Howdy.

I've not been around this week - I've had a cold.

                                      


I know that what I have is a cold; I know that it's not the swine flu, because

(editor's note: I don't understand all of this stuff about "the swine flew' - everybody knows that pigs can't fly, except in Cincinnati. We now return you to your regularly scheduled FCD post, which is already in progress)

                                                                                                                                         the swine flu seems to knock people down for a week and a half, and they are unable to communicate with the outside world beyond a single text message - "hav swine flu. c u next wk".

(editor's note - my friend Rich, in Huntsville, AL, has explained to me that people in his neck of the woods are only symptomatic with swine flu for a period of two days. I'm assuming that folks in his neck of the woods also bend steel bars, leap medium-sized buildings with a single bound, and  eat gravel for breakfast - RAW grave. The folks that I know who've had the flu, I haven't seen since they got it - I don't have any objective evidence that anybody lives through this thing yet)

But I have had a pretty bad cold. As far as I can tell, it hit me early Saturday afternoon, while I was watching Tennessee @ Alabama. It descended upon me with a vengeance; one minute I was cheering on the Crimson Tide, and the next I was slumped in my chair, telling Ethel that I had the swine flu (although I figured out later that it wasn't the swine flu - see above).

There is a school of thought that says that the cold actually hit me several hours earlier, during the 41st Annual GoDaddy Half Marathon. I had been training for this thing for months; I'd been running many miles at a consistent 7:45-ish pace, and I was hoping to break 1:45, which is an 8:01 pace.

Every bit of information that I had from my training told me that it was a done deal.

I started the race well - the first two miles were downhill, and I ran them at 7:20 and 7:40 pace, respectively. Then the course hit an absolutely level stretch for the next nine miles - and my pace kept getting slower and slower and slower, until I found myself running 10:00 pace near the end, and just barely broke two hours.

It was three or four hours later when I felt the nasty cold descend upon me; my friend Viki says that I was already sick during the race. I'd like to believe that - it would mean that "it wasn't my fault" or something like that - but it really doesn't matter, anyway.

I missed work entirely on Monday and Tuesday. Usually, with a cold, I just push through - I keep working and training and going to meetings and doing everything that I would do anyway, because it doesn't seem to matter what I do; the old chestnut says "if you treat a cold with rest and liquids and Vitamin C it'll be over in a week and a half, but if you ignore it, it'll last at least ten days".

But this time it just knocked me out - it was too difficult to do my daily stuff. I laid on the couch - I just LAID there. Didn't even check my email - I just watched old Season Two Buffy episodes and drank hot apple cinnamon tea.

Ethel took care of me - while delivering the obligatory "men are such wimps when they get sick" comments. (N.B. - she got the cold yesterday. She was up all night with the sniffles and sore throat, and she didn't go to the gym today. But if you think I'm gonna mention that to her, then you haven't been married very long). On Wednesday I went back to work, and now I'm back to full functionality, even if I am not yet 100% - my run this morning was slow and miserable, and I'm still taking my cold medicine every four hours.

Tomorrow I'll get up and run some, and then I am going out to the lake to take Soulstice for one last sail - this is a sea trial; a couple have made an offer on the boat, and just want to make sure that she's seaworhty before they sign the papers. That's not a happy-making thing; it's a sad-making thing, but it's one of those things that has to be done.

I have to admit, though - if I have to take my boat out one last time, I'd rather not do it when I have a schnoz full of snot and a sore throat. That's not the way to make good memories.