Saturday I leave for Pittsburgh for the 2008 Transplant Games. I am not ready. The months have slipped by and all the conditioning I had wanted to do has mostly remained undone and I am weak with little stamina. Between bad weather and fatigue, my efforts have been way off the ideal.

I have recently managed to get my doctor to change my blood pressure medicine from one that slows the heart to one that dilutes the blood vessels and that has helped marginally. I always had good blood pressure but the anti rejection medicine has the side effect of raising it.

He also sent me to one of those stress tests where they hook electrodes on various parts of your chest then have you run on a treadmill. All the jagged lines that were printed out on the chart turned out good, and my heart returned to resting okay, but the blood pressure went up pretty fast and stayed up which is apparently why I get so winded so fast when pushing it. That is due to being out of shape, so one of those Catch-22s — hard to get in shape being winded but without being in shape will get winded easily.

Tulasi came with me to Pittsburgh weekend before last for the final Team Pittsburgh meeting. I got T shirts and other uniform stuff. I was saying to one runner (heart transplantee) how I didn’t know if I should run the 800 meter race because I will just be chugging around the course at such a slow pace. He said for one race at a previous Games a participant had done it with a walker, the kind with wheels on it. So I guess I will go ahead and embarrass myself by competing.

We were going to go try the 20 K bike race course again but after the meeting we went shopping in the Strip, the produce wholesale and great food retail area , and scouting event locations. When we were leaving for North park for the bike course, the car starting making strange nosies so we aborted the mission and went straight home. I didn’t feel like I had made enough progress to be able to do the second of the 2 laps that I was unable to do the first time, but figured it wouldn’t have hurt to try.

One change in the race is instead of a 1 3/4 mile ride before the 1 and 1/4 mile nonstop unrelenting hill, the race will now start at the bottom of the hill. This is good because if I am foolish enough to attempt the second lap, if I can’t make the hill the second time I can just turn around and coast back down to the starting line. From the old starting point I would have still had the longer backtrack remaining at the bottom with possibly nothing left in the tank to make it.

Here is my schedule:

Sat. 7/12/2008 – Registration and then Opening Ceremonies (6:30 PM)
Sun. 7/13/2008 – 5K Road Race for Organ & Tissue Donation (Transplant Athlete) (7:00 AM – 8:30 AM)
Mon. 7/14/2008 – Track & Field – 800 Meter Run (4:00 PM – 4:45 PM)
Tues. 7/15/2008 – Cycling – 20K (12:00 PM)

I will be staying with friends in Pittsburgh Saturday night, returning to New Vrindaban for the Ratha Yatra, then back to Pittsburgh Monday.

I have been running wheelbarrows of compost and mulch to trees and shrubs in a last ditch effort to get some improvement in stamina, but it may be too little too late — we’ll see.