Told ya so...

is probably what I'm going to say every time I write a new post. Told ya that I'm terrible at keeping up with these things!!

Anyways...it has been a while, and a LOT has happened! Since the last time I posted, my running schedule was a little erratic. My little brother got married May 18, so my running was non-existent that week due to being in Hickory and Asheville running errands and wedding festivities. The week and a half after that I was deathly sick and could barely get out of bed, never mind running the hills of Winston-Salem. Finally, I was up in CT for yet another wedding of a childhood friend of mine and was thankfully getting over whatever bug I had.

Once I got back to WS after Jack's wedding I started back at PA school and finally got back out on the road! Luckily, I wasn't starting from square one, so it wasn't too painful to get my butt back in gear. I had some absolutely great runs, getting 4 miles in at times and running 10 and sub 10 minute miles (don't hate--for me, that is like super sonic speed).

Unfortunately, last week wasn't my best week of running. I definitely hit the wall on a couple of runs for reasons completely unknown to me. It has been ridiculously humid here and has rained almost every day for the past 3 weeks--obnoxious--and in the first couple of tries last week my legs and lungs just wouldn't go. So Joe and I did a lot of walking, but that's okay--I'm not judging myself for not being able to have fabulous experiences every time I go out for a run. Especially since I ended things on a really good note.

Some of you may have seen the Facebook status that I posted about the Rolling Stone Magazine cover. I had a very solid, albeit slow 4 mile run (finally!!), but was very determined not to stop running. I was very frustrated by the fact that our media continues to give the wrong (in my opinion) people celebrity-like attention. I do NOT want to see this guy connected to the Boston Marathon bombings on the cover of anything. He does not deserve to have his face there. There are SO many other people from that event and who have stepped up since then that I want to see on the cover of magazines, in a human interest piece on TV, or on the news page of my search engine. Those are the people who truly deserve the attention.

I'm not saying that I don't think we shouldn't be asking ourselves why things like this happen, what's the thought behind these horrific incidences, and what (if anything) could we possibly do to foresee and prevent these tragedies. What I'm saying is, I don't want our media to present these incidences from the perspective they constantly use. I get it. It's human nature to want to understand and get to the bottom of this situation by looking back at these people's lives to be able to identify something in their past. Anything. That could make it all make sense.

Believe me. I'm going to be a Physician Assistant. My goal in life is to get to the diagnosis. Cure the patient. For that to happen I'm constantly searching and asking, "Why? Why did this happen? Why did this patient present like this? Where's the connection? How do I find it and fix it?" Sometimes I'll never know the answer, sometimes I will. I just refuse to give the causative agent the all the attention. Instead, I give my patient the attention, it's his or her life that is being affected.

Who knows if that analogy, metaphor--whatever it is in this case--even makes sense. I just feel that it is an injustice and a disservice to all those who were forever changed by that event to place an individual, connected to causing that tragedy, on the cover of a magazine with an interview that discusses "how a popular, promising young student...became a monster." Because frankly, I do not give a damn how popular or promising this kid was--I care about how popular and promising Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, and Martin Richard were before they were murdered. Can they or any of the other people who were injured or traumatized or affected in any way PLEASE be on the cover of magazines or in human interest stories on the news or on my search engine news page? PLEASE? I promise all you media people, your ratings (as far as I am concerned) will be better, at least by 1 person, because I'll actually want to watch and support your station.

Okay. I promise I'm done with my rant and off my soapbox...for now. I don't want to offend anyone, but this is the reason I'm training to run a marathon, after all...

for some freakin solidarity. #bostonstrong