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The 4,5,6 Challenge

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Having a goal matters.  Every five years, I try to set a goal that seems like a “stretch goal,” or something I will be unlikely to reach without a lot of effort. Further, I find motivation from writing out my goal. It is as if writing it becomes a contract with myself. It is a commitment to attempt to be the person who can aspire to remake myself back into the fit person I was before MS. It is also a challenge, and I hate losing.

Five years ago for my 40th birthday, my wife gave me a gift of a trip to Yellowstone so I could run a half marathon and see Old Faithful that was on my bucket list (things to do before I die).  Of course, running a half marathon there is no joke.  It is a long run at altitude.  So for months before the trip, I trained as hard as I could in the D.C. humidity.  My brother-in-law who went with me asked, “what if you can’t finish the run? Will it still have been worth all the effort?”

I told him the answer I still use when trying something hard, “Failure is not an end point.  It is simply a way of measuring my next attempt.”  I finished the run in the top third of all finishers.  I may have fallen a few times, but I finished thinking “not too shabby for a 40 year-old.”  The effort paid off, and it would have paid off whether I finished or not.  Having the goal gave me a purpose to keep running when I was tired or just didn’t feel like it.

Now as I approach my 45th birthday, the question was what shall I set as my “stretch goal.”  With Covid 19 upending all of our lives, it may seem petty to think I need some physical goal.  Travel is out as three of the six in our family are high risk patients.  I needed something that would stick in my head and keep me moving.  Then my little kids were listening to some old kids music, and I heard “It’s as easy as 1,2,3 baby you and me…” 

The “4,5,6 challenge” is on! In October when I turn 45, I will have 6 pack abs.  That challenge is just what I need to keep working out and even doing the 10 min ab burn at the end of the workouts.  After 28 days with Chloe Ting, I am on to the “Beach Body on Demand” 21 day fit routines.  Dropping  the sodas down to at most 2 per day, eating healthy, and walking/running after our four kids has me well on the way.  If I don’t have the 6 pack abs by the time I am 45, I will certainly have a healthier body than when I started.  However, I plan to reach this target.  I already went from 234 lb in March to 197lb now.

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mistake, MS, MS cognitive function, MS progression, MS research, MS symptoms, Multiple Sclerosis, Uncategorized

How We Measure Success: Beware Dangers of Metrics Posing as Reality

This do it all scale can tell me my weight, height, body fat percentage, total weight of my fat, and more...if I believe it to be accurate.
This do it all scale can tell me my weight, height, body fat percentage, total weight of my fat, and more…if I believe it to be accurate.

In our hustle and bustle world, it seems there is an increasing pressure to do not just “better” but to do “optimally.” We want to know we could have done no more and be no better than we are. This desire can lead us down many false paths as we attempt to quantify “better” and “best.” How do we measure success?

At 9:48 on April 13, I stepped onto the new scale, height and body fat analyzer at work outside our little convenience store. Then after my lunch run, I decided to see if there was an impact from my run. Since there was no line, I stepped right up. One forty-five minute run resulted in my losing 6.4 lb. of fat! It was such a miracle run, I even gained 0.4 inches in height. The machine even gave me a receipt to prove it!

This machine is a very convenient way to track some basic health stats. However, there is no way I burned 6.4 lb. of fat in a 45 minute run. What this test shows is our need to question the results and measurement error before drawing conclusions. The simplicity of the two measurements claiming to measure the same things seems like a great test, but if results like mine were real, I would be a biggest loser coach on a team that never loses. Alas, life is rarely that simple.

Do not think this is simply about my fat percentage as read by a scale. We make these measurement errors all the time in our desire to have measurable, quantifiable results. With multiple sclerosis, drugs have been approved for more than a decade based on their ability to reduce the number of new lesions seen on MRI’s of patients’ brains. It’s an easy, if expensive, measure which gives researchers a nice quantifiable measurement from which they can claim “drug X is an improvement.” However, the question remains as to whether the lesion test is a good test for the reality of the patients’ multiple sclerosis progression. I and many other MS researchers have come to believe the overall brain volume/shrinkage is probably a better measure of MS damage, but that measurement isn’t enough on its own either to define the damage.

At some point, like after my run, a look in the mirror and noting which belt notch I use is probably the better bet to determine the impact of my run, even if the measurement is less precise than the super scale pretends to be. Similarly, I would never take the results of an MRI showing lesions as the best sole measure of my MS. Some days I will feel awful and tired with new symptoms, and the test results might or might not show why. Neither result changes my reality for all my attempts to quantify the impact of my MS today.

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