Wednesday morning at 8 am in the master bath. There I was, innocently shaving my face when I felt a slight scritchy scratchiness at the back of my throat. All of a sudden I began to understand why Tour de France cyclists push elevator buttons with their elbows when they are racing. I’m peaking, dammit, and I’m not getting sick. Ok, maybe I am not peaking like a Tour de France racer, but I have been preparing for the suitcase of hurt that will be next weekend for some time now. My lunch date on Monday mentioned that she was recovering from a little cold. Perhaps she was just practicing Step 12 when she passed it on to me?
My denial of illness powers can be formidable, and at times I have had to be truly miserable before I did anything about being sick. Not this time around, however. It seems unlikely that the Ingles in Marshall would have as wide a variety of herbal remedies as the one I visited, but maybe that’s yet another reason not to live in Madison County, NC. I loaded up in a way that would have made Howard Hughes proud. Zinc, echinacea, and Vitizemin C. The US Anti-Doping Agency is bound to be sending vampires to my house any minute. They’ll never make it stick, though.
And in the meantime, I’m still training. In fact, I can really only tell that I’m fighting something when I run. That’s fine except the one reason I really don’t want to be sick is because I’m running a marathon in a little over a week. Oh well, more spitting and coughing for my fellow runners to enjoy. It really is a thing of beauty to watch me excrete bodily fluids for 26.2 miles. Fortunately, it looks like I’ll have support present with a camera so you likely will not have to miss a thing.