Freak week

My last long run before the 10 Miler was this Saturday. It went fine, 7 miles at a 10:40 pace. I felt pretty crappy the whole way, and did not feel like I was going that fast. I am just now getting over the chest cold that has given me a smoker's voice and deep, throaty cough for the past week or so. On my weekday runs, I was getting just warm enough to loosen everything up so that I felt pretty good by the end. On Saturday, I warmed up, felt good, but by the end was really, really feeling the congestion in my chest. I was good and whooped by the end.

Also, my foot was hurting. For a few miles, I was convinced that I was coming down with plantar fasciitis a week before the race. When I took off my shoe, I realized what the problem was. Thursday night, I got a number of mosquito bites on foot, three on my arch. I have an unusually strong reaction to mosquito bites, and by Saturday morning, they were so swollen that they looked like one giant welt, and of course every step was pounding on this welt. No wonder my foot hurt. Here's what they look like tonight:

(My foot doesn't realy look that weirdly elongated, it's the angle and the macro setting.)

Not so bad, but this is day five after the bites, when most normal humans wouldn't even have a mark. Saturday night, they were so itchy and painful that I actually took a Benadryl. I hate it - I only take Benadryl when I have no other options. The last one I took was when I had a bad case of hives about 7 years ago. I took a single child's meltaway, and spent 24 hours being groggy and sluggish. And my foot still itched.

So here I am, days away from the race, with an itchy, painful foot, the remnants of a cough and cold, and pumping my body full of performance-reducing drugs. Once the Benadryl wore off enough that I had a return of cognitive function, my pre-race freakout started. I think 5 days before race day is a new record for me.

I tried to silence the demons with a run after work tonight, but running in the heat freaked me out. I'm trying to embrace the anxiety, and harness it. I've got 10:15 on the brain, bad.