June is summer tune-up time. Elsewhere, you may read about plants, ants and summer's cropped pants, but I'm focusing on getting the most out of my body and mind over the next few months. There's news about the sun, a great women's run, and help for pain when you feel your body's undone. Take from it what you will.
- While the Canadian Dermatology Association (CDA) has always sent out messages about skin and sun damage, this year's sun awareness week (this week) keys on teaching people how to screen themselves for melanoma, one of the cancers still on the increase in Canada.
This year, more than 3,900 Canadians are expected to develop this skin cancer and two a day will die from it. It starts in the pigment-producing cells in the skin's outer layer. These can grow out of control, causing tumours. Fair-skinned people whose sun-sensitive skin burns rather than tanning are most at risk.
Because in its early stages malignant melanoma is highly curable, the CDA wants us not only to cover up and wear sunscreen, but also to check our own moles. Backs and legs are the cancer's favorite sites, but it can be found anywhere.
This year the CDA's new educational twist is getting people to remember the melanoma alphabet -- really just the first four letters. A stands for asymmetry, meaning the shape of this particular mole is not the same on both sides. B is for border, or the mole's visible edge: A malignant melanoma's border is ragged and irregular. C, for color, can be anything from brown to black with areas of red, grey or white. D is for diameter: Melanomas can grow in width -- something to watch out for.
- Back in January, when there was no sun, I attended the launch of this year's Jean's Marines. The women's running group, led by Toronto doctor Jean Marmoreo, offers a tremendous opportunity for women to train for this October's U.S. Marine Corps marathon in Washington, D.C.
Last year at this time, Marmoreo had 184 mostly middle-aged women in the midst of training for the run of their lives. "Until this year, they'd never run much more than around the block," she says in a new movie made on Jean's Marines. "If they make it, they'll know they can achieve anything." The movie airs Saturday at 10 p.m. on W Network.
The group's method is to walk-run. You run 10 minutes and walk one, even during the 42.2-kilometre marathon -- although, Marmoreo says, at the beginning, many of the participants are walking 10 minutes and running one.
It's not only the new runners who are inspirational, but also Marmoreo and her partner Bob Ramsay, both of whom have faced tremendous challenges (she of debt and he of addiction) in the past. They met in mid-life: She was turning 50 and had decided to walk the 1,600 kilometres of the Appalachian Trail. He walked along with her, a walk, she says that "makes or breaks" a couple.
"We've been given a second chance," says Ramsay who has also become a marathon runner and who now looks at destinations around the world where the two can go to run and enjoy a holiday.
- For any joint or muscle pain, I recommend a new book called Instant Relief, by Peggy Brill, a New York orthopedic physical therapist.
I applaud the book's simplicity. If you're in pain, you don't want to read 20 pages on how and why; all you want is relief. Ten chapters cover different parts of the body, from head to toe. Each chapter offers various easy exercises (illustrated clearly) to relieve the stiffness, pain or cramp. She peppers her book with interesting names for her exercises. There's even one called Brill's chicken -- not a barbecue recipe, but a way of relieving shoulder pain. Humour in a medical book: I never thought I'd see the day.
