Hooray for Stomach Bugs!

I don’t mind getting sick altogether. It’s not great, but now that I have kids, it’s more of a matter of when. Usually, I just drink some water, drink some weird herbal tea made from foraged mullein leaves, and plow through it. Unfortunately, stomach bugs don’t really work like that.

On Friday, my son yakked a few times but had a fine disposition, and no problem eating thereafter. On Sunday, my daughter started yakking. She, a few more times than my son, but again was in a good disposition. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I started feeling ill. Nothing awful, but a little bit of queasiness. I made my wife drive us from her sisters in Boston to our house in Vermont and with good cause. Half-way home we had to stop on I-89 so I could retch my brains out with cars whizzing by at 80 miles an hour no doubt laughing at the poor schmuck on the side of the road getting vomit all over his shoes.

We made it back to the house uneventfully, but it was then my ailment took a turn for the worse and rendered me a bit useless. I tried to help maintain kids, dogs, and unpack from a weekend away, but who knows how much help I actually was. Eventually, bed time rolled around. I offered to read my son his stories and put him to bed, but my wife just looked at me, told me I was green, and needed to go to sleep. The last time anyone told me I was green was after a bender of Southern Comfort that went on way too long. Needless to say, I was in bad shape.

I went to bed, and got up the next day almost ready to go. My stomach was still sore from all the dry heaving. I hadn’t eaten anything in 18 hours, and anything I had eaten earlier on Sunday had been purged from my body. My stomach was tender and it took a while to get any real food in it, but I was better.

Unfortunately, and this is where I get hung up, my Monday run sucked. It was short, it was slow and that was to be expected. But now my weekend miles are minimal and that is when I do the bulk of them. I know it’s nothing to worry about, but I’m still having this little struggle in my head, trying to convince myself that is okay to miss my mileage goal; that mileage goals are nothing but check points on the way to a final race goal and missing one or two won’t hurt anything. It’s tough though.