maybe if you hum a few bars...

I ran the Turkey Trek with a cold. In the rain.

I could feel the cold coming on the day before, but I have maintained a steady denial about it, on purpose. So far my denial has taken me through the Turkey Trek, on a 2hr ride yesterday, and out for a 1hr run this morning. In retrospect it doesn't sound too bright, but at the time, it all made perfect sense.

I feel like I have to explain my stupidity, for my own edification.

It's been several months since I was last ill. That's a good thing. That I am less ill these days is truly a happy thing. I have two first graders now in public school. It seems like I spent an entire season last year with my head under a pillow of stuffiness. That I can even say I've been illness free for several months seems like a miracle.

Out here 3 days after the race, I'm going to say it's not hubris. it's not arrogance. It is partly ignorance, partly fear, and partly stubbornness.

Why not hubris or arrogance? I suppose that since I have an ego (however small it may be), it is possible for my own need to succeed to supercede any rational thought. Am I arrogant enough to think that I am bulletproof? Or that I'm better than everyone else who is there? Uh, I'm not arrogant enough to think that I might even place in a local 5K on thanksgiving, so no, not so much. We have some fast people show up for these things, it's highly unlikely for them all to be somewhere else (in fact, the winner had a 15 minute time. 15 minutes. Wow). I really really wanted to do it, no doubt about it. My arrogance takes me as far as mid-pack these days, not much beyond that.

We have established that I am not immune to my own ego, but that it is not running the show. Let's talk about stupid.

Oh yes, let's talk about stupid. Should be an easy judgment - even I am willing to believe that one. Stupid implies that I ignore sensible advice, or that I know better. Or it could imply that I am not fully informed. I'm going with that. Since I'm not sick all the time, quite frankly, I forget what it's like to be sick. I forget what happens, what it feels like. How does this sick thing go again? Plus there's the whole delayed reaction thing with me. It usually takes awhile before anything works on me, it's not like I have felt immediately crappy at any point in this journey. That delayed muscle soreness thing? Exactly 24 hours for me -- extremely predictable. Most other things? Not so much.

I did get up on Thursday feeling iffy. Aha! For some this would surely be a sign, but I have also gotten up plenty of mornings feeling a bit iffy - I think it's a perfectly normal feeling at 5am, and that's why maintaining a certain amount of denial is so important. If I listened to myself every time I felt a little low on energy, you'd see me eating a whole lot more snickers bars.

Then there's the whole energy scale thing. See, I have this theory about the training - it keeps me feeling mostly great superficially. It's not until I start digging in that I get a sense for how thick the "good"veneer is. This from someone who used to have a habit of not eating, and wake up dizzy every day, or go through a half a pack of cigarettes a day. I think my sense of perspective is decidedly skewed. A superficial feeling of "good" is pretty awesome, but I still have no idea of the scale. How deep does it go?

Also, it's not like I rolled out of bed with a fever on Thursday, or felt dizzy, or exceptionally horrible. That sort of experience would be more obvious, and I would not ignore that. No, I could tell I was losing my voice, but I didn't feel low on energy, drained, or sore anywhere. Just kinda snotty.

It could be that I have built up a certain insensitivity to feeling crappy...

Fear? Pretty obvious that since I'm training for an Ultra I'm a little afraid to lose some fitness if I don't maintain a consistent training program. Sure, fear plays a role. I was more OK with the fear of potentially getting sicker than I was of missing the experience or running a 5K.

The stubborn part is obvious. There is a lot of training that gets accomplished by pure stubbornness, so it's hard to differentiate when stubbornness alone is running the show. Truly, any time the weather turns a little bit iffy, my internal dialogue begins.

self: I don't like running in the wind.
Self: yeah, it's not the funnest, just get it done.
self: I could just run on the treadmill, that would be OK.
Self: you could, but it would be really boring and would seem like it would take forever. Don't be a puss.
self: I don't like running in the wind.
Self: ...but if you just dress up right, you'll be done before you know it. Go do it. It'll be an adventure!

you could insert rain, snow, cold or pretty much any weather condition other than moderate temperature in place of wind and I might go through the same dialogue, complete with inner whimpering.

Most of the time, Self wins. I do it anyway, because Self is just more stubborn than self. Self is my inner grown-up, my inner Jure Robic. self is my inner two year old, my inner petulance. They're both very stubborn people, but grown-up me wins more often than 2-year-old me, as it should.

Back to my point. With a little bit of internal dialogue for pretty much anything that involves an additional challenge, the other factors that might be going on (illness, broken parts, whatever) get lost in the noise. The "noise" seems to consist of the unknown (I can't remember what happens if I'm starting to get sick and I run in the rain), the familar knowledge that feeling like crap will pass (just like every Masters morning), and a little bit of fear (I need to keep training if I'm gonna do that big run). With all that going on, suddenly it doesn't seem so unreasonable for me to be running a moderately-paced 5K at the Turkey Trek. In the rain. Without my voice.

Meh. Who needs a voice.

I did decide not to swim Friday morning - because already feeling iffy plus the 5 am iffy seemed like a poor decision.

The Saturday ride was based on rationalization: I took a day off training, so I'll be better now. Right? Well, I was...

The Sunday run was part rationalization and part momentum. I'll just do a short run, I had a good ride yesterday, I'm taking it easy. Except that it was clear that the snot was impairing my ability to breathe and take in oxygen, so the run was harder than it should have been. Plus breathing the cold started to feel weird.

It did not help to be outside for a few hours on Saturday, in the cold, watching a parade.

And now I have a cough. Bleah. I don't know if it was inevitable, I don't know if I did it to myself. I don't know if I'm better or worse because of what I've done. Frankly, I hate not knowing, and so I am throwing a big tantrum.

I'll take tomorrow off. I don't know when it'll be OK to get back into it, it's hard to figure out. It's not like I'm equipped with a sign like the one on the FedEx box that says the driver "has/hasn't" picked up by 5:00, though I think I need a sign, something that says "sick/healthy". Wouldn't it be nice if we came with a sick/healthy version of one of those "clean/dirty" dishwasher magnets? Or a "sick" light? Something. Anything. I don't know about you, but I seem to need one.

In the meantime, I think I'll skip Masters and sleep in a few days.