Surprisingly good week!

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I never thought I would be able to say at the end of my short runs for the week - that I feel great!

Sunday I ran 10 miles in 1:43 and that felt great, I even pushed my last mile and it was the fastest mile of the ten, so I was feeling really good. Tired, a little sore, but no real knee or plantar pain. What a great feeling :).

The next day is where I ran into several problems and learned some lessons that I will not be in a rush to repeat. This was Labor day but my Avonex nurse was coming out to help me with the Avonex Pen for the first time. The past few months I was using the pre-filled syringe and manually injecting. I had done one, with problems, last week after just viewing the video. I didn't get the needle on tight enough and when I turned the injector over to get it ready for my leg... the needle dropped onto the floor! Needless to say I couldn't use that needle, so I did the injection using one of the other packages the next day.

She went over the usual, mostly I knew what to do already, did the injection and took two Advil. Still felt good, the shot was completely painless, I almost didn't know if it had gone in until I took out the injector and saw the needle. I capped it and made notes to self:


  1. contact biogen to try to get a new syringe for my 4th week instead of refilling the script early
  2. order a new sharps container that has pre-labelled shipping
Next on the agent, short hike with kids and dogs. Sister and two dogs, wife and son, friends and their twins and one dog. We were a pack! This was a good 2.5-3 mile hike in Upton State Forest, obviously we took it slow because of all the kids and dogs. But the 2nd half was purely uphill. I was starting to feel it in my legs. Back at the car I was wiped, and started to feel hot. Temp was spiking from the shot, seems to be harder to get under control than the Rebif was, and not only that - once home (temp 100.1) it kept going up even after taking 2 Tylenol. After 40 minutes I checked again (temp 103.9) and took 2 more Advil. About 1.5 hours after that it started to subside.

Well, two important lessons in my blog post of lists:

  1. pre-medicate and post-medicate vigorously and possibly the next day
  2. don't do a 3 mile hike on an off-day after a 10 mile run
That ends my lessons for self!

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