Wow, time has flown by! Diabetes Blog Week is almost over. Today’s prompt: “What is one thing you would tell someone that doesn’t have diabetes about living with diabetes?”

I feel like I should have something profound to say here, as if after almost thirteen years of diabetes—has it really been that long?—I should be some kind of sage. But when it comes down to it, living everyday with a chronic illness renders it rather banal.

Doing all of the diabetes things (checking the blood, using insulin, changing infusion sets, looking at CGM graphs, being mindful of all the factors that affect blood glucose, and doing so many other activities) becomes just another part of living. It’s an unwanted part, to be sure, but those of us living with the disease integrate it into the fabric and rhythms of our life because we have to. Sartre and Camus would remind us that we’re always making choices, but practically our options are severely constrained when it comes to either accepting this disease and making it part of who we are or deciding to ignore it and face the consequences.

What this means is that we live life in multiple ways. We have the “normal”/”healthy”/non-diabetic portion with jobs, commutes, families, hobbies, and obligations, not to mention anxiety, joy, boredom, failure, and success. And then we have the part where we pick up the slack for our malfunctioning endocrine systems. This brings its own tasks, obligations, diversions, emotions, friendships, and opportunities to be better than yesterday. Diabetes is just another “thing” that we do. And like other things in life, sometimes it’s surprisingly easy, while other times it’s cruelly difficult. Sometimes we use these challenges in life and diabetes as a springboard to transcendence, and other times we just can’t wait for them to be done so that we can say, “Well, that sucked. Let’s never fucking do it again if we can help it.”

Diabetes just is.

It’s an aspect of my life that I manage (or mismanage) like any other part. Could I have better BG numbers and be less afraid of insulin? Yes. Could I also sleep more, floss regularly, and worry less? Yes to all. Do I mostly do alright with the diabetic and nondiabetic parts of my life? Absolutely. Diabetes isn’t a separate thing from me, but it is also not an essential, defining part of who I am. Just as I would never say, “I’m a toothbrusher,” it seems ridiculous to assume that my diabetes shapes the essence of my life any more than my toothbrush. I would rather say that I’m a husband, a software engineer, a triathlete, and an international playboy, and I just happen to do all of these things with diabetes.

That’s what I would say to people with or without diabetes: This illness is just another part of life, so don’t expect it to be our top priority or our defining characteristic. There’s more to us than that. It is, nevertheless, an important part of our lives, and it’s going to have an impact on what we choose to do and how we do it. Occasionally, it’s going to mess everything up. Try to be as Zen and thoughtful in your acceptance of this part of us as we are trying to be ourselves and as you would be of any other aspect of our lives.

After starting with the good news yesterday, today in Diabetes Blog Week we look at the flip-side: What could be better? What could we start doing today to make it better?

Friends, I am very good at spotting possible trends in my BG readings. Yesterday, I reported how morning swims are almost always amazingly consistent BG experiences. I have also noticed that I go up most afternoons around 2:00 and then drop a bunch during my afternoon workouts. I’m observant enough to have seen that evenings are higher than mornings. And I believe that I fall slowly overnight before going back up a bit before dawn. Some of these trends are good, others less so, and some just are what they are.

(Recently I’ve also been noticing more trends like the one shown below: awesome trend lines reported by my CGM. That 7:00 bolus there is for pizza, my friends. Half of a large pizza.)

What I’m not good at doing is acting on those hunches. When I suspect a pattern, I could should make detailed observations, adjust a few things, and test whether that made it better. But I don’t. Well, I do, but it takes longer than it should. (I also forget to write down the awesome things that worked, and I sometimes have to start over from scratch.)

“Why?” you might ask.

I believe some might call it “procrastination.”

“But that’s not a reason,” you say. “It’s likely just an effect of some kind of disordered thinking. Why not make the changes?”

Because, my dear friends, it’s hard to make changes to something that (mostly) works, that keeps away the lows and lets me exercise when I want with (mostly) good results. Because it’s hard to fiddle around and possibly make things worse. Because starting to make changes like that requires an active commitment to start, and I just haven’t carved out the time to do the basal testing (again!) or kept up with my BG+food+exercise journaling. Because, despite having done my NPH exorcism almost two years ago, that fear of the lows is still very much with me, and getting closer to the good place means getting closer to the edge of hypo more often. (At least I tell myself that, even though I’m not convinced it’s true.)

But today is a new day, and it’s the day I can stop procrastinating on these trends.

The few people that I’ve talked about it one-on-one have all said that it will likely be useful to someone out there, so I’ve decided to go ahead and write it. Besides, May is Mental Health Month, and reducing the stigma of mental health issues by bringing this kind of thing to light is what the month is all about.

Enough stalling. On with the dispatch!

When I graduated from high school, I weighed 135 lbs (61 kg). Since I’m 5’11″ (180 cm) tall, that put my BMI at the extremely low end of normal and healthy. I was always thin when I was growing up—some used to say “skinny,” which I always hated hearing because there was usually judgment involved when it was said. I was, to quote Lisa’s matter-of-fact assessment, a “stick boy,” but to me that seemed normal. The way I looked at 18 was how I’d always known myself. Being thin and athletic was part of my concept of who I was.

Why did I weigh so little? Simply put, I didn’t eat very much. I just wasn’t that interested in food. Don’t get me wrong, I ate three good meals a day, and throughout my whole life I’ve enjoyed good food and indulged—yes, even overindulged—when it was plentiful. For the most part, though, it wasn’t. I don’t want to make it sound like I was starved, because I wasn’t. I ate at mealtimes; I ate what was available, which was pretty healthy; I didn’t ever feel overly full; I rarely got a lot of satisfaction from eating; and I didn’t mind being a little hungry.

When I got some freedom in high school, I kept eating the way I always had. Eating healthy was a choice, and (perhaps) I put more pressure on myself than was necessary to eat well for several reasons. (1) I had good eating habits and enjoyed some of the healthier foods, although (even then) eating veggies wasn’t a routine choice. (2) People in my family tend to get larger as they get older, and I didn’t want that to happen to me. In our defense, my grandmother’s desserts are delicious and plentiful! (3) As an athlete, I knew food is fuel. Even at that age I understood that the better the food, the better my running performance was. (4) It was America in the late 80s and early 90s. Even though obesity wasn’t an American epidemic yet, the media was starting to get saturated with stories about “good foods” and “bad foods.” I seemed to take those stories with more gravitas and certainty than they likely deserved.

I thought I was normal. I still do think my teenage self was alright, if atypical. I certainly never thought I had an eating disorder. There might have been clues that I thought about food the wrong way, but I didn’t see them as such. After a cross-country race I was cooling down with a friend who we all thought had an eating disorder. When I declined a hunk of French bread from her loaf, she said, “If I have to eat, you have to eat, too.” Then there was the time in my first year of college when the resident assistant on my floor tried to give me a flier for an eating disorder support group. And when we were newly married and going on road trips, Lisa would from time to time remind me that normal people eat lunch even when it’s inconvenient. I was able to shrug off the first event—my teammate was being friendly, and I certainly wanted her to eat—and Lisa and I were doing the normal thing of figuring out a shared schedule. But the support group suggestion upset me quite a bit. How much I ate was no one’s business but my own, I thought, and I certainly didn’t see myself as having a problem.

Was I calorie deficient? No. Did I have an eating disorder? It’s difficult to say looking back after all these years, but I’m inclined to say “no.” I certainly had several of the elements of disordered thinking about food and body image that are typical in anorexia and orthorexia, but I never actually avoided eating when I was hungry. Eating disorders are serious medical conditions, and I don’t feel any need to include myself in that group lightly. Plus, I was always considered very healthy; no doctor that I can remember ever suggested I was underweight or malnourished. Nevertheless, it’s a fine line and I was close to it. (Looking back, I’d say “uncomfortably close.”)

What I do know, after more than 20 years of being thin and then gaining and losing weight a couple of times, is that at 37 I have body image issues which occasionally lead to anxiety and unhappiness.

In a nutshell: I simply cannot see myself objectively.

I know that when most of us look at ourselves in the mirror, we see things that we like and don’t like, and those things usually look worse to us than they do to other people who also get to see them. That’s normal human behavior. I suspect even Clive Owen looks at himself in the mirror and occasionally sighs in frustration.

What I’m talking about is not really knowing whether I’m the right size and not knowing if the things I don’t like about myself are actually problems or just a symptom of my messed up body image. My mind’s concept of myself is still the person who weighed 135 lbs, had bony arms, and a very outie belly button.

As a triathlete who trains all the time and weighs between 145-150 pounds—depending on the season or phase of the moon, it seems—I’m able to convince myself that what I see isn’t actually the way things are, but it’s all based on faith and logic and not on what I think I see. This I can manage pretty well. “That Buddha belly there,” I think to myself, “isn’t really there. And besides you need it for your infusion sets and CGM sensors. So don’t get any ideas.” And, “That kind of jowly area you have there . . . it isn’t really there either. Really. Really. I know. Trust me. Really.”

What I still have a hard time dealing with are the comments from other people that I’m too thin.

I feel like I’m in a very good place with both my weight and my feelings on food. (Although sometimes I think diabetes would be easier if I didn’t have to eat, that’s completely beside the point and only ever happens when I really, really want to eat but am battling long periods of high blood glucose.) I like to eat. I look forward to eating—and cooking, too! I eat meals of all sizes. I snack. I eat so-called junk food along with my healthy lunch from home. I adore ice cream. Food and I are tight, and my weight stays where it is only because I workout.

But when other people suggest that I’m working out too much or have lost too much weight—even though I haven’t lost any in almost 18 months—my mental equilibrium gets thrown off. I know that I should take it as the joke or sarcastic compliment that it almost certainly was. But not knowing what I really look like and having been defensive in the past, these things leave me worried that maybe people are trying to tell me something that I really should be able to see for myself— just like my RA suggested almost 20 years ago. There’s a fine line for me between shrugging off these comments while being happy with who I have become and accepting that I really just don’t know whether there’s a kernel of truth in them.

I don’t really know how to end this post except to say that it’s not as bad as it might sound from the last few paragraphs. I think about food all the time because I have diabetes, and I think about how I look most mornings after taking a shower and whenever I change my diabetes paraphernalia, but I don’t feel dragged down by food or my body image very often. Mostly I just want anyone reading this to know that (a) if you’ve felt the same way, you’re not alone, (b) body image problems and eating disorders can happen to men, (c) sometimes people are trying to help you the best way they know how and sometimes there just wise-cracking, and (d) it’s okay to like yourself no matter how you think you look. Well, that’s probably enough rambling for now.

p.s. — Yes, this post was scary to write, but it was scarier to publish it.

p.p.s. — If you feel like leaving a comment—which I encourage—please be open-minded and courteous.

(Ignore the one-sided bias in the article. And don’t bother reading the comments; they’ll just make you angry, even if you’re not a cyclist. But, Yay Dara! for looking like you’re in your mid-20s!)

My fellow drivers, here are some tips for coexisting with bicyclists on the road:

• Share the road. It’s the law. You don’t have an exclusive right to the roadways.

• We are not out here to inconvenience you. If you have a problem with making space for cyclists, you need to (re)learn some basic “how to get along with others” skills. Start with empathy and go from there. If you don’t know what I mean, imagine yourself, your spouse, or your child on that bike, and see if that doesn’t change what you’re thinking about doing.
• Pay attention! Stop texting while driving. Get off the phone. LOOK AT THE ROAD!
• Wait to make that turn. We’re going faster than you think. If you’re contemplating turning in front of us, you’ve already made your first mistake, because you’ll be unsafely cutting us off before you know it.
• Slow down. Stop racing to get around us. When you see us and another vehicle approaching from the other direction, slow down and wait the 5-10 seconds it will take until you can safely pass us. 5-10 seconds. That’s it . . . honest.
• Move over. The road is wider than you think, and there’s no rule that says you can’t cross the center line a bit to pass us. If your driver-side wheels aren’t on or over the yellow line, you haven’t moved over enough. If you don’t want to do this because of oncoming traffic, see the previous tip.
• Don’t assume we’re going to give you the right of way. Cycling is hard business, and getting up to speed and maintaining it involves work. If we can avoid touching the brakes, we will. It’s your job to follow traffic laws, just like it’s our responsibility to do the same.
• Don’t be a dick. This is what it all boils down to. Treat us like people you might know, not inconveniences. We might steal 20 seconds from your day, but is that worth causing someone harm. Be safe out there, for everyone’s sake.

My fellow cyclists, remember:

• Be smart. Even though we have the right to share the road and have the same right-of-way privileges as cars, don’t assume drivers think we do. They have the better part of 1,000 pounds (or more) on us. Better to ride another day than to be “right” but squished.
• Don’t run stop signs, stoplights, etc. Yield the right of way when it’s required. Don’t turn in front of cars. I know: stopping sucks, but we can’t make them accept/respect us if we don’t play by the same rules.
• Don’t be an idiot. Avoid unsafe situations. There are intersections I avoid because they’re dangerous and/or I’ll be unreasonably slowing traffic. There are some narrow, curvy roads with too much traffic that I won’t go down even though I want to. It’s the way of the world; accept it.
• Stay as far to the side as safely possible. If there’s a shoulder, you don’t have to ride on it, but it’s not a bad idea if it’s wide enough and free of rumble-strips and debris.
• Hold a straight line and be predictable. Drivers always complain about “swerving, erratic cyclists.” Prove them wrong.
• Signal your turns. Give plenty of notice. If you’ve come to a stop at a light, don’t be afraid to signal more than once. And forget about the American-style right hand turn signal; it’s for people driving broke-down cars and is just confusing for everyone else. Point in the direction your going. Turning left? Point left. Turning right? Point to the right with your right arm. Exiting a rotary? Point at the exit. (Finger guns optional.)
• Make eye-contact at intersections. It lets the drivers know that you know that they know you’re there. It helps convert you from being part of the scenery into a less-likely-to-be-squished human.
• Look around. Be aware. Plan ahead. Check behind you to see if cars are coming before you need to move farther into the traffic lane (or wait to go around an obstacle).
• Don’t be a dick. We’re not entitled to anything more than anyone else on the road. It’s true that we have to deal with people who (unfortunately) would rather endanger us than wait a few moments for safety’s sake, but we should try not to respond in kind. I’m as guilty as anyone for gesturing or yelling at drivers or trying to chase down idiots, but really, it just makes them that much worse next time. If we cede the high ground, they’ll never need to take our complaints seriously. Save your venom for the truly egregious ass-hats.

Obviously I don’t know all the circumstances of Dara’s run-in with the truck, and these tips aren’t meant to imply that she or the driver is at fault. They’re just things I think about on a daily basis when I’m out riding.

Stay safe, readers. And get well soon, Dara!

Now that ATB and my recovery period are over, it’s time to start training for what’s next. “What IS next?” you ask. Well, let’s see.

The NE Season Opener sprint triathlon is five weeks from today on the 13th of May. Twenty quick days later, I’m riding 100 miles around suburban Minneapolis-Saint Paul as part of the A.D.A.’s Tour de Cure. [1] My dia-bestie Scully will be there, as will Scottie J, Heather, and who knows who else.

All of this means one thing: a whole lot of bike riding is in order. (Plus the requisite running and swimming, obviously.) I’m pretty sure I can ramp myself up to a full century in eight weeks, even while tri training. [2] If I add ten miles per week to today’s ride distance—which is entirely doable—I’ll be there. No problem.

What HAS been freaking me out is the idea of riding my new tri bike. It has been since the day that I bought it, but today was the day I rode it for the first time outside. I was nervous before heading out, and that nervousness turned into absolute terror moments after I headed out the door.

How to describe riding a tri bike? (1) The saddle is positioned well forward, so that most of the energy goes directly to the pedals. You sacrifice comfort for this, and are left feeling like you’re going to fall over the front of the bike at a moment’s notice. (2) The handlebars aerobars have two parts: the steer-horn-like pair of grips that have the brake levers and that you use for turning and the aero extensions where you rest your arms as close to the center line of the bike as possible. The extensions have the shift levers. You can’t shift and brake without moving your hands from one part of the aerobars to the other. And when you’re in an aero position, you might as well give up on the idea of braking at all. (3) Because you’re more forward over the bike, even trying to steer when not in aero is kind of like trying to drive a Porsche at high speed using a go-kart steering wheel.

So I decided to start early on this Easter Sunday morning, hitting the road before 7:30 and heading out of town in the direction of nowhere (a.k.a., the towns of Upton and Grafton) on Route 140. It was a good decision.

Heading down the big hill a few blocks away from my house, I realized that the bike is much more stable when it’s going fast. And it can go fast. Wicked fast. (It weighs like two pounds and accelerates like crazy.) Going up the hill out of town—still not in aero yet because I was in town and scared—I realized that my ability to handle the bike at slow speeds (i.e., less than ten miles per hour) was going to be a special challenge.

My heart was racing and the voice of self-doubt in my head was very, very loud. If I hadn’t been wearing long-finger gloves to hold off the chilly air, you would have seen that my knuckles were white. This little ride through suburban MetroWest Boston was turning out to be one of the three scariest things I’ve ever done on a bike. [3] After getting to the highway, I finally summoned all of my courage and got down into the aero position. I was a bit skittish and I veered a few times, but I started to get the hang of steering with my body and finding a smooth gear to keep the bike going the right direction without too much wobbling. I spent a lot of time talking nicely to myself, acting as my own coach and cheerleader.

A little more than a half-hour in, it was time to turn around. I pulled onto a side street, tested my blood sugar, changed into my regular bike gloves, took off the beanie under my helmet, and collected my thoughts. “Well, I’m not dead. And I didn’t break the bike. And it seems to be getting easier. So let’s head home and continue making progress on the way.” The ride back was better and not just because I could feel the bike without the gloves.

I won’t lie. Today’s ride was a little worse than I had expected, but my confidence now that I’m done is much better than it was in the first minutes of my outing. I expect that I’ll keep improving every weekend between now and my first tri of 2012 in just over a month. By the time I do the Nautica NYC Tri in early July, I hope to have much more early morning mileage under my belt. And by late August, when I do my half-ironman in Maine, I’ll be a pro at riding this machine. Well, that’s my hope at least.

When I got home I decided to celebrate . . . with another bike ride. My nerves had only given me about 17 miles on my new bike, and I needed another 15-20, so I refilled my water bottle—which is really hard to remember to drink from when you’re freaked the hell out—and swapped bikes. Out on the road everything immediately felt wrong. Power wasn’t going through the drivetrain quite as easily as a few minutes earlier, and I felt like I was sitting really low toward the back of the bike. Perhaps I had a flat? Looking down I could see that wasn’t the case. And the handlebars felt so far apart. I held a straight line so easily, if felt like I was steering a Buick instead of a bike. “Oh, right, this is my regular bike.”

I was off, the miles quickly slidding by. It was fantastic. I can’t wait for next weekend!

1 — Not to be confused with the JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes that I’m doing in Death Valley this October. (If you’ve already helped with the fundraising, thanks! If not, please consider a small donation and help JDRF search for a cure to type-1 diabetes.) Shortly after I posted that I planned to ride in Death Valley, Heather said I should do their century, too. It seems all anyone has to do these days is ask me to do an event, and I’m in. [back . . .]

2 — My eighteen-week TeamWILD training plan starts on the 22nd of this month. I will, of course, tell you all about it. [back . . .]

3 — The other two being riding out of Arles in traffic shortly after crashing while riding into Arles in the same traffic (which really wasn’t that bad), and riding down a particularly steep hill on one of the trails on the mountain outside of town where I lived in high school. Those weren’t so bad. Today was probably the most freaked out I’ve ever been. [back . . .]

• The backup power generator outside my office
• The wind
• The cat’s one-side conversation with me . . . at all
• People walking down side corridors at the office who I keep almost running into
• Music in the car or the TV in the house unless the volume is way up
• Soundtrack CDs in the car
• The turn signal in the car
• Cars approaching me when I’m riding my bike
• Half of my coworkers when they talk
• Most people at the other end of conference tables
• Much of anything when I’m eating . . . except my food
• Lisa when she’s tired or being snarky (but always in a playful way, I might add)

Things I can hear very, very well:

• My own voice
• My own breathing
• My toothbrush and hairbrush
• My facial sinuses
• My head swiveling on my spine
• The high-pitched ringing in my ears that I normally only hear in dead quiet places

If you’ve tried talking to me recently and only gotten a vacant look, don’t take it personally. If I’ve been talking even more quietly than normal or overcompensating by shouting, sorry. I’m not hearing things outside my own head very well these days. It’s the result of ear barotrauma.

It seems that it’s a bad idea to fly when congested. Evidently, it’s a very bad idea to take six flights in twelve days when massively congested. I didn’t suspect when I had sinus pain as we landed in Madrid and Barcelona that I would be walking around with invisible seashells on my ears for the next 24 hours. And I was starting to get a bit concerned when it lasted a couple days after we returned from Spain and then again the weekend that I flew to run Around the Bay. But I didn’t ever think it would still be with me ten days after flying home.

My doctor says that it might go away in another week or so. Or it might not. He’s probably going to send me to an ENT, who will probably prescribe me some steroids, which will probably wreak havoc on my blood glucose. My not-always-to-be-fully-trusted coworker says this happened to him after diving and his ears have never been quite the same since. Let’s hope medicine trumps anecdote.

So, suppose that you have barotrauma and need to go somewhere? My doctor’s advice: don’t fly. What if you had a cold, knew in advance that flying might mess up your hearing, and still needed to fly? My doctor’s advice: take a maximum-strength decongestant 30-60 minutes before flying, drink lots of water, use a saline nasal spray, and chew gum. Oh yeah, and try not to fly.

Speaking of tying up loose ends, here are a few follow-ups to recent posts.

I. What to listen to next? I wanted to listen to something new, but I wasn’t sure where to go next. Then yesterday on the way home, I heard an NPR segment on U.K. reggae. (It’s okay. You can admit that you listened to it to, and that you occasionally discover new music via public radio. Your sense of being special and nonconformist is safe here, friends.) One of my earliest memories of music that made me sit up and take notice was hearing a bit of calypso, so it feels a bit like diving back into the music of my early youth. Years later, when I first started listening to some early 80s British music, I was amazed at how much reggae and ska influence there was in it. (And then there’s this.) So why not dig into reggae for a while?

II. No hablo español. Turns out, you don’t need to know Spanish to have a good time in Barcelona; most of the shop clerks, hotel folks, and wait staff knew enough English for us to communicate. And the locals are at least as friendly as the French to people who try to speak a few words of the local language before asking if they know English. (I will grudgingly say the Spaniards are perhaps even a little friendlier.)

Often people could tell after my first few words of Spanish that I wasn’t very proficient, and they just switched to English. Evidently, Lisa and I don’t look Spanish either. One woman at the Madrid airport tried to say something to me in Spanish, which I didn’t understand, so then she asked, “Nicht verstehen?” (“You don’t understand?”) After I answered, “No,” she proceeded to try to speak to me in German. She could have also said one of the two or three things in Arabic I remember—”لا أفهم؟”—and my answer would have been the same. (I was telling Lisa how bizarre it is that I can say “I don’t understand” in Arabic and German but not Spanish.) So I countered with “¿Habla ingles?” and “Parlez-vous français?” with the same result. My helping her was not meant to be. Anyway, I guess that we look more German than Spanish.

Thanks to “Sesame Street” and my mom teaching me a few words as a preschooler, I can count to twenty and be on the look out for “entradas” and “salidas” and “peligro.” When we had to use Spanish, we were still able to buy things and order food, and I even gave directions to a woman looking for the street she was walking on. By the time we left I had the simplest of conversations with the check-in agent at the Iberia desk in Barcelona, which only broke down when she asked what kind of seats we wanted for the flight back to Boston. I laughed when she said that I speak Spanish very well, and she seemed amused when I said that I don’t speak Spanish at all.

And then there’s Catalan, which was everywhere in Barcelona. It’s a beautiful, funny thing that sounds not quite French and not quite Spanish. At any rate, I found the Catalan menus easier to read than the Spanish ones. Boy oh boy, did I want to speak French a lot on this trip. . . .

III. City Running. I have decided that big cities are not easy places to run in unless you’re willing to make a commitment to travel to a nice place to run: along the Seine or Thames, Central Park in New York, the Domain in Sydney, the waterfront in any city lucky enough to have one, etc. Suburbs are easy enough to manage, but if you’re staying in the city where all the action is, there’s just so much stopping and starting.

Except Boston. Somehow Boston has been blessed with plenty of long streets with minor side streets, meaning you usually don’t have to stop at every corner. And these streets take you quickly to the Charles River trails or to the Emerald Necklace and its parks. I’m trying not to sound parochial—especially since I don’t run in Boston often—but the number of people running all over Boston at any time of day just helps prove the point that Boston might be one of the best running cities in the world.

Nevertheless, I needed to run on our trip. This vacation was a perfect time to taper, but I still had to put a few miles in every other day just to keep my legs fresh and ready. (My orange New Balance shirt and I have now run in five countries on three continents.) So if you’re staying in the L’Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona and you need to run a few miles, what to do? First, use the Passeig de Gràcia or the Rambla Catalunya to head to La Rambla, the super-touristy pedestrian area. If you finish your run before 9:00AM, you don’t have to dodge many people. Also—and this seems true for most European cities—head to the old city where the streets are one-way, windy, narrow, and designed for pedestrians. You’ll often get lucky and an early-morning delivery vehicle will block traffic, letting you run in the street without too much worry.

Just have a good idea where you’re going and don’t get lost.

IV. Pool ladies. Honestly, it would be easier if the four of them weren’t trying to swim in my lane.

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

Let’s recap. Focus = Peanut Butter. Having boundaries on your time = Chocolate. Put those two great tastes together!

This Morning, I accidentally swam 2,250 yards instead of 2,000.