A brick in the kiln

"If I don't answer I'm asleep in a drug-induced bubble. If I don't return your call within 48 hours I've choked on my own drool. Give all my things away to charity"

So ended my voicemail to the Distraction yesterday. This little cold/allergy thing I have been dealing with reared its ugly head and it was time to take decisive action. It had been below code orange level for a few days- simply just a mild annoyance, but dealing with a work emergency that made me have to fly to Maui and back in one day, have about 5 hours of sleep, two days in the full sun, blahblahblah caused it to elevate to red alert. After spending all day with ears that wouldn't clear and a feeling that I was in a fog, I headed to the store to grab some meds. I am pretty sensitive to any kind of allergy or cold medication, and knew I would pass out pretty quickly. I popped two pills, managed to stay awake through three episodes of House on Hulu, but passed out at 7:30pm. Eleven and a half hours later, I woke up feeling somewhat better. The mucuosal melange is still on, but at least I feel somewhat rested.

After cleaning Pele (my bike) quite thoroughly a few days ago, I didn't want to take her out on the road. Since we are less than a week away from Honu, I wanted to get some sort of a workout in. I decided to do a brick workout and threw her on the trainer. I figured it would also be good to do a ride inside, since the stationary aspect of the bike would be good heat training (in case you don't know, the race is on Kona, which is supposed to be ridiculously hot). I friggin hate riding on my trainer, but some skinny chick on chick action (America's Next Top Model) helped distract me for my ride. 5 minutes in, I was dying. Sweat was pouring off my body. I kept repeating: good training, good training. Although my house may have looked normal, my brain processed my surrounds to look like this:
You know its hot when your breath actually feels good landing on your body. As I got less and less entertained by Tyra, I began trying to predict where the rivulets of sweat would travel along my bike tube. Good times. My nose was still running like crazy, but I didn't think it would be polite to my roommates to practice my snot-rocketing skills in the living room. Instead, I created a lovely artistic sculpture of snotty TP next to my bike. Yum.

An hour later, I decided I had enough. I practiced my transition, and hit the road for a quick 1.5 mile jaunt. All these bricks I'm doing are certainly helping my confidence about Saturday. I now know that when I hit the road after a ride, my legs feel surprisingly light and I tend to want to go out super fast. The speed helps get rid of the jelly feeling, but I need to try to pull back the reigns a bit. I think my strategy will be to run for about .5 mile without looking at my Garmin, then try to slow down the pace a bit.

After my brick workout I felt better than when I first wokeup, so I did my core workout and my Power Yoga dvd. Since I'm not sure whether this thing is some sort of allergy or a cold, I am going to town with doing laundry and cleaning today. I must shake this by Saturday. The last thing I need is race pictures of my failed snot rocket attempts!