Curse You, Immune System!

Last night, I woke up around 1am dehydrated and congested like you would not believe. I downed three glasses of water and fell asleep on the couch, only to wake up two hours later to use the bathroom and guzzling down another two glasses before crawling into bed.

I tried to keep my morning routine the same after that: Sunny woke me up at 5am to be fed, I make breakfast, I gather things together for my meals at work, and so on. I was hoping to run after breakfast, but I wound up falling asleep after eating my cereal sitting up on my couch. An hour later, I rushed to get ready and out the door. By the time I arrived at work, I wondered if I should have called in sick. I did not have a fever, but I felt like I did, feeling hot and stuffy and just awful.

Around lunchtime, I threw in the towel. Understand something: in college, no matter how sick I got, I never, ever skipped class. I skipped class for many other reasons, but never because I was sick. So a part of me was beating myself up as I emailed my manager to tell him that I was going home, but as I drove home, it became more and more apparent I made the right choice.

At one point, I worried I wasn't going to make it, or I was going to find myself in an accident. Luckily, I got to  the grocery store alright and quickly bought cough drops for my sore throat, Dayquil for my cold, and microwaveable soup and ice cream just to make me feel better. I would have loved to make my own soup to keep my sodium levels down, but I was just feeling too terrible to cook. Microwaveable meals really do exist for a reason; it's not just for the super lazy or super busy!

I'm feeling a lot better now, though I am feeling awful about my missed run today. This is a head cold, and every runner and every expert says that I can run like this. But my reasoning for not running and how I'm trying to convince myself that this missed run was okay is simply this: if I couldn't stay a full day at work, there was no way I could do any sort of exercise today.

Tomorrow, though, I should be able to make it out to RBRC. I see no reason why I can't stay at work all day, which means I'll be able to run. If I still have a sore throat and massive amounts of congestion, I'll do the 3K; otherwise, I'll attempt the 5K.

I haven't been this sick in ages. This is awful. I hate this so much. But my sore throat is mostly gone after downing cough drops like crazy, and I'm just biding my time before I can take my next set of Dayquil to help with the congestion. I took a hot shower to help, but of course it was only temporary. Maybe on my way to work tomorrow I'll buy some Vicks.

But! For as much as I cry at how exercising was taken away by this sickness, at least I was still mostly healthy, minus the pint of ice cream. I bought low-calorie, low-sodium, and low-fat microwaveable soup, for example, and that was my lunch. My dinner was a salad with some toast. And I still have my half marathon on Sunday to look forward to. This will do nothing to my overall health and fitness, though I'm thinking about not doing a weigh-in on Friday because of this. We'll see tomorrow!