“Hey, what about the girl? What’s Li’l Diva doing? This is all to benefit kids like her. She has a Facebook account. I hear the youngun’s love the Facebook and the mouse clicking and the liking and the poking!”

Li’l Diva was summoned away from another cringe worthy episode of Dance Moms to face the parental music.

She spoke like the middle-schooler she is.

She said, “I don’t want other kids to know I have a disease.”

Correction. She spoke like the average, normal middle-schooler she is underneath the makeup she started wearing this year to hide the telltale mark of juvenile myositis – the bright butterfly rash across her face.

My Love and I looked at one another.

“You don’t have to say you have the disease,” My Love said. “Say you are just trying to help kids who do have it.”

All I could do was nod.

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Cure JM Foundation, the tiny nonprofit that searches for a cure for our daughter's autoimmune disease, is SERIOUSLY in the running for $100,000 from Chase Community Giving and still has a chance for the big $250,000 grant.

This is a quick one-time vote (OK - two times if you vote then share the link and someone clicks it; three times if you are a Chase bank/credit card holder) that takes only a couple of mouse clicks. Please vote for us and our charity partner, Rett Syndrome Research, before Sept. 19 and spread the word.

Here’s some details: http://www.curejm.org/chase/index.php

Here's the voting link: http://tinyurl.com/click2curejm-rett

Here’s a 2-minute video that will require a tissue or two:

Cure JM Before I Keel Over Trying

You know those people who obnoxiously tweet, Facebook and blog widget their running times and distances?

I hate them.

I exaggerate.

I only hate every fiber of their obnoxious “put down the Doritos and look at me acting all superior and health-conscious” beings.

Know who hates them more than me?

My Love.

But only because she can’t be one of them.

After running two marathons and three half-marathons over the years to raise money to help find a cure for Li’l Diva’s juvenile myositis, My Love has been officially scratched from the Baltimore Running Festival on Oct. 13, 2012. She goes under the knife next week to repair a torn meniscus in one of her knees.

In her place, will be …

Summer Vacation Lessons Learned

In a fit of over-caffeinated ambition, My Love and I scheduled more family trips into eight weeks this summer than the Brady Bunch did in five years on television.

It didn't take a crazy old prospector to lock us in an abandoned jail for us to soon realize the pitfalls of all this family togetherness; however, I suspect the engine fire in our minivan may have something to do with an ancient tiki. It also may have had something to do with my speeding through a Lake Michigan sized puddle lined with dead leaves and pine needles in an effort to get away from the constant howls of "How much longerrrrrr?"

Nevertheless, it was an adventure-filled two months.

We experienced Fourth of July among the dehydrated waves of grain in the Great Plains.

We visited the birthplace of the women's suffrage movement in upstate New York where we spent most of our time visiting a museum dedicated to the movie "It's a Wonderful Life."

We rode a boat under Niagara Falls, boogie-boarded in the North Carolina surf and learned the art of heckling the opposing pitcher in near-empty minor league baseball stadiums.

Here are a handful of lessons and observations from our summer vacations:

The annoying mosquito to parental drivers' ears is no longer the backseat bellow of "Are we there yet?" It's the middle row of the minivan whine of "When will we start getting 3G again?"

According to my 12-year-old daughter, when going on a weeklong trip to the scalding flatlands of Nebraska where we'll spend most of our time in towns smaller than her middle school with her grandparents, who are farmers, and my wife's best friends, who are undertakers, the most absolutely necessary item to bring is a flat iron for her hair.

If you think the United States has cornered the market on gaudy tourist traps, you've never visited the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. It's as if downtown Las Vegas and Times Square birthed a circus geek.

The first question children ask when you arrive at your lodging destination has evolved from "Does it have a pool?" to "Does it have free Wi-Fi?"

Provident Bank Park, the Westchester County home of the Rockland Boulders baseball team of independent Can-Am League, is one of the nicest minor league ballparks you'll ever visit. Unfortunately, the quality of pitching embarrasses Little Leaguers.

Sonic Drive-Ins offer 54 types of milkshakes. I kid you not – 54. However, whenever we stop at one, all my daughter wants is a cup of their ice pellets.

Environmentally conscientious coastal communities, such as those on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, have banned supermarkets from using plastic grocery bags. This is good news unless you bring your dog with you on vacation. And he's prone to traveler's diarrhea. Like ours.

The people of Nebraska love shooting off fireworks, just not fireworks sold in Nebraska. Those are "church fireworks," in the words of my wife's brother. Instead, you need ones from neighboring Missouri, which contain enough liftoff and explosive power to qualify as military grade anti-ballistic missiles.

There are many reasons why you can always get a table for four at the Hard Rock Café at the height of the dinner hour. Not one is good.

A modern family of four now packs more electronic communications devices for an extended weekend trip than it does pairs of clean underwear.

The best beach time on the East Coast is after 5 p.m. when the shadows grow longer and the adult beverages have sufficiently numbed the burning scrapes caused by sand inside your bathing suit liner.

Vaccines We Really Need

A successful school year for your child starts with his or her good health, and that sure beats it starting with you cleaning up Lucky Charms vomit off the Turkish rug.

While there are many tricks to raising a healthy scholar, tricking children into what's good for them is frowned upon these days. Blame those self-appointed "experts" who subscribe to the child-rearing theory known as the Sanctimonious Helicopter Attachment Drone of Uptight Parenting, or just SHAD-UP.

So what can you do as aside from giving junior daily baths in free-range, grass-feed hand sanitizer?

Poke the kid silly with syringes! Preferably ones loaded with bacteria and viruses!

Vaccines have proved to be highly effective at warding off many childhood diseases, so make sure your little one is up-to-date on all required shots before the school year starts.

But wait – there's more!

Scientists who actually got out of the lab enough to meet members of the opposite sex and spawn a child or two, sometimes on purpose, are developing some super new vaccines. The following are currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (now a fully owned subsidiary of ConAgra Foods, a division of Google and a Spike Lee Joint):

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