Jogger's Migraine

Oh, so this is super and very typical of my life. I've been trying to exercise more regularly again. I was doing really well last spring, but hit a major stumbling block when I had emergency surgery and was laid up for several weeks. Now that I'm all better physically, I'm having difficulty getting on track mentally. But I did start running again and I actually do enjoy running, which means that something is bound to go wrong. Last night I had a nice little 2 mile run with lots of incline so it was about 30 minutes total. Two hours after I finished I got a horrible, horrible headache aka a migraine. 1000 mg of ibuprofen didn't even put a dent in it.

Today, I gave it some thought and realized that I've gotten a headache pretty much every time I've run in the last few months. I gave in and looked up "exercise headache" on WebMD. I'm not putting that as a link, because I don't want to encourage anyone to use that site. Seriously, look up symptom like "toe cramp" and you'll either be diagnosed with bone cancer in the foot or some kind of muscle degeneration. But I digress... I figured that my headaches were a result of dehydration since I probably don't drink enough water. But according to WebMD (again, not the most reliable source) there is actually a condition called jogger's migraine that is fairly common in people that ordinarily get migraines. Apparently, when I exert myself, I am not getting enough blood flow to my brain and that causes the blood vessels to constrict and cause a migraine. Fantastic!

My colleague who runs marathons has never heard of this, however, and that makes me wonder if perhaps WebMD is making it all up. Guess I'll need to see a real doctor to find out!

Pocket Susan Advice: Start cooking. When you eat out you spend, on average, twice as much as you would pay for the ingredients for a meal at home. If you don't like waiting to eat when you get home from work, consider making casseroles or other dishes in advance that you can heat up when you're ready. Another blog, I'm an Organization Junkie has a great feature called Meal Plan Mondays that offers lots of great meal plans and recipes to get you started!