Dispatches from the middle

Less philosophical today. More experiential. I ran Edmonton’s Canada Day 15km race yesterday with the following roster of pre-existing conditions, and therefore, pre-selected excuses for potential poor performance:

1. Residual sickness (esp. coughing) from last weekend’s flu;
2. Nothing to eat prior;
3. Very little sleep prior;
4. A week of no running prior, preceded by a week of very little running (i.e. poor training);
5. A vicious meat bolus sloshing around in my belly/upper intestine from the previous night’s Brazilian barbecue binge (a less than wise, but exquisitely delicious idea) and the dehydration following an extremely salty meal;
6. Not having pooped properly for a number of days (thanks to the aforementioned inactivity and not helped in any way by the 10 different types of meat on offer at Pampa…but, my God, that lamb was to die for!).

Yes, I did look up “bolus” before I used it. It’s a fitting word both in the sense of  “a rounded mass” and “a large dose of a substance [given by injection] for the purpose of rapidly achieving the needed therapeutic concentration in the bloodstream”. Thanks, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bolus! It was indeed a large dose and, while it wasn’t delivered exactly by injection, I did rapidly achieve the needed therapeutic concentration of barbecue in my bloodstream!

For all those things though, the race actually went quite well. I was significantly slower than I would have liked, I think primarily due to pre-existing condition #1, but managed to run it consistently and – wonder of wonders – comfortably. Which just goes to show you can often run a lot better and a lot further than you may think you can! Our bodies are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for sometimes. So don’t let suboptimal conditions get you down. They’re there, should be avoided where possible, and taken into consideration where necessary, but these are not necessarily limiting factors. Lesson learned. There goes my repertoire of excuses.