Goals for 2011

I did pretty darn well with my 2010 goals. I'm no longer setting myself one for my weight -- having maintained myself at 135 pounds for about a year and a half, I'm pretty sure that keeping a healthy weight has become a habit for me, and not something I need to give myself a mental reminder about any longer. (I continue to use Lose It!, the food- and exercise-tracking iPhone app that helped me get down to this weight, in order to alert me to any upticks in my weight so I can correct the problem before it gets bigger.) But I still have some running and nonrunning health-related goals:

• Blog on ReasonPharm at least once a week. My temperament is very much fits-and-starts; I often work obsessively on a project for weeks, then abandon it for weeks, then return to it. You can see it in my 2010 posting pattern, where I'd post every day, sometimes twice a day, for a few weeks, then fail to post for a couple of months. This is not how to keep readers coming back, duh! I am capable of disciplining myself to do a thing regularly, as I've shown with my ability to maintain a running schedule of 4-5 days a week for four years now. (I don't reduce frequency in the off-season, just mileage.)


• Give CrossFit a try. Endurance is, obviously, not a problem for me. Strength, however, is. I've never in my life been able to do a single unassisted pull-up. I would like that to change, and I've heard nothing but positives about CrossFit from fellow Objectivists. I'm planning to attend a teaser class at CrossFit South Brooklyn, which is a quick jog away from my apartment, in January, and probably sign up for private Foundations training (basically the onboarding stuff where they show you how to do the moves) after that. Assuming all goes well, I'll be able to attend classes after Foundations are done. I'm excited, and a little scared -- my typical workouts as a distance runner are long and work me somewhat hard, but rarely to a very high level of intensity. Am I going to be able to hang with the tough guys? I hope so!


• Pick a really damn cool marathon to run. I have now set a personal record every time I've run the marathon. I certainly wouldn't mind doing so again (and running a 4:22:35 PR in 88-degree weather begs the question of what I could do if the conditions were better), but chasing PRs is no longer my primary goal. My husband and I may want to have a child in the next three to five years, and once that happens, I am probably going to have to give up marathoning. I won't give up running, but maintaining the mileage load I need to run a successful marathon doesn't really go with the time and energy needed to raise a child. Which means I can count the number of marathons I have left in my lifetime on one hand (since I don't plan on running more than one a year, and can't necessarily count on getting back into marathoning once any children are older). That means I want every race I have left to be a special experience. Right now option one is Berlin, which is a city I've desperately wanted to see again ever since I visited ever so briefly in 1999. It's an enormous race -- one of the five World Marathon Majors -- and would thus have great crowd support. Plus, it's a nice flat course, so I could chase another PR. Other possibilities: San Francisco (for a serious challenge) or Marine Corps, which I might be able to run with a friend, something I've never done before.
  

And that's about it!

Aaaaand it's price control time!

Really, is anybody surprised? Of course, the White House won't come out and say that the government is imposing price controls on the health insurance industry. But now that insurers are responding to all the extra benefits they need to cover (not to mention all the sick people who'll be buying "insurance" for chronic conditions -- particularly the ones who, now that the individual mandate is in trouble, are going to wait until they have an acute problem to purchase their policies) by raising prices, Obama and Sebelius are stomping their feet, crying "Boo, hiss, reality!" and telling insurers they're going to have to present justification for any rate increases of more than 10%. It's not a very long step from there from the government ordering insurers not to sell any policies at prices it deems "unreasonable."

"Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, said that in their zeal to review premiums, 'the administration and Congress have largely ignored factors driving up the cost of coverage.'"

I don't feel sorry for the beating Ignagni and her ilk are taking. AHIP got behind ObamaCare when the President was trying to garner support for the bill; AHIP was hoping that it could grab a huge share of loot by forcing Americans to buy coverage they don't want or can't afford. But now the scheme is blowing up in the industry's face. Big shocker: when the nanny state giveth, the nanny state decideth how much things should cost.

Goals for 2010: How'd I do?

Now that year's end is approaching, time to see how I did, as I set up my goals for next year.

First, my 2010 goals:

• Maintain weight at 135 pounds. Done, and without a whole lot of difficulty. I've replaced just about my entire wardrobe -- it's such fun buying size sixes instead of tens and twelves. Also my husband brags about the fact that although the cliche is that a woman lets herself go after marriage, I look better than I did on our wedding day. Hah!
  
• Beat my personal record in the marathon. Also done, although in retrospect I should always have qualified this goal with "weather permitting." I sliced six minutes off my PR, but I did so on an 88-degree day in Chicago, at the cost of fainting from dehydration a few days later. Was it worth the medical emergency? Probably not, since next year I can try again. Then again, it was so hot that I'm not sure going out more conservatively would have saved me.
• Run a 5K. Done...twice! As expected, I slashed my previous PR (set before I started seriously running and before I pared my weight down to 135) from 26:47 to 24:09.
• Improve core strength. This is the one area in which I've failed miserably, mostly because I haven't held this goal in mind all year. I'll address this in my 2011 goals.
• Go injury-free. Hmm. On the one hand, I didn't injure any body parts. On the other hand, can we call a year in which I fainted from dehydration "injury-free"? In any case, the circumstances surrounding Chicago were pretty extreme, and it's unlikely I'll ever again be faced with running a marathon in such difficult conditions, so I do give myself credit for knowing this year when to stretch, when to lay off a prescribed day's training because of illness, etc.

Soon to come: Next year's goals!

Freedom of speech? Good luck with that one.

Medical Marketing & Media reports that a Jazz Pharmaceuticals drug rep is suing the federal government for the right to speak about so-called "off-label" use of Xyrem, the drug he represents, citing his First Amendment right to free speech.

I wish that statement didn't have to be qualified. I wish some drug company would have the cojones to flat out state, once and for all, that the muzzle the FDA puts on every pharmaceutical company that does business in America, is unconstitutional and a violation of rights.

The rep's argument, though, is that he should have been allowed to speak about this particular off-label use because the manufacturer had already submitted data to the FDA for approval of that use. FDA's rationale for violating manufacturers' rights is to say that, if it allowed off-label promotion, manufacturers would have no incentive to conduct clinical trials to provide evidence to support new uses of their drugs. The Jazz rep and his lawyer say that, since the trials were already conducted, there was no need to incentivize Jazz to perform more trials, and therefore the rep's off-label speech wasn't so wrong.

FDA's counterargument is that it's not the speech that's wrong, but rather "the crime is introducing the drug into commerce." I suppose it's easier to convince Americans that governmental activity falls under the commerce clause than it is to convince them that they should sacrifice their First Amendment rights, hence the attempt to call the rep's action something other than what it is, an exercise of freedom of speech.

Where do I begin to point out all the things that are wrong here?

• Why yes, FDA, you have criminalized free speech for years. As I said, I wish pharmaceutical companies had the will to stand up and say so, because from the FDA's eagerness to characterize this "crime" as one of commerce rather than speech, it's clear the enemy is a bunch of mean little men who scurry like rats when presented with the truth.
• Who says pharmaceutical companies wouldn't have incentives to do clinical trials without the FDA? They certainly wouldn't need to deal with the kind of bureaucracy the FDA imposes, but that doesn't mean pharma companies wouldn't want to do trials -- precisely because lots and lots of people won't take drugs without that level of evidence that they work. In order to increase market share, then, companies have to do trials, or find some other way of showing that their products work.
• Pharmaceutical companies aren't the only ones doing trials. In a free market, anyone who wants to answer a particular question about whether a drug works, is free to do so, provided he can recruit enough patients for a trial and doctors to conduct it. Even in our not-at-all-free market, plenty of nonprofit groups and individual hospitals or doctors do this. People want information. That means, in a free market, it's often profitable to be the discoverer of such information. You don't have to muzzle pharma companies to incentivize the release of data.

In any case, I highly doubt that the Jazz rep is going to win his case -- even though it's true, the FDA is violating his and his employer's rights.