In my dream last night I was flying to France, probably (and here I'm filling in the details from waking life, as they make sense to me) on a chocolate and wine tour, but our airplane was making some odd jerking movements in the sky not far from our landing, and then we dropped straight down. Straight and fortunately so, because it was only that we didn't come in at an angle that saved us. We sat on the landing with our broken windows and baggage tossed about the cabin but we were safe, all of us, not one of us injured, and the captain was so flushed at having saved us that he decided to lift off again and do a loop-de-loop to show off, which was a total disaster. There was last week at the Sun Run, my shaky landing, a 30:54 which felt too hard and left me a bit rattled, and then there was the Times Colonist 10km yesterday. The one thing I would have asked pre-season, if this was going to happen, was please don't let it happen at the TC10k. This is my city. I know far too many people here, some of them who know the difference between a 32 minute 10km and a 30 minute race, but many who don't. Many who know only the gaps and how far back someone is, and how pedestrian they look compared to the real runners. Somehow this stuff still kind of matters to me. In a way, showing well here legitimizes what I do.
I wasn't ever in the race. Fell off by 1km, reached in 3:08. Such an awful feeling to be running hard but posting 3:20 splits, which is where I settled shortly after the opening kilometer, and to see that the group ahead of me wasn't pushing yet still they were pulling away, when two months ago I would have been right with them and it would have been en route to my half-marathon.
And of course what I want to do is be proactive. I want to figure out what to do to bounce back, then do it. With this I can't. I have to wait, and for an indeterminate amount of time since really my immediate symptoms aren't overt, they aren't things I can feel coming or going. I'm mostly just tired, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes I can't tell how I'm doing even at slow running speeds, and it isn't until I try to do a workout when I discover my nervous system isn't working and that my body isn't conducting a current.
I care about the race to a degree, but mostly I worry about my body. I worry that this isn't the plateau; that in fact things are about to get exponentially worse.