My 15 Minutes in the Sun

Bishop back in the running
BY ROB ROSE FOR THE SUN CHRONICLE
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:25 AM EST


Paula Bishop overcame a near-death experience to get back on the road. There can only be a handful of people on this planet who have had the experiences that Paula Bishop has had in her 20-year running career. It's hard to conceive of anyone who has been through the spectrum of moments that she has endured in just the past decade.
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ROSE: Runners of the Year, step forward please
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12:16 AM EST

As a runner, it's easy to get discouraged when one views the physical condition of the American people.

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Friday, February 1, is National Wear Red Day. It's the kickoff to the American Heart Association's Heart Health Month. People are encouraged to wear red this Friday to raise awareness about women's heart health issues. Many organizations are participating in different ways. For example, the Boston Bruins will come on the ice between the 2nd and 3rd period of their game tonight in red dresses and shoot goals at a red heart on the ice. A portion of the ticket sales from the game will go to the AHA.

Go Red for Women is a movement sponsored by the American Heart Association. The goal is to educate women about heart disease, methods of detection and prevention, and lifestyle issues that can affect outcomes. The organization uses a red dress as its symbol. Please visit their website (www.GoRedForWomen.org) to learn more.

Before my cardiac arrest eight months ago, I knew intellectually that heart disease was a bigger killer of women than breast cancer, but it was more an interesting fact than a real life issue for me. I have become much more attuned to issues of the heart since my own experience and have been looking for ways to raise awareness among my women friends. So I plan to wear red on Friday and I proudly wear my red dress pin every day. I even purchase a bracelet with hearts and a red dress from Brighton. A portion of the proceeds goes to the Go Red for Women movement.

-P

Tufts 10K

Here I am with my running gal pals at the start of the Tufts 10K. We took the train to Boston, walked from Back Bay Station to the Boston Common, picked up our registration packets, and checked our bags. My fam fam caught up with us and got a picture of us before the race. Notice the dry hair.



Over 5 miles later, you can see that things have changed. I now look like a drowned rat because as soon as we hit the starting line, it started to drizzle. Moments after we crossed the finish line, the drizzle stopped.

My running buddy, K, and I ran the race together, from start to finish. She's the one who was with me when I collapsed back in May. Crossing the finish line together was an emotional moment. I felt very thankful to be able to participate in the race, to be able to run with my best time yet on that race, to share that moment with her, to have other women from Foxboro who joined us, and to have my friends and family there to cheer me on.

The Tufts 10K is a powerful race. You are surrounded by 7,000 other women, each of whom has her own story and her own reason for running. Because of the turns in the course, you have many opportunities to cheer on women who are both faster and slower than you. Families line up along Commonwealth Avenue, cheering their runners and holding up signs. While I won't deny the seriousness of what happened to me, I know that there were many women for whom this was a bigger step. It's both humbling and encouraging to think about all the stories that were out there that day.

Considering where I was in May, I am proud to say that I finished the race and shaved 8 minutes off my time compared to 2 years ago (results are here). I'll never be a fast runner, but I am certainly a thankful runner.

I hope I can do it again next year--maybe with a lot less drama!

Initial Thoughts about Musical Preference Systems

I’m a fan, and loosely a scholar of, Hawaiian music. So today I entered Keali’i Reichel, a well-known pop music artist in Hawai’i, into Pandora’s search engine. Pandora asked if I wanted something similar to “Keali’i Reichel (Holiday).” I said yes. It played a song from Hall and Oates “No Child Should Ever Cry on Christmas Day.” I gave it a thumbs down. The next selection was “Songs from Matengo Folktales” by Bowling Green State University Men’s Chorus. The next several selections were Christmas songs; apparently Pandora locked onto the “holiday” theme. Next I tried a searching for Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (a.k.a. IZ), arguably one of the best-known Hawaiian artists outside of the islands—it couldn’t find him.

Finally I tried searching on the term “Rainbow” hoping to find IZ’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World.” Eventually I saw something by Jake Shimabukuro, a Hawaiian artist. The helpful start message described the piece as featuring folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopations, acoustic guitar riffs, and “a good dose of guitar pickin’.” Not a bad description, I guess, for a ukulele piece. Perhaps the title of the piece, “When My Guitar Gently Weeps” fooled them.

Since I indicated that I liked this piece, Pandora used that as a model for choosing pieces for me. The next selection was “I Surrender All” from 50 Hymns on the Guitar. I guess it was a good dose of guitar pickin’. Subsequent selections included wonderful acoustic guitar pieces by such artists as Pat Kelley and Mark Holizinger, Don Ross, Raina Rose, and other guitartists with whom I was not familiar—but not a single piece of Hawaiian music other than the original Shimabukuro one.

I take this as evidence that programmatic musical preference determination must take into account more than statistical comparisons. I’m still thinking a lot about this, but my main area of concern is that the sense of community around a particular artist or musical style and the concept of identity through music play a large role in musical preference. As a further demonstration, consider a female listener who identifies herself as a lesbian. She likes the Indigo Girls. Based on musical characteristics (folk influences and a good dose of guitar pickin’), would Pandora select a Melissa Etheridge piece (basic rock song structures, extensive vamping, major key tonality, gravelly female voice)? Probably not initially, but to that listener the connection between these artists is real and important. There is considerable overlap in the communities that surround them since all of these women are openly lesbian musicians.

Elements such as community and identify are hard to quantify, but music preference systems will have to come to grips with the sociological and cultural aspects soon.

Testing mapmyrun.com

That should be the 5 mile route above, but it doesn't appear when I view it. Maybe people using a different browser can see it and will let me know. (I'm using Safari on a Mac.) You can access the route here though.

I've been using Map My Run for a while now because I find it fascinating to know down to the one one-hundredth of a mile how far I am running. I want to to know precisely where my splits are so that I can time myself and fret over how I was a few seconds slower than yesterday. I rode my bike (I have an odometer on it that measures in hundredths of a mile) on part of my favorite 3.3 mile route one day so I could determine precisely where the one mile mark is. I've even considered carrying the GPS with me to get a better measurement. In other words, I'm obsessed.

Anyway, check out Map My Run. My recommendation is to select "Follow Roads" to make it easier. They still have some bugs to work out, but it's a great tool if you need an accuracy fix like me.

What a Summer!

So the culprit was not the mosquito but another dear/deer friend here in New England:



That's right, friends. It's a deer tick. I never saw the silly thing and I never knew I'd been bit, but I got a whopping case of Lyme disease in August. Chills, fever, bullseye rash all over my body (hands, arms, legs, and torso). I was sick for over 2 weeks before I was diagnosed. My own fault, really. Though I had suffered through a week of the chills, fever, fatigue, etc., I didn't go to the doctor because--get this--my temperature could be kept around 100 degrees if I stayed on Advil so I stupidly reasoned I must be getting better. Actually I just desparately wanted to go on vacation to New Hampshire so I was willing to convince myself in any way possible that I was not that sick.

The rash broke out while we were in NH. By the time we got home we knew something serious was going on. We quickly figured out it must be Lyme. I went to the doctor and lo and behold, tested positive for LD. I went on the antibiotics. After 2 1/2 weeks I started reacting to those (tingling in the hands, constant flushed feeling) and quit.

So I started the summer with cardiac arrest and ended it with Lyme disease. Surely I am done with the sad tales, right?

Everything has more meaning

One side effect of going through a life-threatening incident like I did is that, at least for now, every ache and pain takes on more significance.

A gland in my left groin (that sound sooo male, I'll just on my bikini line) became very swollen and painful Saturday. Since I had a couple of heart catheterizations during my hospital stay, I was worried that I had some kind of infection from that. But that was over 2 months ago, so that can't be it. By the end of the day Saturday, I had a fever. It's now Monday and I still have the fever and a headache. I'm either too hot or too cold, I ache all over, and I'm exhausted.

I'm not good at being a patient. I keep trying to get up to do things, but I don't make it far before I run out of steam. Yesterday with my fever hovering around 100, I suggested to Dave that maybe a good run would knock it out of my system. He gave You're-An-Idiot Speech #35. He probably would have tied me down to the bed (hmmmm) if I had tried. I had such a horrible night last night that I didn't even suggest it today. But I'm getting cranky from being inactive for so long. This explains why I left the hospital in Boston and wandered the streets in Mission Hill with heart monitor leads stuffed up under my shirt so no one would know I was an escapee.

I probably have a virus (just for fun Dave suggested West Nile) and it will run its course just like it does in other normal human beings. My heart can take it.

And when it's over, I'll go for a run!