Tuesday, February 5, 2008

No such thing as a sick day...

Yesterday afternoon, I started to get that scratchy, you-know-something-is-not-right, probably-about-to-get-sick feeling in the back of my throat. It explained a lot about the past week as I'm sure that I have probably been battling with it for a while now. So, anticipating the onset of some sort of sickness and knowing that there is no such things as a sick day right now, and I was to be in the pool ready to swim fast at 6am, I started my surprise attack before it could get a jump on me.

It started with 6 Echineacea and that was followed by 3 of our secret cold beater herbal pills (sorry, can't divulge the name) and that was topped off with a lot of water and 2 tylenol. I went to bed thinking, hoping, wanting to have caught it early enough. Midnight hit... I woke up. My throat was basically closed and I could hardly swallow. Inital reaction "oh sh*t I have strep throat" but that, of course, was followed by, "let's try to keep attacking this in case it is just a cold". So I got out of bed, and stood in the bathroom for about 15 minutes mixing as many remedies as I could think of at that hour. Again, the bottle of Echineacea came out, the special herbal pills, and more tylenol but this time I also topped it off with 6 oz of Airborne (which I happened to have on hand from my trip to South America). I got back into bed, fell asleep, and hoped I had done enough.

I woke to my alarm to a much less sore throat. My head felt a touch off, but I was pretty sure it was not fever. I popped some more pills, drank another thing of Airborne, filled a bottle with Emergen-C, ate a banana and headed to the pool. Every 30 minutes or so during the swim I stopped, drank some Emergen-C and popped a few more of the herbal pills. I had a great swim set and even managed to swim some pretty fast times (especially considering I had that feeling of complete disconnect between my limbs, torso and head).

I continued a pretty aggressive regime all day and am happy to say, though probably not out of the woods quite yet, that I think I may have edged this one out. But with that, after a 6k swim, hour ride and tough treadmill session today, I should probably head to bed!

Another day of training waits for me tomorrow... no sick days here!

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