Working Class Runner

Today marks the completion of my 46th trip around the sun. I actually twice attempted writing this in advance to auto-post it today. But each time I wrote some before saying said no and deleting it, unconvinced I would sincerely mean much of it once today came. I figured it was better to wait until today and shoot from the hip.

I am just a couple months away from paying off my last major debt: My student loans from college, a debt I’ve been paying for about 20 years. And that payoff almost got delayed after my current loan servicer conveniently lost a large extra payment during a platform conversion this summer. I decided to stop extra payments and just let the smaller auto-payments withdraw until they got around to finding and applying the lost payment (which they finally did late last month). I’m still on track to pay the whole thing off by the end of this year, and then my only debt will be my usual revolving debt (I’m one of those people who charges everything and pays it off after each month).

DIET

I got sick of skin allergies and rashes, which plagued me pretty badly this summer, and eliminated a lot of foods from my regular diet. I cut out chicken entirely, which historically has given me rashes (at least here in Vegas: the region’s chicken apparently contains an allergen). I avoid eating pork because (this runs in my mom’s side of the family) it doesn’t agree with my digestive system. A lot of farmed fish also gives me weird hand/foot rashes overnight.

For animal protein this leaves cows and wild caught fish, which is 95% of the time all the animal products I ever eat. I eat canned fish at work during the week, and beef for dinner most nights. I mix and match what I have during the day on weekends and holidays. I still have occasional chicken or pork in modest doses (e.g. ramen, and if you ever have pizza with meat on it the meat is sourced from chicken/pork), and often there’s no lingering effects.

I still eat a lot of peas and potatoes, now I have steamed carrots more often, and recently I finally swapped out rice for dinner with steamed peas and sometimes carrots.

My appetite and waking up during the night hungry has always been a recurring issue, and in the last few months of cleaning up my diet both of those have finally calmed down.

I finally just stopped worrying about my weight, which has settled in the high 180’s and wouldn’t come down, and focused on fueling life and training. Incidentally, my weight began coming down recently, though I’ve also ramped up training and resumed running regularly after an easy summer. Now that I’m sustainably building volume, it will be interesting to see if my weight stays stable or (as it did in 2017-2018) peels off naturally as I run a lot.

TRAINING

After Vancouver in May, Las Vegas had the hottest summer it’s ever had. I also had my previously mentioned series of random health issues, leading me not to do the marathon I initially planned for the fall.

I spent summer experimenting with and adjusting my weekly training, since the heat and my limited home HVAC made it hard to recover between workouts, plus running workouts indoors in warm conditions were difficult to sustain.

I since learned that in general, at least as long as I continue to live in Las Vegas, I’m best off spending the summer cross training with strength training, and keeping any running to a strategic minimum. When I lived in Chicago and weather was more manageably hot, training during summer was more do-able. So this will probably change should I finally move away again (which I would only do to somewhere cooler; sorry Florida, sorry Texas).

One key development is learning to love the Matrix ascent ellipticals, which come to closest to the cross training ideal I had found on the ARC Trainer.

As Planet Fitness gyms have phased out their ARC Trainers, they’ve also become more consistent about stocking the ascents in their gyms and I’ve actually found they might work a bit better:

• It’s easier to maintain a higher cadence on the ascents than the ARCs. While the ARC range of motion is closer to running for the hips, the cadence of the ascent is not only quicker but the rolling motion is more natural than the pendulum-like swing of the ARC.
• Ellipticals of course involve the arms when used properly. As I got used to using the arm handles on the ascent, I actually found my arms didn’t get tired on longer runs, and likely because of glycogen increases they actually got a little bigger, even if the muscles didn’t necessarily get more toned.
• The ARC’s ideal incline is about 6-8°, while the ascent elliptical set to 100% (10°) still feels as comfortable as the standard 0% while providing more of an elevation gain per stride.
• The ascent’s max incline not only matches (perhaps exceeds) the relative power exerted on the ARC Trainer but also gives your body a lot of natural practice with the angle and motion required on uphill running, easing the body’s adjustment once you actually are running uphill.

While I still support using the ARC Trainer as runner cross training, I can now attest that modern ascent ellipticals are now comparable cross training. Since the ascent is usually the option I have at my gyms, it’s what I mainly use for cross training now.

I still strength train at least once a week. Sometimes I go a couple weeks between workouts. Sometimes I work out 2-3 times in a week. It depends on my schedule more than how I’m feeling: My full body workout is consistent, easy to adjust as needed and easily repeatable. I just did it this morning, in fact.

I still follow an adjusted, slightly shorter version of the full body workout I originally devised in 2022. I typically only do 13 exercises: Instead of both the cable row and lat pulldown I just do one or the other. Also, instead of the adduction and abduction, I adapted a Piriformis Stretch into a crunch exercise for the abductors, and do a sitting butterfly crunch for the adductors. I also moved the exercise order around a bit for logistics, though beyond doing the tougher compound exercises earlier in the workout the order isn’t super important.

I’ve dabbled in strength training other, more conventional ways, but always find that this workout is better overall and come back to it.

WHAT NEXT?

Another ongoing consideration this past year is, once my debt slate is clear, what I’m going to do going forward.

I know I don’t want to grow old in Las Vegas. However, the last three times I made a major life move I knew exactly where I was going and why.

I knew I wanted to live in Seattle in 2004. I knew I wanted to live in Chicago in 2014. I knew I wanted to come back to Vegas and get my ongoing debt cleaned up for good in 2019.

Today, I don’t have a clear destination in mind. I know it’s not a good idea to make a move when you don’t have a clear reason to make it. Without getting into detail, there’s several feasible cities I’ve loosely considered moving to this past year, good arguments for living in all of them, and various problems with living in all of them…. not to mention being far from family again (though the latter’s diffused a bit by multiple siblings having finally moved out of Vegas with their families in the last couple years; now we’re all separated no matter what!).

One key is I’ve since found the heat and dry air is a factor negatively affecting my sleep, itself something I’ve been working on for years. While I’ve made strides and improved on that front, my recovery can improve dramatically living somewhere else.

Another obvious factor I mentioned earlier is that (while restaurant portions are always bigger) the general food quality in Las Vegas isn’t as good. This is the only place where my chicken allergy flares up, so there’s clearly some additive they give the chickens in this region that triggers it. Living somewhere else would allow me to enjoy chicken again. They also have consistently better, more organic produce elsewhere.

The major issue with a move: I like my current day-job situation, though it’s also a pair of golden handcuffs. Barring unexpected fame and fortune, I’m certain I won’t have a job situation this good ever again. Leaving here to live somewhere else would be a significant downgrade in pay, working conditions and benefits, among other drawbacks, even if living somewhere else in itself would be far better for my quality of life. Objectively, it’s a very bad idea to leave a situation this good.

But the tradeoff is I have to stay in Las Vegas. While much of my family is here, life across much of the board in Las Vegas is not a great situation here nor will it be, for all sorts of reasons I won’t get into here. I’ve made it work, but it only works to a well-short point. Also, the national economy has made middle class life tougher for everyone. Life in suitable Vegas real estate is simply not affordable, even though I’m making decent money.

I wouldn’t mind keeping my job remotely but, while some colleagues do work remotely, I have several local job duties that make it unworkable. And, though loyalty’s rewarded here, I’m probably expendable enough to not be worth the trouble anyway. If I decided to leave, they’d probably just say “well, we’ll miss you, but… bye!”.

Part of paying off my debt in purgatory was about making life afterward a lot more affordable, with plenty of room to save or invest. Having researched living costs elsewhere, many other desirable big cities would be easily manageable… if I had my current income and benefits. With expectedly less… maybe? Possibly not? Never mind trying to find a suitable role. For those reasons, moving away isn’t a slam dunk decision.

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I thankfully wouldn’t call this a midlife crisis. I do a better job now than years ago of living life on my terms. I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do with life, got to do a lot of things people get to old age wishing they could do, and still never have regrets about the past. There’s still a lot I can and want to do. I feel more of a house-money mindset of following new and current ambitions rather than a need to make good on unlived anything.

That said, I know the distant future’s probably got to happen somewhere else. Vegas obviously will not get any cooler. I probably should save up and live at least one more horrid summer out here. Long term I would rather deal with 75-85°F muggy outdoor humidity and occasional torrential rain (and BTW I actually really like cold weather in winter so that’s not an issue), than endless 115°F days and waking up to 80-90°F every day for months.

Meanwhile, there’s no pressing need to pick a destination and move away for now. I can continue training and eating healthy, continue working where I’m at, and just keep diligently working on myself as I’ve done for the last while.

Also, the Vegas winters are obviously easy to train through, and I should at least be able to run outside until the outdoors turn nuclear again next May. Perhaps over the next year I can avoid the many health problems I randomly had this year, and a summer of cross training will go consistently well. We’ll see.

YOU’RE RUNNING VANCOUVER. GONNA TRY AND TRAVEL OR RUN ANYWHERE ELSE NEXT YEAR?

Beyond Vancouver, the Strat stair climb in February, and the typical fall racing season, probably not. They do a big hill climb in Big Bear Lake called Conquer The Wall during August, and I may try it next summer.

I’ll probably make a point to only travel to Vancouver in May. I’ll probably repeat the multiple sub-race trips I took there, in 2026. I might incidentally take weekend road trips in 2025 (like the aforementioned Big Bear climb) after skipping them this year.

I skipped it obviously this year, but I’ve got an eye on how the new Las Vegas Marathon is handled next month. Reportedly the organizers also put together the Portland Marathon this year, which has had a history of problems and this year had multiple logistic problems (they started the half marathon too early, parts of the course were open to traffic, course volunteers gave bad directions to runners, no one staffed the 10K finish line and the winner actually had to climb over a closed gate to finish!).

I generally avoid races that I know are run by poorly run and questionable organizations (it’s why I avoided Ram Racing events in Chicago after 2017). But the LVM is also a local marathon, with probably the best marathon course available. Rock N Roll quit running a full marathon a few years ago and their full kind of sucked anyway. The Original Las Vegas Marathon ironically is run through not-so-original Anthem, runs a bit too early in still-hot September, and I abhor two-lap marathons on a half course. Calico and BBSC‘s marathons are run on tough rocky trails and rural roads, their most feasible courses are also two-lappers, and I have no interest in trail/ultra racing.

If the LVM goes off well next month and they do it again next year (not a given)… maybe? However I’d have to stay in marathon shape through the summer, and I’d really like to just cross and strength train through summer and not worry about maintaining high running volume. I could run it as an experiment. I could just run the half. Again, we’ll see. I have no firm plans after next May.

Though I’ve considered going overseas in past years, I probably wouldn’t seriously consider doing it for a race before 2026.

I would have to improve and ramp up my strength and plyo training, but Hyrox looks like a lot of fun. It’s a safer more accessible form of Spartan Races or Crossfit comps. However, I’m certainly not doing any Hyrox before next fall, if at all. Plenty of time remains to change my mind on that.

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So the plan for the 47th trip around the sun is basically to stick to the current plan that’s been working, save my money, and let future plans develop naturally… even though I know change is coming in the foreseeable future.

I’m probably having ramen tonight, though.