Monday moaning!

Very glum this morning; chafing is much better (right leg still sore, but left leg pretty much recovered), but I am coming down with another lung ailment!

I wasn't feeling well in the late afternoon yesterday, but I put it down to not having eaten enough earlier and the fact that I was having an extremely long wait (like, almost an hour!) for a city bus to get me across town to the subway on the way home from visiting out-of-town friends with new baby in tow on the dreaded and inconvenient-to-reach-from-me Upper East Side.

As the evening progressed, though, I realized that I'd been quite wheezy all day, and that my lungs were clamping down...

I think I am not as sick as last time (this is what I always think when I am just getting sick, but in this case it has a fair chance at being right!). The plain and obvious truth: I got sick at pretty much exactly this interval after my other 100-mile ride too; clearly it just puts an extended strain on the huffing-and-puffing system that doesn't necessarily create problems during the ride itself (I use my albuterol inhaler before I start, keep an eye on the clock and make sure to use it again roughly every 1.5 hours, a little before it actually wears off) but that leaves me wheezy afterwards and very vulnerable to any minor respiratory infection.

The fact that I never get enough or good enough sleep is the clincher; that's what makes all the difference in whether or not you can fend off a minor viral infection, and really I am always very vulnerable, the number of times I get a restful night's sleep in a month is pretty much none!

I only had this asthma diagnosed a year and a half ago, but in fact it has caused me significant problems for much longer than that, in all three marathons I've done and in a number of other endurance sport situations as well: the precipitating factor for getting terrible month-long bronchitis last fall was doing the short 'social triathlon' in Cayman and wheezing a lot on the run. I need to get a better handle on this and how to circumvent it.

There is nothing I can do but take it very easy for the next couple days and hope to get better more quickly than I did when I was sick four weeks ago. As I said before, I have this doctor's appointment later today anyway (original goal was just follow-up on insomnia and asthma from winter physical); I will see if there's anything she can give me, but am not especially optimistic.

What I really will need to do is see the asthma specialist again when I get back to New York properly in September and take a deeper look at what can be done to improve this, and also to see what can be done about the insomnia; I have an appointment with a sleep specialist tomorrow, though I've seen a few other folks like this before and do not imagine miraculous change is in order. Really I need a new regimen where I do a lot less in general, take things easier, never work in the evenings, etc. and tackle the sleep thing in the most ambitious possible way...

I am certainly feeling a bit glum, in short, but there is truly nothing to be done now but wait to get better. I missed the last big training week's long swim and long run, but I did hit the all-important long bike ride, and I won't sweat it about losing these days of workouts. I believe I have trained enough to have the base to finish, and that what I do or don't do this week won't materially affect that. I'm away at a wedding Thursday to Sunday and wasn't planning on exercising much then anyway - I'll just have to wait and see how it goes. If I feel good early next week, I'll have a long-day workout like the one I imagined, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday once I've had a chance to 'test' whether lungs really are better.

(It's possible that this really just is a slight thing and I'll feel better enough on Wednesday to do some kind of workout - we can only hope.)

I got the IMCDA athlete's guide on Friday, and I spent a good bit of time Saturday poring over it and running the numbers on course cutoffs. In fact, though people complain about them, the cutoffs are very generously designated; their rationale is that if you're still at that point it is in their experience pretty much impossible that you would finish, and I will take that consequence if it comes. But I still believe that if I have a reasonable day out there, I can beat the cutoffs and get an official finish in the 16-16:30 range - and that is what I am going to try my damnedest to do!