Careful What You Wish For...

I’ll be honest with you. Lately I’ve lost my drive. I don’t want to work out, don’t want to sweat. I’d love to cozy up to a box of fancy chocolates and down the whole thing. I’m still doing everything, kind of hoping this moment will pass, but I’m really just not enjoying myself. Now, you know how the saying goes: be careful what you wish for.

Last Saturday I was on a 10 mile run. It was a tad colder than I’ve been used to (and let us all bow our heads and give thanks to Mother Nature for being so kind and generous this Fall), but it was clear and sunny, a perfect day for a run. And I felt horrible. I couldn’t figure out why; I had slept well, eaten properly before it. I was just struggling with every step. I have a sentence I sometimes ask myself on difficult runs: “Am I injured?” If the answer is yes, I get to stop. If not, I need to suck it up and keep going. Today I asked myself the question, and I paused on the answer. I wasn’t injured, but something definitely wasn’t right.

I finally got through that run and made it home, though I needed a 2 hour nap to recover from it. The next day I went for a 3 mile run/walk with my running buddy, Karen. Karen is recovering from a foot injury, and wanted to do an easy run together. I’ve been looking to push my workouts even more (in some future blog we’ll talk about ½ Ironman Triathlons :-), so I jumped at the opportunity. Karen carried a timer set to buzz after 3 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking.

That run with Karen was hell. Wait, let me explain. Running with Karen is always a pleasure; she’s interesting and smart which makes for enjoyable conversation, and she runs faster than me making the running parts the perfect challenge for me. But on this day, I could barely get through each 3 minute run segment. All of my muscles ached worse than they did after the marathon, and for the life of me I couldn’t catch my breath. That run required about a 3 hour nap to recover from, and when I woke up, I turned to my husband and said the sentence that I’d been trying to avoid: “I’m sick”.

I watched my husband leave the house with our two kids to take them out for pizza for dinner, and I crawled back into bed, half wondering when I had been hit by a truck, and half wishing I really would get hit by a truck in order to be put out of my misery. Before I got into bed, though, I hopefully laid out my clothes to go to the gym for my regular Monday workout of a ½ mile swim followed by a 45 minute spin class.

Monday morning I heard my alarm and had just enough strength to shut it off and turn over. I wasn’t going anywhere, not to the gym, not to work, nothing. Several hours later, I woke up to an empty house: the kids were at school, Wil was at work, I’d slept longer than my cats had. I sat up and my chest hurt so much I started looking for the anvil I was convinced was sitting on top of it.

I finally got enough strength to throw on several layers of clothes (I was freezing!) and drive the entire 3 blocks to the doctor’s office. The receptionist remarked that I was dressed for the next Ice Age but it was almost 50 degrees outside, and all I could think was that I didn’t have enough strength to kill her.

It didn’t take long for the doctor to figure out what was wrong, and she uttered the one word that no runner who is five weeks away from her next half marathon wants to hear: “pneumonia”. She asked if I smoked, and through a barrage of coughing I managed to get out that I am a marathoner and triathlete. In other words, umm, no, I don’t smoke. Her reply: “Oh, you’re an athlete. Well, no working out for a week or two.” She might as well have told me to go pick out my coffin. No working out for 2 weeks?? That could just kill me.

For the next couple of days, I did almost nothing but sleep and cough. Of course, this is a busy week for Wil at work, so he had to work late, leaving me to be sick single Mom. I decided that no child died from eating sandwiches for dinner, and that’s just what they got for 3 days straight. After a few days the antibiotics started to kick in and I started acting like a responsible adult again, actually providing my children with a home cooked meal and even making it through half a day of work before I had to go home and sleep for the other half of the day.

It’s been a week since I worked out, and guess what? I completely miss it. I am HUNGRY to work out again. I want to do 3 hours of resistance bands and then run a half marathon, just for a warm up. As much as I may have been in a rut, I still liked how my body felt healthy and solid from all my workouts. I liked the energy I had from eating well. Yes, I miss junk food from time to time, but I like being this 5 foot tall powerhouse more than I like eating an entire chocolate cake.

I still can’t breathe well and know that I can’t do my regular hard workouts for a while. I know that I might not be able to run that half marathon in January like I had planned. And that’s OK. I know that long term I am an athlete and at some point in the future I will be able to do my insane workouts and follow them up with a salad for dinner. And I can’t wait.