Jen Miller at the finish of the Ocean Drive 10 Miler in Wildwood, N.J.
My butt, unfortunately, is dead.
“Dead butt syndrome,” the sports medicine doctor said to me after making me go through a series of circus-act contortions that involved swiveling my hip in all directions. His voice was very serious, his tone stern. I wondered if I should start making funeral arrangements for my rear, maybe a New Orleans-style blowout parade?
Hold the tuba. My butt’s not really dead. It can’t be revived with defibrillator paddles, but it can be fixed.
The technical name of the condition I have is gluteus medius tendinosis — an inflammation of the tendons in the gluteus medius, one of three large muscles that make up the butt. It’s a very isolated and painful injury that knocked me out of marathon training in January with stabbing pains in my hip. It’s a symptom related to what running experts hammer at: the need for cross-training and strength training. I was running so much that I told myself I didn’t have time for the exercise machines or weights, so I have no one to blame but myself.
I’ve been running for five years, but I’d never heard of the problem. I ran it by a friend, a former track coach at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was baffled too. I haven’t seen any coverage, though the doctor said it’s fairly common with runners who train for half marathons and beyond. It took him five minutes to figure out the problem.
“A new thought in running medicine is that almost all lower extremity injuries, whether they involve your calf, your plantar fascia or your iliotibial band, are linked to the gluteus medius,” said Dr. Darrin Bright, a sports medicine physician with Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and medical director of that city’s marathon. “In the last five to 10 years, we’ve just realized how much of an important role the gluteus medius plays in stabilizing the hips and the pelvis in running.”
If you think of the pelvis as a cup, the muscles that attach to it, including the three gluteal muscles and the lower abdominals, interact in an intricate choreography to keep the cup upright when you run or walk. If these muscles are strong, the cup stays in place with no pain. If one or more of those muscles is weak, the smaller muscles around the hip take on pressure they weren’t designed to bear.
The cup still stays up, but at a price. First come muscle tears and inflammation, followed by scar tissue in the muscle. If left untreated, this process becomes a cycle that keeps feeding into itself.
“For people who have persistent pain, it’s healing gone wrong,” Dr. Bright said. “That gluteus medius isn’t firing the way it’s supposed to. You’re getting an inhibition of the muscle fibers. It’s kind of dead.”
Some of us run through the pain, which is what I did. And many compensate by adjusting their strides in a way that impedes the gait and can lead to problems in the quads, hamstrings, Achilles tendons, heels, knees, calves, ankles, feet or toes.
“Whether they’re recreational weekend runners up to the elite marathoners, the majority of runners I see have weak gluteus medius and gluteus maximus muscles,” said Dr. David Webner, a sports medicine doctor at Crozer-Keystone Health System in Springfield, Pa.
For about 70 percent of his patients, physical therapy that stretches the muscles in the hip and leg and strengthens the gluteus muscles, along with a temporary reduction in the mileage and intensity of running, resolves the problem. Deep tissue massage, which sends more blood to the area to break up scar tissue, along with strength training may also help to break the cycle of inflammation and scarring.
More advanced approaches include ultrasound guided tenotomy, which uses ultrasound to identify the affected muscles and then “poke little holes in the area of the scar tissue,” Dr. Webner said, or platelet-rich plasma therapy, which involves injections of centrifuged blood products and is what Tiger Woods underwent after knee surgery last year.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to take it that far. I’m lucky — the pain has ebbed with physical therapy and changing one of my weekly runs to a cross-training workout.
“Those runners who do multiple types of exercising are less prone to have weakness than runners who do just running,” said Dr. Webner. “Triathletes who come into my office don’t have as much weakness as just solo runners.”
So I’m biking. I row. I sweat through elliptical workouts at the gym.
And I no longer have the feeling that a pin is stabbing my hip every time I drive. I can sit for more than a half hour without pain. And last month I ran the Amish Bird-in-Hand half marathon, and felt no more discomfort than you’d expect to endure running 13.1 miles through the hills of Pennsylvania Dutch country.
To keep my rear alive, I must be vigilant about continuing to strengthen my lower abdominal and gluteal muscles. Last week, I slacked off and the pain came creeping back.
Is it annoying to have to focus so much on these muscles to run? Absolutely. But if it’ll revive my butt, it’s worth every leg lift and crunch.
Jen A. Miller is the author of “The Jersey Shore: Atlantic City to Cape May.”
Saturday, December 25, 2010
When the Diagnosis Is 'Dead Butt Syndrome'
One for the Books - Friday, December 24, 2010
This month’s final flurry of legislative successes for President Obama and the Democratic Congress underscores the difficulty of rendering a single verdict on their tumultuous two years in power.
In November, Democrats forfeited control of the House after suffering the largest midterm losses for either party since 1938. They absorbed stinging defeats in the Senate as well. But before that, and to an utterly unexpected extent after that as well, Obama and congressional Democrats passed into law an enormous agenda. This Congress will enter the history books for the magnitude of both its political losses and its legislative victories.
The program that Democrats implemented during Obama’s first two years doesn’t approach the Himalayan peaks of the first congressional sessions for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. But probably not since Johnson has either party implemented as much of its agenda in a single legislative session as Democrats did in this one. “You probably have to go back to Johnson to see something as substantial as this,” says presidential historian Robert Dallek, a Johnson biographer. Historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University agrees: “Legislatively, this Congress has probably done more than any Congress since the 1960s.”
Democrats had their legislative disappointments. Mostly because of Senate filibusters, they could not pass limits on carbon emissions, reform the labor laws or the immigration system, or establish a public competitor to private health insurers. Obama felt compelled to accept the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor could he persuade Congress to back his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
But the achievements in the ledger’s other column are imposing. Health care and financial-services reform top that list. The 2009 economic-stimulus package contained, by some measures, more net new public investment in education, infrastructure, and clean energy than Bill Clinton achieved during his entire two terms. Other significant wins included bills that restructured and increased college financial aid, toughened pay-equity laws for women, expanded national service, and provided new credit card protections to consumers. This week’s Senate vote approving the New START pact provided Obama a bipartisan foreign policy-victory that steamrolled the opposition of the GOP Senate leadership.
Many of these bills fulfilled long-standing Democratic goals. Presidents of both parties since FDR had pursued comprehensive health care reform; Obama alone signed it into law. The repeal of the Pentagon’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy that Obama signed this week concluded an effort to allow gays to serve openly that dated back to Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Earlier, Obama signed legislation protecting sexual orientation under the hate-crimes law and more closely equalizing the penalties for possession of powder and crack cocaine--in each case implementing changes key Democratic constituencies have likewise sought since the 1990s.
Almost without notice, Obama ended a similar odyssey of even greater consequence. In 1996, Clinton’s Food and Drug Administration asserted the authority to regulate the marketing and sale of tobacco products; in 2000, the Supreme Court said it overreached. Since then, public health advocates had repeatedly failed to pass legislation providing FDA that authority (partly because of Bush’s opposition). Last year, Congress finally approved the bill and Obama signed it. FDA has already banned candy-flavored cigarettes and proposed to strengthen health warning labels. “That was the most significant legislative action that the Congress has [ever] taken with regard to tobacco,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.
Why didn’t this record provide Democrats more defense against the wave that capsized their House majority? One (smaller) reason is that the interminable struggle over health care overshadowed much of it. More important, conservatives, and even many independents, recoiled from the cumulative scale and cost of these initiatives at a time of economic unease. Most important, as the downturn lingered, the Democrats’ agenda appeared incapable of, and even tangential to, creating jobs, the public’s main concern. Many of the Democrats’ priorities “didn’t seem relevant to what the public was struggling with,” says lobbyist Vic Fazio, the former chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
One other factor contributed. Democrats passed such a comprehensive agenda largely because they achieved near-parliamentary levels of party unity in Congress. That focus on uniting Democrats was probably unavoidable given lockstep Republican opposition, but it produced a kind of myopia. On the biggest issues--health care and stimulus--Democrats spoke mostly to each other and never attracted enough public support beyond their core coalition.
All of these factors converged to ignite a fierce backlash against Democrats in the midterm election. If that recoil carries a Republican past Obama in 2012 as well, many of the Democratic legislative achievements could be uprooted. But if Obama wins a second term, he could instead institutionalize his key reforms. The huge federal deficit, and growing Republican strength in Congress, virtually ensures that the Democrats’ latest tide of Washington activism has already crested. Yet, if Obama can steer a course to a second term, the powerful imprint of that surge might endure.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
2 firefighters dead, 17 hurt in extra-alarm blaze - Chicago Breaking News
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
RE: Feliz Navidad!
Ed Schultz on Feud with Rush Limbaugh and Why He's Mad at Obama - The Daily Beast
Ed Schultz was a right-wing radio talk-show host—until he fell in love with a liberal and hit the big time. Howard Kurtz talks to Schultz about his feud with Rush and why he’s mad at Obama.
After bashing the president's tax-cut compromise on MSNBC for four straight nights, Ed Schultz found himself breaking bread with Barack Obama in the small dining room off the Oval Office.
“Mr. President, the American people didn't vote for you because of a policy or your stance on health care. They voted for you because you inspired them, you got into their soul,” the high-decibel host said. Insisting that he take on the Republicans, Schultz declared: “I think you're selling yourself short. You can win that fight.”
Obama stared at him intently and said flatly: “This is where we’re going.”
A former college quarterback with a beefy frame and booming voice, Schultz has emerged as a fiery populist who doesn't mind singeing his own side, even as he reserves his most inflammatory rhetoric—“ruthless,” “mean,” “rotten to the core”—for Republicans. Five years ago, he was a radio guy in Fargo, North Dakota, borrowing money to stay afloat; now MSNBC is touting him as a surprise star of its liberal lineup.
Schultz defends the harsh personal rhetoric he employs against conservative politicians and pundits. “Liberals have been vilified, laughed at for years,” he says. “It's good to give it back to them.”
His fans seem to agree. The Ed Show just enjoyed its best quarter and is up 19 percent this year over last, averaging 637,000 viewers. That is way behind Special Report With Bret Baier on Fox News, which is up 4 percent with 2.1 million viewers, but ahead of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room on CNN, down 29 percent with 544,000 viewers. His visibility is such that Schultz considered a plea from North Dakota Democrats that he run for the Senate this year.
He savors his skewering of the right, but there was a time when he was one of them—a television sportscaster (after briefly making the roster of the Oakland Raiders) who became a talk-radio conservative, boosting Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That began to change in 1992 after Schultz had his first date with the woman who ran the homeless shelter in Fargo. She had him grab a tray and wait on line for the Salvation Army lunch served to the downtrodden.
“Ed was in his suit, dressed to the nines, surrounded by homeless people. He was mortified,” says Wendy Schultz, now his wife and the producer of his three-hour radio show, broadcast down the hall at Manhattan’s 30 Rock. “He had a very tender heart and was very easy to tip over.”
“There are times I tell him he goes over the top and that TV is different than radio,” Griffin acknowledges. “A couple of times he’s crossed the line. I said, ‘Ed, you ran down the field 100 yards and you spiked the ball. Don’t spike the ball!’”
Schultz soon morphed into a left-wing prairie populist. “Some people believe it’s a made-up story, that it was about money, that he saw an opportunity as a liberal talk-show host,” says Schultz’s friend Don Haney, a reporter at KFGO radio. “But his conversion was genuine.” Haney says Schultz was a great colleague but “to be honest, he’s got a temper. There are some people who have drawn his wrath.”
Logan Mock-Bunting / Getty Images
In 2004, North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan (whose campaign got a $2,000 donation from Schultz) recommended him to a national radio syndicator. Schultz borrowed $600,000 to keep the show alive (“We were nuts”) and bought a mobile home—festooned with ads for the North Dakota Farmers Union—to go on the road.
But it wasn’t enough. Hungry to develop a television profile, Schultz borrowed an additional $150,000 for a satellite camera hookup for the occasional invitations from Larry King and other shows. The couple would watch cable news on a big-screen TV in their lakeside Minnesota home and Schultz would critique the hosts. “It just became an obsession with me,” he says.
Fired up and ready to go after Obama’s election, Schultz and his wife got a place in Washington. When MSNBC President Phil Griffin spotted him at an Obama press conference—White House aides had placed him in the front row—he asked Schultz for a cup of coffee at Washington’s Four Seasons. “I just connected with him,” Griffin says. “I thought, ‘Holy cow, that guy is a live wire!’”
After a tryout, Griffin pressed Schultz to move to New York to start a 6 p.m. show. “You have to understand,” the new employee said, “I moved here to get this job!”
One morning last week, the 56-year-old broadcaster is sitting in his small office—adorned with photos of him having killed a half-dozen pheasants at his snow-covered North Dakota ranch—as his producers debate whether to discuss the tax cuts with leadoff guest Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator. “He’s a pretty wound-up dude,” says Schultz, peering at the script through reading glasses. “He’ll say we’re making a mistake, we’re digging ourselves a hole.”
Schultz eases behind the anchor desk in a studio barely larger than a walk-in closet—he switched from the main studio because he thinks the closer confines give him more intensity—and banters about the Minnesota Vikings until the red light goes on. When he opens the show with which stories “are hitting my hot buttons,” he bellows in almost comical fashion.
After railing against the extension of the Bush tax cuts for 14 minutes—“the deal is with the devil!”—he welcomes Sanders, who gets all of 2 1/2 minutes before being hustled off. Sanders may have just conducted a nine-hour filibuster, but the show is mainly about Ed, who often ignores the prompter and wings it. He unloads on incoming House Speaker John Boehner for tearing up during a 60 Minutes interview: “Do you think he cries for the unemployed in this country, or the people in America who saw their jobs shipped overseas?”
Schultz has little patience with those calling for greater civility. He savages his targets in a nightly “Psycho Talk” segment, calling Rush Limbaugh “the drugster,” Sarah Palin “Caribou Barbie,” and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie a “fat slob.” Rather than merely attack their ideology, Schultz says things like: “C'mon, Rush! Let's get it on!... Get away from your drugs. Go see the doctor and get some hearing. Maybe you could pick up a 19th girlfriend. Maybe you could try marriage again.” He has even said Limbaugh looks like Hitler.
Turns out the Rush grudge is personal. After the Today show did a story on him in 2004, Schultz recalls Limbaugh dismissing him as a $4-an-hour Fargo guy who would never make it. But in constantly carping on Limbaugh’s past addiction to painkillers, Schultz can sound as intolerant as any opponent.
“There are times I tell him he goes over the top and that TV is different than radio,” Griffin acknowledges. “A couple of times he’s crossed the line. I said, ‘Ed, you ran down the field 100 yards and you spiked the ball. Don’t spike the ball!’”
These days Schultz has been employing his invective against the White House, a stance he made clear during the presidential luncheon that also included the likes of Rachel Maddow, Arianna Huffington, and Frank Rich. The onetime conservative who lunged left is now frustrated by a president he finds insufficiently liberal.
“His willingness to compromise has taken a lot of liberals by surprise,” Schultz says over a salmon dinner after strolling in the snow without a coat. “I think you can be in disagreement with a president you support without being disrespectful or nasty or snide.”
Schultz, who first broke with Obama for dropping the public option from his health-care bill, tells viewers that “the Republicans have hoodwinked the president” on the tax deal and the process has been “un-American.” Such language allows him to avoid a frontal assault by painting Obama as misguided rather than malevolent.
One thing is certain: The hunter remains loaded for bear. “Not to get too grandiose about it,” he tells me after demolishing dinner, “but I really believe I’m saying things a lot of Americans want someone to say.”
Howard Kurtz is The Daily Beast's Washington bureau chief. He also hosts CNN's weekly media program Reliable Sources on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET. The longtime media reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, Kurtz is the author of five books.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Monday, December 20, 2010
44 - Haley Barbour: I don't remember the civil rights era being that bad
Robert Kuttner: The Stimulus That Isn't
On signing the tax-cut deal December 17, President Obama jubilantly declared "We are here with some good news for the American people this holiday season. This is progress and that's what they sent us here to achieve." So how have Republicans repaid Obama's willingness to meet them three-quarters of the way?
Bipartisanship evidently lasted about as long as the signing ceremony.
First Republicans refused to approve the routine stop-gap bill to keep the government funded at current levels pending the budget resolution and next round of appropriations. They killed the DREAM Act, for decent treatment of well-behaved children of undocumented immigrants. Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell squeaked through the senate with the votes of a few socially moderate Republicans defying their leadership.
The Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in a massive denial of reality, issued their own separate report, denying that the financial collapse had anything to do with deregulation or speculation. Coming along next is a set of Republican demands in the budget resolution for much deeper cutting of public outlay.
So it's clear that "bipartisanship," even on heavily Republican terms, produces no follow-through and no reciprocity. This is bipartisanship in the spirit of Neville Chamberlain. You give, and immediately they are after you for more.
It is astonishing how the Beltway echo-chamber, most egregiously the editorial page and news columns of the Washington Post (hard to tell the difference), thinks this deal is good for the Republic. The Post has become a cheerleader for policies that fail to cure the economy and show off Obama as a weakling waiting to be rolled again.
The tax deal, re-branded as a stimulus program, is paltry and ineffective as economic tonic. What hardly anyone seems to have grasped is that the deal basically continues the status quo with almost no stimulus.
If the tax rates on the books in 2010 did not produce a recovery, why should we expect that the very same rates will change the economy in 2011?
The deal not only continues 2010 income tax rates into 2011 and 2012. It actually increases estate taxes slightly, since estate taxes lapsed entirely for one year in 2010.
It also basically continues current unemployment benefits. Even the temporary 2-point tax break on Social Security taxes is a substitute for a more progressive and effective Obama tax break from the original stimulus of February 2009 that the Republicans refused to extend -- the Making Work Pay tax credit.
About the only new stimulus in the bill is a business tax break that increases the value of tax write-offs for new investment, valued at about $55 billion.
Does anyone seriously believe that a $55 billion net tax cut in a $15 trillion economy will have more than trivial effect?
Using Congressional Budget Office estimates of GDP growth, the deal might produce as many as two million jobs if businesses respond by investing more and consumers feel more confident about increasing their spending. Lovely, but the economy is currently short at least fifteen million jobs.
The small stimulus effect will soon be undermined by the spending cuts that are already the Republicans' next demand. Even the stopgap spending measure to continue spending next year at this year's levels, which Republicans just blocked, is already a cut when you factor in inflation. Deeper spending cuts, about to be imposed by incoming Republican House leaders, will overwhelm any stimulus effect of the tax deal.
Obama, according to well-placed sources, plans to introduce a "tax-simplification" scheme in the State of the Union address -- get rid of tax preferences and lower tax rates, as proposed by the Bowles-Simpson commission, with no net stimulative effect. This is a classic case of trying to change the subject. This might or might not be sensible policy depending on the specifics. But what ails the economy has little to do with the particulars of the tax code.
I don't understand how Obama's political advisers think this formula can produce his re-election. The tax deal was popular at a superficial level. Voters, when asked about the deal in a vacuum, apart from other economic issues, approve of bipartisan cooperation and they like tax relief when nothing else is on offer. (In that context, it's noteworthy that the one part of the tax deal that respondents to the ABC-Washington Post poll did not like was the temporary cut in payroll taxes. The vast majority of Americans don't want to weaken Social Security, even when the bait is tax relief.)
But such polls tell us nothing about the President's prospects for 2012. The 2010 off-year election was the second largest swing away from the incumbent party in the past 130 years (1930 produced a slightly worse swing against the Republicans), according to the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. It was the worst mid-year swing against the Democrats ever.
Ground Zero of this disastrous defeat was the Midwest. This is hardly surprising, because the working middle class in the industrial heartland, which provisionally voted for Obama in 2008, is facing devastation in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The 2010 swing there was huge. Without carrying the heartland of the Midwest, Obama does not stand a prayer of re-election, even if the broad public says it approves of his bipartisanship.
But bipartisanship to what end? There is simply no way that the combination of upwardly tilted and puny tax breaks, spending cuts, and a re-jiggering of tax rates and loopholes is going to make a serious dent in either unemployment rates or underwater housing values in the Midwest.
Joblessness and losses of household assets in these states will continue at depression levels, even if the national unemployment comes down modestly.
Obama and his advisers are left with the vain hope that Republicans will nominate someone so lunatic that Obama will somehow squeak through. But be careful what you wish for. I vividly remember 1980, when some Democrats cheered the nomination of Ronald Reagan because he was too rightwing to get elected.
The watershed year 2008 was a political moment when an incoming Democratic president had all the raw material for a dramatic break with the old order -- when Republicans, Wall Street, and laissez-faire ideology were primed to take a richly deserved fall for the economic collapse.
Obama chose not to pursue that course. Instead, he identified himself with reviving Wall Street and pursued a feckless bipartisanship and a feeble recovery program.
Last spring, Obama and his aides were on the road assuring everyone that the administration's economic program would produce a "Recovery Summer," which never came. Now, Obama is repeating the mistake. Adviser Larry Summers' valedictory message is that the even weaker tonic of the tax deal will somehow restore economic jobs and growth. Crying recovery, when recovery doesn't come, is even riskier than crying wolf.
Six months from now, when the economy is still in the doldrums, either Obama or some other Democrat had better stand up for a real economic recovery program -- or no Republican will be too grizzly to be elected president in 2012.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.
His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.
Posts
