Best laid plans of mice and men go awry…
Men plan. Goddess laughs.
Ah well, that just makes it sound epic. Fact is, there warn’t a whole bunch I could do.
First off, everyone at work had been getting sick starting the week before last. Some damned cold/flu thing. My wife had gotten sick this past week, and I played the delicate dance of tending to the infirm while trying not to get too close. I think I pulled it off OK - at least in the relationship side. I know I was going through hand soap and Purell at a pretty brisk clip. Trying not to get breathed on at work. Guarding my computer keyboard with a machete. Trying to watch my sleep so I didn’t get run down. Tending to the items on my list for the Davis 200K. My working theory was that I had been fighting something the week after the CXSR race that I’d passed around.
Got caught in a pretty hammering downpour on the way into work last Monday, but had warm duds at work and access to a handy heater vent, so everything was actually toasty by the time I got dressed for the return ride. Another shorter ride on Tuesday felt good. The tires arrived from RBW, got mounted and everything bikey was teched and tuned by Thursday evening.
On Friday evening, I packed the bags with food, made the ride sandwiches, filled the bottles, made the coffee, rode the bike a couple miles to make sure everything was still dialed, lubed the chain, sat down for dinner and suddenly began to feel very, v-e-r-y, vvvveeeeerrrrrrryyyyyy tired. Like falling asleep with my fork in midair kinda tired.
I was pretty sure this was not a good sign.
It seemed that everything was ready to go except for the rider. And I was really too damned tired to care. Which was good, I reckon, as it brought out a more zen acceptance line of thinking. My thought on Friday night as I set the two alarms for 4:30 AM, was that it was going to be pretty clear one way or the other. Either it was a momentary discharge or there was going to be no way of riding.
It must’ve been about 4 am when I woke up. It was before the alarms went off. All I knew was that I could barely swallow and some weird spherical antannae had formed where my nose used to be. Clearly a “No-Go.”
Turned off both alarms. Fumbled around and found my phone, which was set as a backup alarm and turned that off. While that was opened, I tapped out some twitter thing, erased the cursing and then tried again.
Back in bed. Slept until 1-ish on the first sunny and reasonably warm Saturday we’ve had in a while, caught parts of some VH-1 documentary on the history of Heavy Metal (music, not the magazine) went back to bed until Sunday noon, watched part of some movie that didn’t make any sense when you fell asleep through parts of it.
Tonight (Tuesday) most of the other symptoms are gone, though my coughing bursts are becoming legendary. I’m not quite energetic enough to be antsy, but that’s probably the next step.
Ahh well. At least the bike is patient…
March 12th, 2009 at 9:21 am I think I caught your virus over the internets. I knew I should have sprayed Lysol on the screen! My second day home sick… :(