Finally got in a pretty solid core strength and stretching workout on Friday. Good thing, because I needed it on Saturday. Wrangling a 5-year-old and a 19-month-old at the park is a great workout, especially when the 5-year-old wants to kick a ball around with you and the 19-month-old wants to wander off and explore. I was regularly running off to bring back the 19-month-old, then running and kicking with the 5-year-old. Combine that with doing a little upper body strength training on the playground equipment, and it was a fairly solid amount of exercise.

But that put my Saturday afternoon plans on hold when it stimulated a mild attack of sciatica. My plans to power-wash the garage floor while the baby napped turned into Daddy taking a nap too. The best I did was walking a circuit of the neighborhood (about a quarter mile) with the boys to see if there were any other kids out to play with.

The sciatica was better come Sunday, but not good enough for me to feel up to anything strenuous, so I took Sunday easy.

Goals for the coming week are 3 walks of at least 1 mile, 2-3 core strength and stretching workouts, and some small adjustments to my diet to cut some of the excess fat and calories. This morning, instead of my normal breakfast burrito with 6 slices of bacon, 2+ eggs, and 1/2 cup of shredded cheese in it, I had a bowl of Kirkland Cranberry Macadamia Nut cereal and a cup of low-fat milk. Do I feel as sated and warm in my tummy as I used to after the breakfast burrito? No. Do I feel just as sleepy? Yes. So no immediate sense of greater health or vitality from this lighter breakfast, but it's a process. Gotta give it a little time to kick in.

Just gotta keep making little incremental changes each week and hope those changes add up to me being able to run a 5k obstacle course come September.

On Wednesday, I ended up walking a different course than I did on Monday. My wife's car was in the shop, so she borrowed my car and was going to meet me at the Park and Ride to pick me up in the afternoon. When my bus got into the Park and Ride early, I decided not to waste 15 minutes waiting for her when I could get in a little exercise and began hiking home. I got a good half mile or more into my hike before my wife came along, going toward the Park and Ride and picked me up.

This morning, I overslept, and got an unintended mini workout. If I don't get to the Park and Ride before 7, parking gets very difficult to find. I had to park deep in BFE. Counting my paces and multiplying by about a 19-20 inch stride, I parked about 1/8th of a mile further from my stop than I normally do. So getting to and from the car today will add an extra quarter mile to my daily walking.

Remember, I'm seriously out of shape, so the first four weeks is just getting up to a 2 mile walk without significant pain in my back or lower body. Every little bit of extra exercise, stretching, and walking helps.

Next progress blog: Sunday night. See ya then.

For those of you who do not know, I'm planning to run The Warrior Dash in just under 12 weeks. I am 41, very overweight, bad back, and haven't walked more than a half mile in a stretch in over a year. I don't get winded going up the stairs in my house, but if I don't turn things around, that's not far off.

The Warrior Dash is basically a 5k run combined with an obstacle course. I'm going to skip some of the obstacles, like wading through a bog and crawling under barbed wire, but I'm hoping to complete the 3.15 mile course and at least 7 out of the 11 obstacles in an hour or less.

I just did my first training session, a simple 3/4 mile walk with some mild up and downhill components. I finished it in the target time of under 20 minutes without huffing and puffing too much. But my lower back was screaming.

A combo of gaining back the weight I lost last year plus being really lax on core strength exercises since then put the pressure on my lower back, and turned on the pain signals in the last quarter mile. I'd planned to incorporate a little bit of core-strength into the training routine, but I think I'm going to have to be more aggressive with it. If I don't get the abs toned up and taking more of the strain off my back, I'm not going to be able to make it, because my back will fail me before my lungs or legs do.

This isn't about weight loss, though the added activity may prompt some. I'm trying to go from total couch & computer potato to doing a 5k obstacle course in 12 weeks. The numbers I'm going to worry about during the next 12 weeks are not how much I weigh or how much I eat, but how far I can go and how fast I can do it.

Wish me luck.

Slate had an interesting article last week on the overuse of prescription heartburn drugs like Prilosec. If you read through it, the author links the overuse of these drugs to doctors being too quick to write a prescription instead of getting a better understanding of the problem or doing lifestyle counseling instead. The author then takes the next step to say that paying for all these prescriptions is a major part of why our healthcare costs are skyrocketing.

Now, the fact that doctors are prescribing a new prescription medicine when a generic cousin is available is a problem that increases costs, especially in the light that the new medicine is not significantly better than the old one in any particular way. But the practice of dashing off a prescription and moving on cannot be blamed entirely on the doctors. It can be blamed to a certain extent on the way our healthcare system is structured.

Insurance companies do not have billing codes for 15-minute blocks of time. They have billing codes for office visits and patient assessments. Your doctor gets the same amount of money if they spend half an hour with you or 5 minutes with you. If they want to make enough to pay their mortgage, car payment, health insurance (you'd be surprised how expensive insurance is for doctors), they have to see a certain number of patients per day. Sometimes they work on salary for a clinic or HMO, but then they have to go through performance reviews which count how many patients they're seeing in a day.

Talk may be cheap, but not when you're talking to a lawyer, doctor, or other professional who expects a certain hourly rate far in excess of what you and I make. And insurers seem to have done the math and decided that they're paying less for prescriptions than they would for longer office visits.

But it's not just the insurance system that promotes overprescribing. We're Americans, goddamnit. If we go to the doctor and complain that hitting ourselves in the head with hammers is giving us headaches, we don't want our doctor to tell us to stop doing that. We want our doctor to prescribe the medicine we saw on TV that stops the headaches associated with hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. We don't feel better unless we walk out of there with a prescription in our hot little hands.

We already know "bed rest, fluids, Tylenol, and time" are what you do for a cold, and if we know that, we don't want to hear that from a doctor. We came to the doctor for expert advice, not common horse sense. And thus the doctor feels pressured to prescribe something. And that's likely a big contributor to the study showing nearly half of kids getting prescribed antibiotics for colds that won't even respond to antibiotics. I'm sure many doctors tried to put up a fight when they were young and idealistic, but got beat over the head so often by stupid parents who wanted a feel better pill, even if there wasn't one, they started handing out antibiotics just to avoid the argument.

High-priced prescriptions do add to the health care overhead. But so does procedure-based payment that encourages doctors to tag 'em and bag 'em. So do people who don't feel like they've been treated unless they get a prescription. So do people who would rather use pills to relieve the discomfort caused by bad lifestyle choices than suffer the self-denial of making good lifestyle choices. We're all to blame for our overmedication and the associated costs, and it won't get better until attitudes change in a number of camps.