As the title of this post indicates, last week marked the longest week in my marathon training program mileage. From Tuesday to Sunday, I ran a total of 80 km, culminating in a 32km run on Sunday! I repeat this same week twice more in the next 5 weeks, and then it will be the final taper to the marathon. I’m pretty sure I could finish the marathon with no problem tomorrow if I had to, but I’ll still need these next 7 weeks to tune up my engine. Thus far, I’ve had pretty good luck with my training program, avoiding both injury and illness, the bane of any endurance athlete’s existence. That changed for a me a bit in the past week, with me coming down with a nasty little bug. At first, I was worried that perhaps it was my old friend strept throat coming back to haunt me, but as I write this, I think it’s just a nasty cold brought on my who knows what. All I know is that it has caused me to take 2 days off work to basically sleep. Normally, on a sick day, I try to catch up a bit on chores, but this time around, it was sleep central for me, not getting up till after 1 pm both days. It also caused me to yet again seek out medical advice. I still have not gotten a family doctor, and at this point, figure I won’t be getting one anytime soon. Instead, I just keep going to Appletree Medical Clinics. This time, I even signed up to be part of their ‘group’. Essentially, it makes them my family doctor.
I found a new clinic this weekend, close to Carling and Merivale, and think it might do the trick. It’s close to home, and is pretty new and modern. I was going to the one downtown, but after waiting over an hour, only to find out there wasn’t actually a Doctor there on Saturday (they weren’t sure why), I’ve given up on them. Anyway, at my behest and a bit of questioning, I got the Doc to take a throat swab to rule out strept, and got some blood work done on Monday to check on some other conditions I’ve got (namely these pesky dizzy and light-headed spells I’ve been getting some days). He was mainly concerned with my blood sugar levels, but indicated my vitals were all fine (BP 110 / 80, RHR 56). It can’t hurt that I’m in respectable shape again due to training.
There’s another reason that last week felt like the longest week. Jody left on Saturday for BC, to surprise here Dad on his Birthday (Happy Birthday John!), leaving me alone with Jonah and no company, so the house has been just a bit emptier than usual. Of course, that means working on the bar more, and catching up on music for a bit. It also meant heading over to Al and Matt’s for Meatfest ’06. Basically, we had a raclette night, with way too much food on Saturday. Add into the mix several bottles of wine, and you’ve got a fun little soiree. Of course, we’d also said we’d join some of Al’s friends in the market later on for duelling pianos at Fat Tuesday’s, but instead ended up at the Aulde Dubliner for a band from Montreal. This of course meant more imbibing, which was really unnecessary. I blame it on Matt. I’m really not used to drinking much these days, and this just put me over the top. I was pleasantly tipsy by the time I stumbled home at about 3am. On the plus side, we discovered a great band. If you ever get a chance, you’ve gotta check out the Mad Caps from Montreal. And that’s not just the beer talking. Everyone agreed they were awesome. However, it made for a very difficult Sunday 32km run, hence the tired-looking man in this picture to the left. Well, that’s it for now. Tune in for a bar update soon.
