August 11 - home sick

AM: 2 miles, aborted run...

I woke up this morning feeling woefully sick to my stomach and slightly weak all over.  I get sick enough to stay home about once every year, and when it happens, I know.

I stayed home from work and slept as much as I could, but I ate no more than a pre-run piece of toast and a few crackers throughout the day. I'm trying my best to put down fluids, but that's proving difficult when my stomach has put up flares, concrete roadblocks, and a flag man telling everything that approaches, "road closed."

Some of the worst possible mistakes I've ever made were running when ill, especially with a fever:

1. My freshman year of college. I felt so sick that I could barely walk to class. I stayed in bed for a day before picking up a friend from the airport. At the airport, I was so sick that Valerie and Samy had to push me around in a wheelchair. I ran the next day, anyway, before promptly going into remission over dinner that night when I broke out into a fever at the restaurant. This all could have really hurt me, so I took the wisely took the next day completely off. This worked well, since I ran what in 2004 was a PR for me (at the St. Patrick's Day 10k).
2. My junior year of college - outdoor track. This was going to be my only outdoor season of track in college, so I wanted to make it a good one. During a long run, I fell off pace so badly that I had to walk the last mile of the Greenbelt Park loop.  I tried that week to resume hard training, and I just dug myself into a deeper and deeper hole. My workouts times got slower and slower, yet I dug deeper and deeper still, climaxing at the ACC Outdoor 10,000, which to this day is hands-down the most humiliating race of  my life. Because I tried to hammer away at running while my body was begging for recovery, I ran the last lap as the only person on the track got the motherf***ing pity clap for the first time in my life. This is the only race that I can say definitively that I wish I had DNF'd. 

Lesson learned: when I think for feel that I'm running a fever (as I am right now, sitting limp of the couch typing on my laptop), I am uncharacteristically conservative with my training. Bert jokingly calls me "superman," and if that's the case, common diseases like the flu (or whatever intestinal jihadist is in my system right now...) are my "kryptonite."