Really! Again!

St. Paddy's day is Thursday and seeing as how it is my favorite holiday of the year and just two days later is the first race I've got scheduled this season I should be pretty pumped. Right? I should; yes but I'm not as excited as I was last Monday afternoon. So let's back up to last Monday afternoon and see where things went south. Monday work went well, my legs were a little sore from Sundays 15 miler but I was okay with that because the run went in my opinion fantastically. After work I went out for my planned 5 mile run and it too went well, no pain in my shin or anywhere else so I was feeling pretty good. As I was getting ready for bed Monday I started noticing my throat getting scratchy... No biggie I thought just a little dry from the cooler weather. A restless night of tossing and turning was followed by an equally as pitiful Tuesday. The scratchy throat had now become a full on cold with all the fixings. Cough, congestion, sinus headache, runny nose etc... So I made struggled through the rest of the work day, being as careful as possible to not pass on my germs to co-workers. I got home took some nyquil and began the second straight night of tossing and turning. Welcome to Wednesday where things started to seem better, but as the day dragged on the cough started getting worse and was now starting to feel like my lungs were burning with every hack. On a plus note, all this coughing almost counts as a decent ab workout.
At least it felt that way! Wed. night went the same as the last two and as I laid in bed wishing I was asleep at 4 am I decided I was going to have to call in to work and go see the doctor. I forgot to mention I had read an article in the newspaper Wed. that stated there was an extremely high amount of Strep and hay fever cases reported in Kzoo. The funny part was when I called my manager to let him know I wasn't coming in I got his voice mail and since I hadn't uttered a word in at least 8 hours the first thing that came out of my mouth promptly after the beep was about 5 seconds worth of the nastiest hacking and coughing you have ever heard. I had to pause for a moment after I finished because I totally forgot what I was trying to tell him in the message. After finally spitting out the fact that I was not coming in and was going to the doctor I hung up and decided it would be a good idea to text him and advise him that in the best interest of his hearing he should probably ignore the first 5 seconds of the message lol. I was able to get into the Dr. Thursday morning to find out that not only did I have a fever (which explains why I kept waking up sweating in the night) but I also have pneumonia :-( F me. So the good Dr. put me on antibiotics, gave me a note to take Fri off work and advised me to take it easy this weekend and see how things were on Mon. No problem because I didn't feel like doing anything this weekend but getting over this crap.

So now it's Sunday night and I spent the  weekend doing just that, laying on the couch watching movies and whatever sports were on t.v. I'm not a big fan of basketball but thankfully there was no shortage of games to watch to fill time. For the most part I'm feeling much better and my fever is gone. I still have a wicked cough and a fair amount of chest congestion which I'm hoping will pass soon, but I keep hearing from people who have had pneumonia that has lasted weeks and weeks so I'm hoping I just special and a quick healer. Needless to say I haven't run since last Monday, which has been one of the hardest parts of all of this. I can't wait to get back out there and get back to knocking out some miles but at the same time I don't want to do too much too soon and end up back on the couch. Grrr. I'm also severely bummed that it looks like Saturdays Shamrock 5k (which I was going to try and PR at) isn't in my best interest. I'm UBER bummed because last year illness sidelined me from this same race! The quick version is the night before the race I came down with the flu and spent the whole weekend hurling my guts out! Have I totally ruled out running Sat? No not totally, because I'm stubborn and I'm not ready to concede defeat just yet, so we'll see how the week goes. Here's to hoping this hacking and coughing clears up sooner rather than later so I can get on my merry little running way!