Last night, doubled up in pain with the old stomach problem. Almost weeping with the agony of it. Everything was off. There would be no marathon for me this year. To round off the misery, my right foot was also throbbing with pain. Felt like an old gout problem. Neither of these had troubled me for many months, and both turned up again on the same night.
Then this evening, still feeling delicate, I put on my gear and ran 3 miles and felt pretty good at the end of it. Had a few mild chest spasms, perhaps from the uncontrollable flood of chocolate biscuits and peanut butter yesterday. Could the pain be a fat-intake thing? Yesterday I had a manic and uncontrollable desire, a need, for sweets and chocolate. Ate a whole packet of choc fingers plus lots of other rubbish. Wondered if it is related to the long run on Sunday.
The stomach pain last night is not the same as the chest pain I get sometimes when running – which is more like a stitch. Last night’s disaster was a revisit of what I call Hurt Stomach. I call it that not because it hurts (though it is excruciating), but because it’s like that scene in the first Alien film where the John Hurt character is complaing about stomach pain and is operated on. The creature bursts from his stomach as he dies in a maelstrom of pain and screaming. Er, well it’s a bit like that…. I’ve not had it for nearly a year but it’s come and gone over the past 5 years or so. No one has been able to explain it. It’s completely incapacitating. I don’t even want to describe it any further. It’s just the worst thing that has ever happened to me, apart from Liverpool winning at Wolves in the last game of the 1975/76 season to deprive Queens Park Rangers of the Championship.
Last night’s problem aside, there was something surprisingly energising about tonight’s run. It reminded me of the time I was horribly ill in Kathmandu. In retrospect, and with the benefit of experience, it was highly unwise to eat a prawn curry in the middle of the Himalayas, god knows how far from the sea. They weren’t thawed properly, and I hit an agonising ten day stretch of vomiting and fever. Dreadful. Eventually, unable to eat for days, I felt that I was literally disappearing down the pan, and in the middle of nowhere. After being holed up in a cardboard and concrete hotel room for a week and a half I decided that it was kill or cure.
I was delirious and hallucinating, and dizzy. I got down the stairs and out into Freak Street. I had to have nutrition even though I couldn’t keep any food down. Found a corner shop. Bought a can of pasteurised orange juice for some extortionate sum. Stumbled over to some waste ground up on the other side of Durbar Square and sat down on a patch of grass. I felt barely conscious. Opened the tin with my swiss army knife (I knew it would come in useful someday), and just gulped and glugged this stuff down. I can still remember the way it overflowed my parched mouth and streamed down my neck and chest and back. My body didn’t know what was happening. I remember a few moments of total confusion… then I suddenly just sort of woke up. Snapped out of the illness. My stomach and throat still ached from all that retching I’d done, and I felt weak and hollow, but I was clear-headed again, and sort of refreshed. I walked back to the hotel with a spring in my step, and slept properly for the first time in days. Eventually woke up feeling absolutely fine.
Nothing like as dramatic as that, but this evening’s run played a role similar to that can of Nepalese orange juice. It was sink or swim and against all expectations, it worked out just fine.
