How to donate blood

"A quick and effective way to make a difference."

How I did it: There's not a lot to donating blood on the surface. Contact your local blood bank via phone or email and determine their hours. If you don't know where to start, check local hospitals or look in your phone book listings for red cross or red crescent facilities. Usually you can set an appointment but some places accept walk-ins. The actual donation takes only 15-20 minutes and the staff is usually very helpful and happy to have your contribution. At the completion, there should be fluids and snacks to help you replenish what you gave up. 

A side note: If you take few to no medications, certain components of your blood (platelets in particular) may be particularly useful to the community. Many donors are elderly people who take aspirin and other drugs regularly so there's a great need for people without these substances in their system. 

Lessons & tips: - Eat lots of iron rich foods for as long as you can prior to the donation. Red meats are very effective, but so are dark green leafy vegetables, peanuts, and other substances. Check here for details: http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/health-and-wellness/iron-rich-foods

- It's been my personal experience that it's more enjoyable to donate on your own time rather than during blood drives. The high patient volume during the drives means that the staff can be overwhelmed and it's generally a less pleasant experience. 

- If you are eligible, consider donating platelets. You can give twice as often (every 4 weeks) and it takes about 1.5-2 hours, but they give most of your blood back to you and the platelets are in very short supply in some, if not most, areas. There's a good chance you're eligible if you don't take very many painkillers or other medications.

- Read the guidelines in advance. There are lots of exclusions including recent tattoos, piercings, certain types of travel, history of certain diseases, or any connection to male homosexual contact. Some of these may not be fair, but they are in place and it's worth knowing not to waste your time if you're in one of those categories.  

- Like most goals, it can help to have a blood buddy that you donate with regularly. It'll help keep you motivated.

It took me 1 day.

It made me Satisfied

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Transitioning from runner to triathlete

My wife and I have been running regularly for years, and have finished a half-marathon and marathon together (after she had cancer surgery, no less!), but now it’s time for a new goal. The half-ironman seems like a reasonable place to aim, since the full ironman is a huge step up in overall athletic effort, where it seems that a half ironman is probably not too much worse than a full marathon once we get used to the swimming and running.

Accordingly, the first steps have been to ease into the other modalities. Winter in PA isn’t the most amenable to outdoor exercise, so we set up an indoor bike training space at home. We already had Trek 1.1’s that have been lightly used, so we bought Blackburn Tech Mag 6 indoor trainers and I bought a TacX trainer tire later because I’ve been burning the rubber off my back tire for whatever reason.

I had some reservations about using a magnetic trainer because I’d gotten the impression that they don’t offer enough resistance. However, this one seemed to work well and has held up solidly for two months of regular use so far. I do recommend the trainer tire to save the wear and tear on your road tire. It seems to cut down on tire slippage, too.

So far the bike training is working well, and I’ve been getting in a swim about once a week of 40-50 laps. Soon, I’m hoping to bring my wife along to get her acquainted, since she doesn’t have much lap swimming experience. Once we get there, I’m hoping we can work our way up to doing 2 runs, 2 bikes, and 2 swims a week. When we’re comfortable with a base level of all three, we can pick a race, register, and ramp up the distances to get ready.

See more progress on: finish a half-ironman

They say you never make one knife

After my wedding in 2008, my wife and I struck out across the American countryside on a freeform honeymoon to Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana before we swung back to go to her Dad’s wedding. For a few days on this journey, we stayed with my Aunt Sara and Uncle John (well, close enough to an actual uncle for the sake of my storytelling) in Riverton, Wyoming. My aunt spent a good amount of my youth on the wrong side of the law, so I’d barely gotten a chance to know her up to that point. During our stay, they showed us around Wyoming, visited with us and generously fed and housed us in their spare room. Over the course of this, John introduced us to his knifemaking forge and walked us through the creation of a beautiful Damascus bowie knife, complete with a curly maple handle, silver inlay set in by my wife, and a leather scabbard that he taught me to sew. That was a few years ago, admittedly, and living in apartments and condos while going to medical school has left me with little time to further explore the craft, but I’m declaring here my intention to return and to properly learn the art of blademaking. I saw them again at a family reunion of sorts last week and got a few pointers on how to get started. I’ll keep updates here to let you all know how it goes.

Edit: Anybody interested in what John Strohecker is capable of should check out his forge's facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blackfoot-Forge/583993724960912

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Procrastination Busting Apps (Mac and Chrome)

So this is a really poorly defined goal. As with all the goals on here, I’m hoping to set myself some more complete, SMART parameters to get me on track. For starters, though, I’ve used a couple of pieces of software to help get me going

1) Rescuetime – Mac app to monitor my internet and app usage during the day

2) Stayfocusd – Chrome app that gives me a set amount of time (1 hour) to look at distracting websites before locking me out of them.

3) Firetask – to-do list organizer to help me break my goals down into steps.

I’ll note that I’ve tried the pomodoro method with its associated apps before, but the nature of my job doesn’t lend itself to 25 minute uninterrupted breaks – in science, you often have to do your desk work in odd intervals while waiting for something to happen with an experiment.

See more progress on: stop procrastinating

All but dissertation

So I’m pretty well underway on my PhD. I’m doing a project on cancer research and have already published a review article, although my project has been changed since then. So far, this process has been much more difficult than most of the other goals I’ve approached in my life because of its poorly defined nature. It’s hard to outline a proper set of steps to get to the end, because research work is by definition exploring poorly understood areas of knowledge. In my case, that’s meant a whole lot of dead ends as my model systems have failed and my hypotheses have turned out to yield uninteresting results. I’m really hoping to generate some positive data this year, and I have a tentative goal of collecting enough data this calendar year to write up a research article. I’ll be using this blog system to keep up to date and chronicle my progress.

See more progress on: Get a PhD

Taking Shape

So I moved from a starter acoustic (A Jasmine S35) to a made in Mexico Fender Stratocaster with a practice amp (Fender Mustang I) and I’ve been playing around with a few things. Over the last six months I worked through the beginner lessons on Garageband on Mac, and I’ve been playing a few tabs. Recently, I picked up the Guitar Grimoire Exercise Book and I’m playing through that to get some more technical practice. I may try the blues and rock lessons on garageband as well. One mistake I made early on was using a book on how to use conventional music for guitar instead of tablature. This might be a good goal in the long run, but so much of guitar is done with tabs that it’s not a particularly useful skill for a beginner. What’s more, I picked up a book on songwriting. I want to start trying to compose as soon as possible so I can create instead of simply imitating. A friend of mine had said that playing an instrument is a mere parlor trick if you only imitate the works of others. I would add that it’s a damned advanced parlor trick, and that there’s certainly something to be said for learning from those who came before, but I like the idea of incorporating songwriting in my training early on.

See more progress on: Learn to play the guitar

How to run a marathon

"It was exhausting and took a lot of time, but finishing was really rewarding."

How I did it: Starting in January, I looked for a nearby marathon and set my training plan backward from there. I had already been running a decent base - 4-6 miles a day every day except friday, with occasional cross training. The major change for my training plan was just doing a long run on Saturdays, gradually ramping it up. I trained with my wife and we increased our distance week by week until we were doing 20 mile runs the month before the marathon. Then we tapered off and did the race.

Lessons & tips:

• Listen to your body and increase your training distance slowly


• If it's your first marathon, I would recommend not worrying about time, just get the distance in and take it kind of easy to avoid injury 


• Your appetite will increase substantially. You may very well gain weight if you don't watch your calorie intake. This is something to consider. 


• If something starts to hurt, do something about it if at all possible. I had knee trouble and a cho-pat knee strap ended up being the answer. 

Resources:

• work with a local running store to make sure your shoes are a good design for your gait and running style. 


• Google around for a training plan, but don't be afraid to adapt it to your schedule. At the end of the day, if you can complete a 20 mile run you should be able to complete the 26.2 on race day.  

It took me 6 months.

It made me

See more progress on: run a marathon