Some things aren’t meant to be… Brad and Jennifer, the 49ers going to the Super Bowl, and me racing a half marathon tomorrow.
After a solid few months of training, I felt ready to give the half a real
shot. After watching women run SUPER fast in Houston at the USA Half Marathon
Championships last month, I was hungry to show that I too have been putting in
the work. I’m eager to get my 2016 Marathon Trials qualifier out of the way,
and Sunday I was planning on taking a stab at it, or at least going after a big
half PR. But like I said, some things aren’t meant to be.
This pesky little thing called asthma got in the way. 2
weeks ago I came down with a cold. Nothing major, I thought at the time, but I
nonetheless took an aggressive approach to getting better. I took days off from
work and running, cancelled a workout, slept like it was my job and pounded the
OJ like a frat boy drinks beer.
But with asthma, even a cold can be major… what for normal
lungs is just a minor illness can quickly turn into bronchitis or pneumonia for
an asthmatic like me. On top of the cold, add in Ohio’s bitterly cold dry air
and breathing 100 years of dust from my old house… not a good combination. Despite
my best efforts, my lungs didn’t stand a chance.
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| Snowy Ohio trails are beautiful but bad for my lungs... |
I ended up in urgent care sounding like a smoker and
coughing up a lung. In a quick 12 hours, I went from feeling great to being the
sickest I’ve been in years… that’s asthma for you. The urgent care doc hooked
me up with some hard-core steroids to wipe out this bug, but the damage was
done. Like so many winters of my childhood, I had bronchitis.
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| Using the nebulizer at urgent care |
Lucky for me, my fiancé is a doctor-to-be and took excellent
care of me – he’s already taking the “in sickness and in health” marriage vow quite
seriously! But all the good care and powerful
steroids in the world couldn’t turn things around fast enough to be sufficiently
recovered to race on Sunday. Although I’ve improved by leaps and bounds, I’m
still coughing hard enough to elicit glares from fellow gym-goers as I hack
away on the treadmill, as well as evil eyes from my aisle-mates on this flight
I’m currently on… telltale signs that I’m far from healthy and far from ready
to race.
I’m still headed back to California – my lungs could use
some warmer air! – and am planning to instead run the 10k at the Davis
Stampede. Even though I can’t chase an OTQ, I can still run a fun race in my
hometown and kick off my 2014 racing schedule with a quality effort. I’m trying
not to be too down about the half – there will be other opportunities. So for
now, the focus is on getting healthy, maintaining fitness, and racing fast in March
and April!
It's always fun to get the win at home and have family watch you race. As I plod through snowy miles and monotonous minutes on the treadmill, I've got my mind on another 10k at home... the USA Outdoor National Championships in Sacramento, CA in June. Thinking about racing the 10k on the track at USA's in front of a hometown crowd is what's keeping me going this winter!
