Good Easter Sunday to everyone…
I chose the title for this blog because I have been dealing with shin splints for about a month now. Shin splints are nothing new to me and I have tried most things to prevent, cure and treat them to no avail. It is very frustrating because every time I seem to be at my fittest and training/racing very well I get the splints, it was that way 15 years ago and it is that way today. On Friday I was running with a guy for a short while who told me to try taking vitamin D for my shin splints. After years of having shin splints it was the only thing that worked for him. I thought wow, new advice I haven’t heard before–that’s awesome! So what do desperate people do in desperate times….. anything they can to solve the problem. So off I went to the drug store as soon as the run ended to get a bottle of, you guessed it, vitamin D. I asked the pharmacist about it and she had not heard of it being used to help shin splints but I didn’t care I was desperate and happy to try anything (within reason). Bring on the placebo effect…!
It reminded me of the time I was climbing in Nepal in the Everest Region and I was very sick with the classic traveler’s diarrhea while doing a solo acclimatization trek. As I stumbled along the trail that day, ducking behind boulders to relieve myself, I was envisioning having to give up on my climb in which I had three weeks left. Around lunch time I arrived at a remote tea house. The owner thought I was looking for lunch but all I wanted was a bench to have a nap on. After an hour of rest I was trying to convince myself to push on when I got talking with a hiker coming down the trail who had stopped for lunch. I told him how sick I was and he said that he had experienced the same thing a couple days earlier. Fortunately he taken some prescription meds that he had brought with him in case of a situation like this. The meds cured him within a couple days. He told me that he had a couple pills left if I wanted them. Normally I would have said NO WAY because for 1. I don’t know what is wrong with me, 2. I don’t know who this random trekker from the UK is, 3. I don’t know anything about the drugs he wants to give me, and 4. I should probably just drink water and get better on my own. But these weren’t normal times; they were desperate times which callfor desperate measures. As soon as he told me he had two pills left and asked me if I wanted them I responded “oh my god yes, thank you so much.” After I swallowed the pill I thought “hmmm I should probably get the name of these mystery pills just in case anything happens.” I didn’t even ask him the name of the pill before I took it, what an idiot I was.
The good news is that the pills worked like a charm and I was back to my normal self in a couple days. I went on the summit Island Peak at 20,100 feet and had the trek of a lifetime.
Another example of desperate times calling for desperate measures is my Scammed in Bangkok story which you can now download for free on the http://www.shawnstratton.ca website.
