Health Report
On Wednesday I found out I had a touch of pneumonia. Just the beginnings of it, thank goodness. I shiver at the thought of a full-blown case, because this was bad enough: fever and aches throughout the body (head, joints), breathing difficulty, cough -- pretty brutal stuff. The doc gave me three big pink tablets. This was Zithromax, and each tablet contained 500 mg of the drug. I took one on Wednesday around noon. By dinnertime the fever was gone. By bedtime, the aches had subsided. By Thursday morning, I felt pretty normal again, until I went up and down the stairs a few times, which left me exhausted, my head spinning. And that's pretty much where I am today -- I've trended better but remain weak. I wonder how much of that is the infection and how much of that is the antibiotics? There's a lot of antibiotic in my body right now, since the idea with the Zithromax three-day course is (as the pretty fold-out Pfizer box says) that the drug builds up in your body and keeps working on days 4-10.

So the Napa Valley Marathon is five weeks away. I'm going to do it. I'm not going to do it in the 3:35 that I was thinking I might before this shit hit. And if I limp home in over four hours, that's OK. It's a strange thing -- part of the point of my training has been to give myself a precise idea of what to expect on race day. I wanted to know how hard I could push it. I wanted to know my time before the race even started. Now it's back to being a big fat mystery.

If all goes well, I'll do some walks in the next two or three days, then some light jogging the remainder of the week, just to remind my body that I'm a runner. Then I'll build up over the following two weeks to something in the 15-20 mile range. Then it's a two week slide into the race.

Hey, whatever. I'm not Frank-fucking-Shorter. Just a plodder struggling to put a little excitement and adventure into his life. I'll run.