It has been a very busy week, and I'm glad that it's over. I'm outside tonight, enjoying this magnificent full moon, having a midnight snack of some piquant leftover Moroccan beef tagine recipe I was experimenting with, and listening to the loud crowds exiting Prairieland Park from the Top of the Hops venue. I'm regretful that I couldn't go this year, and I was reminiscing about the past ones I went to with my cousins, whom I'm beginning to miss.
Sitting down to write this has been my only moment of leisure throughout this week. Today, I feel like I'm back to normal physically, but I claim this reluctantly, as not to jinx myself with some other impending upset. I felt and thought the same thing earlier last week, and on that same day of that conclusion I ended up acquiring and suffering perhaps the worst case of food poisoning I ever had in my life. It resulted in the most unwelcome way to have a ten pound drop in weight overnight (I'll spare the graphic details). I've been carless for a long while, and after running short of food and supplies; toting full backpack loads of groceries (up to an extra 20 kg in weight) on long bike trips was beginning to take a toll on my knees as well through that week, so that has been no help either. It has been so long since I've felt or functioned anywhere close to normal, I suppose I've become estranged for so long from what "normal" feels like. It goes without saying that given the circumstances, the commitment to training has faltered badly. I ran three times this week, and my heart rate and breathing were much better.
In a previous entry I gave myself until May 19th to decide as to whether or not to hold my race slot in the Saskatchewan Marathon. The torment I was feeling throughout that week was swaying me to consider the decline option, but ultimately I decided to hold on to it and participate. I definitely won't be breaking records: my goals are simply to start and finish the thing in one piece. To endure this 10 km race, in the current shape I'm in, I expect that I'd have to hold my pace between 7'00" and 7'30" per kilometer. That's somewhat abysmal in my mind, but pushing harder would only wreck me for the rest of the year. I wish my body could govern itself better than it seems to be doing now.
If the human body's functions were controlled by something analogous in terms of a political system it sure as hell would not be a democracy. The body isn't controlled by the some ruling majority of strong healthy organs and tissues that you do have functioning: rather it is controlled and corrupted by the few minor (or just one) tissue(s) that aren't working well. It's always being dictated and limited by the worst of what you have going on, like a banana republic dictatorship. If that isn't enough, there are always foreign terrorist sleeper cell networks . . . most of which are literally single cells, that are trying to take over, like cancer, bacteria, parasitic protozoa, fungi, yeast, viruses, and other such gollywobs that don't even weigh a single gram when numbered in the millions, waiting to strike and dominate when conditions are right. You can bring yourself to your best through training, but your bodily empire can still be conquered by an invasion of something as simple as flu or salmonella (what I suspect I was afflicted with previously).
I finally found a vehicle last Sunday. Its older than I wanted it to be, but it's within budget, has been well maintained, and of a reliable make and model. It has more power, and more luxury options, than my last one. It's a pimpin' machine (for me anyway); so far the best vehicle I've had yet. Its colour is a deeper, darker, more intense tone of red than that of my last car: somewhere between that of a sophisticated oxblood pottery glaze, and a sluttier-looking shade of cherry lipstick: not too low-key, and yet not too gaudy and ostentatious, just the right mixture of the sacred and profane . . . I like that! I wasn't able to get my hands on it until two days ago, and I'm still exploring the bells and whistles. It's good enough for me as one who is driving a car on a more and more infrequent basis.
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