Here I am Saturday night while my husband is cutting wood at his parents house (sadly that is not code for anything – he is really over there cutting wood) and I am here with BossBoss who is having a lovely date with his blue blanket and rawhide bone.
It’s a wild and crazy Saturday night.
I have been down for the count for about 2 days. Really it’s been about 7 days but who is counting.
(ME)
It started last Saturday after the swim. On Saturday I swim and run. Running has been feeling strong lately despite weighing about 5 – 7 lbs more than ever (but again who is counting; again, me). So I wasn’t too happy when I boarded the mill of dread to find that my anterior tibs really hurt which usually means something is about to go wrong (enter ominous foreshadowing)…
Sunday was good though. I had my bike test and added a ridiculous number of watts since my last test and since I was getting sick this impresses me even more and trust me – it has been a LONG LONG time since I have impressed myself so it is worth noting and don’t worry the bottom drops out in a few days…
Monday I woke up and didn’t feel too bad. Tuesday it finally hit. I read somewhere that it takes 4 days for something to settle into your body and then incubate before revealing itself. On Tuesday I believe I had my big reveal after the bike ride. I had a good bike ride then did masters at night. Lucky for me we did yet another timed mile. When I added 1 minute to my time from 2 weeks ago I did the math and even with my bad math knew that something was up (or slow, or just wrong).
Wednesday I still was not convinced I was at death’s door so instead went running in the cold. I forgot to mention that on Saturday my foot – my right foot which is supposed t o be my good foot – kind of blew up for no reason at all. I was convinced it was broken, fractured or slowly seceding from the rest of my body. I also am convinced it was all the treadmill’s fault so I ran outside on Wednesday instead. That was great except for the fact that it was about 17 degrees and windy. At one point I was so cold that I wanted to cry but intelligently said to myself – a wet face is a cold face so instead I gathered myself and finished the run.
After that run I got my usual winter kennel cough that sometimes leaves me breathless in the middle of the street gasping for air and convinced I will die – DIE – and have to run up to a stranger’s doorway explaining who I am and where I come from in 1 breath of less. DIE! I decided then – finally – that a trip to the doctor was in order. I have been wheezing for about 6 weeks and had on and off episodes of kennel cough. I get wheezy most winters so I don’t think much of it. But now it seemed kind of different.
Time to call the doctor.
Wednesday night was a weird one. At midnight Chris’ phone rang. I thought about not waking him up to tell him it rang but then feared it was bad news about someone in his family. Turns out his office burned down and…yeah. That’s all I’m going to say about that. So on Thursday I woke up late with 15 minutes to get myself to the doctor which was 12 minutes away.
I got there just in time to get weighed. Good thing because I wasn’t feeling fat or anything. So I took off my shoes – hey, this isn’t my first time at the doctor’s weigh in rodeo – and the nurse actually said to me, “funny, you look like a much more silght thing than that.”
I think that was her very polite way of calling me fat.
Good thing I took off my shoes.
Anyways, the Nurse Practitioner (who has the same stethescope and prescripton rights as a doctor but got out of school before she was 40…who’s the smart one now?) told me I had acute bronchitis and gave me 30 days worth of antibiotics crammed into 5 pills (which feels GREAT on my stomach) and a funky steroid inhaler that leaves me jittery and feeling like I could lift a truck.
I did nothing on Thursday and Friday and woke up on Saturday saying give me a workout or give me death. You see, last year I never wanted to train because I was so overtrained. This year I really want to train. The first thing I thought of when I found out I was officially sick was DAMN! I just want to train! So now I sit here literally foaming at the mouth for training. Last year I would have said – screw it! I’m going shopping instead.
Obstacles as opportunities, I know. So I took the opportunity to find a new hobby today. Actually it was Chris’ demand. He told me over coffee (ironically) that I need to relax. I don’t do so good at the relaxing. Yoga was supposed to help but then it turned into a stretch death mission. So relaxing is not my thing because all of my hobbies are work or working out. I just really like what I do and really like doing things too. I can’t sit still.
I believe Chris’ words were something like this:
“My mom has shopping, Meredith has beading, Megan has shopping – well she did but now she has baby – and my dad has trains. You need to find something mindless to do like all of that.”
It’s as good as done: I’m going to start shopping for beaded trains.
So I thought – scrapbooking. There’s this little issue of my wedding pictures from my wedding 3 years ago that are still sitting in a box. Today would be the day I would put them into an album with all sorts of stickers and frilly things. Oh why not. They’re just pictures and I am not paying some guy an extra $700 to put them in a glossy laminated album.
I didn’t realize people took scrapbooking so seriously. There’s a lot of shit out there you can scrapbook with and I felt really overwhelmed. I bought a lot of stuff then spent the rest of the day in a sea of sticky tabs, card stock and wedding photos. It was not relaxing because I am a perfectionist who has to line everything up and match everything and ended up tossing half of what I did to do it all over again.
So much for relaxing.
Now I feel back to normal and fully functional. I can pin this one on Chris. He nursed me back to health with vanilla milk (that sounds kind of creepy, eh?). I am drinking vanilla milk because Chris bought it for me. I complained to him that I felt I had not met my nutritional quota for the day so the boy brings me back vanilla milk. That’s usually my treat after a hard workout. But these days the treats seem to come after…well, just about anything. Hey, I answered the phone! Treat. I got the mail! Treat. That might be why I’m not such a slight thing. But I’m not counting (yes…I am…really).
For the rest of the night I’m going to take hits from my new inhaler and run crazy laps around the living room with Boss. Because I have got to burn off the 400 calories of vanilla milk I just drank. Plus I’m just itching to run. And as long as I keep it in zone 1 I think it’s safe to do a few crazy laps…
Right?
