The Grim Reaper must have had a few sherries this morning. His sickle kept clattering against the window, waking me every hour or so. I woke for the last time at one in the afternoon, my longest lie-in for years.
I’m ill. Still. Too ill to run. Nothing serious, just a bad cough and a wheezey chest and a blocked nose.
Illness fascinates me as it so rarely affects me. I can’t exactly claim to enjoy it, but anything that distorts reality, changes perceptions and challenges assumptions has something going for it, as long as it’s temporary. "That which does not kill me, makes me stronger". Good old Nietzsche. I’ve long believed in the wisdom of that saying. Similar to: "Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body".
Running has to come into this category somewhere. It’s the only decent drug I’ve had in 20 years. Better than alcohol and tobacco. Sometimes I wonder if running should be classed as a recreational drug.
Am I rambling? I can’t tell at the moment. What I do know is that my first week of marathon training has been a write-off. I have a choice here. I can collapse in a flood of tears, or I can laugh, and spit in the eye of fate. I’m opting for the latter. Maybe I can get out tomorrow.
In the meantime, there’s more time available to get to work on some tasks I have lined up, and in particular a writing project that’s been simmering for some time now. It’s come and gone, but after some encouraging correspondence on the forum a while back, I think it’s time to revive the idea. One of the reasons for starting this website was to get me back into writing, which it has helped to do, but for a while now the website has become an end in itself. There’s something I’ve been wanting to write since I started running, and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to see a way of doing it. I’m afraid I can’t say too much more about it at the moment, but I am grateful to all the people who’ve made encouraging comments, privately or publicly. It may work and it may not, but I’ll give it a go.
