The Cold That Killed My Race

I’m going to start by saying how frustrated I am right now. Over the last two weeks, a bunch of my coworkers have had a really bad cold but I, surprisingly, have been fine. Until Tuesday morning. I woke up with a really bad sore throat and my eyes felt more tired than they should have, plus a bit red and itchy. I kept drinking tea and thinking I just hadn’t slept enough. By mid-day, I had a horrible headache, my nose was congested, and I was starting to look a bit like a drunk after a weekend binge. At that time, I gave up on my denial and began taking cold medicine, drinking even more tea, eating lots of vitamin C, neti-potting like crazy, and sleeping (because my head hurt too much to do anything else).

My goal: somehow get over this cold by Thursday night so that I would wake up just fine this morning and be able to drive down to Richmond for my race tomorrow. Sadly, despite everything I tried, I woke up Friday morning still coughing, still red and itchy, and still far too tired (but thankfully no longer with the headache!) to run. Or really to even drive for 2 hours. I was probably even worse than I thought I was because when my mother called this morning, she wouldn’t stay on the phone with me because she said I sounded too bad too talk. And when my neighbor came by to see why I hadn’t left the house in 4 days, she took one look at me and offered to run out and get me medicine - and her husband just came home from the hospital.

So I’m frustrated. One more hurdle in my attempt to actually have some kind of race season this year. I guess it’s probably for the best, given the fact that my knee still isn’t at its best and I probably would have done something stupid at the race and hurt myself worse and mucked up next years race season too. Still, I’m really hoping that this is the end of my bad luck for a while. The next race I’m going to try is a local 5K on December 4. Hopefully, I’ll get and stay healthy over the next 3 weeks and this will be the start of a brand new and much more positive run of training for next year.