The last 4 days have probably been the hardest so far. It started by me moving Wednesday’s training to the next morning. Now… that was the first step to the wrong direction. I could barely keep it together and I felt like the training distance (which was only supposed to be 8 easy kilometers for Wednesday) was getting to me early on. It was torture and by the end I knew my strength was being sapped by a disease that was crawling on me.
As a result, Fridays was spent in roughly 30-minute shifts working in front of my computer or agonising in bed. The only time I ventured into the kitchen was when I felt like to go for a power hike. It was a devastating feeling. Not to mention that I had 10km left for that day and 15 for Sunday. Which was actually scheduled to be 17 and would have included the beginning of the distance, how I was going to smash through the mountains live with a slogan. For the first time in 40 days, I felt I had to reschedule this somehow, because I’m incapable of doing it in this condition.
On Saturday morning, after the usual 5:50am wake-up, I felt hat it still wasn’t right and went back to bed with that momentum, giving myself almost 3 hours to recover. Then I decided – after I couldn’t have guessed whether it was Covid, Influenza or RSV without the lateral diffusion procedure anyway – to give the damn germs a chance and down Friday’s dose. Attila warned me of the consequences, then quietly added that perhaps, given my education, I could decide that too. True, in my own health matters, my own professional opinion very rarely got a real say. This time, too, I chose to run.
It was a fantastic experience. If you discount the fact that I was sweating like a horse, barely dragging this worn-out body, regularly (and loudly) humming back the pace to the lady dictating in my ear and not a single minute that I could have called easy or enjoyable, I managed to develop several blisters on my feet. It was a motivating, uplifting and forward-thinking run…last week.
But it’s not about Wednesday or Saturday, it’s about 15 June. It’s about the fact that whatever the goal, it takes a sustained, goal-oriented attitude to make any change. The 42 days will be as enumeration as the first 17 km on that day compared to the nearly 260 days remaining. And sometimes I think that the real question will have to be asked intelligently, purposefully and well-framed on the next day of the MicroBioma Run: “Now what?”. Until then, the road is paved.