Excuses

I was planning on doing a short little run/swim biathlon this morning, but bailed at the last minute. I had a lot of excuses, some of them maybe valid. Wanna hear all my excuses?

~My dermatologist had his way with me on Wednesday, cutting out 8x basal cell spots. He suggested I stay out of the ocean for a week or so, for fear of infection risk. Had this been my only excuse I don't think it would have been enough to keep me out of the race, but combined with everything else, it was probably the tipping point.

~I was up at midnight cleaning up projectile vomit off Moana's body, clothes, hair, bed, and floor. A sick kid would definitely be a valid excuse to skip a race, especially just a little race that you don't care about. Turns out, she's pretty much fine today with energy levels near normal, but I didn't know this would be the case when I shut my alarm off at 5:30AM.

~Last night when I went to bed my throat felt a little scratchy. Not terrible, but just felt like my immune system was fighting something off. This morning I felt the same way and spent several hours sneezing and blowing my nose. I figured it was possible that a hard effort (for example, a 5K run) would throw me over the edge into full sickness. Or maybe it wouldn't have. I don't think I was imagining it, but I feel pretty much fine now so it turned out to be nothing.

Instead of racing, I slept until 7AM when Maia woke me up asking for breakfast. I drank a cup of coffee then took her for a walk where she clearly wanted to hunt for something in the woods. Later I went for an aerobic jog ~80minutes. I figured it would be pretty slow b/c my HR would likely be elevated since I wasn't feeling 100%. Indeed, on avg I was ~20"/mile slower than I did that same run earlier in the week at the same HR. Not concerned a bit about that b/c I have a clear understanding of what was up. I actually thought it was going to be worse so only 20"/mile off was a pleasant surprise. I do firmly believe that in the physical state I was in this morning, aerobic running wouldn't hurt me. A hard threshold effort very well might have. Knowing these things and being confident enough to make decisions about what's best on any given day feels pretty cool.

I'll probably take Maia on a dog jog later this afternoon. The wind is howling today but for the first time in ~10 days, it's not raining. She's stretching now.