dumbass

At last the big race day arrived & I was all ready for a super PB…everything started so…er…bloody awful really. But things would surely get better as the day went on? That didn’t happen either – but thank God it has been a great week since? er…again, no.

I’ll explain. It all started when I received a text Saturday morning at 7.33am. “You up ok? Text when ur on way”. Innocuous enough, except I wasn’t bloody up and I’d promised a friend I’d lift her for work at 7.40am. Well, there is only one thing to do in this situation – lie! “Yes, I’ll be with you in 10” I replied (fat chance), but I made a genuine attempt to not be late. I jumped up, raced into bathroom and washed the important bits (all with hand soap – sure it’s all the same…scratch, scratch). I quickly picked the first shirt, suit and tie I could find, rummaged in the bottom drawer for boxers and socks and I was set. I made it at 7.50am and luckily enough, my car sharing friend knows me well enough by now that 7.50 was probably earlier than she actually expected me (given that she text me yesterday morning at 7.24am “Stephen’s collecting u, Get up!”. Stephen is my other car sharing friend and they refer to me as the ‘faffer’ as it quite simply (allegedly) takes me ages to get out of the house – well I have to check that I have everything, right? Four times is usually suffice?

I digress. I left with no breakfast, but ate a snickers bar in work. Yip, for breakfast. Good for energy, since I was going to smash my personal best in a race at 2.30? Ahem, I’ll come to that later.

Not only was brekkie seriously suspect, my lunch (pasta dish purchased at a local filling station) was out of bloody date. Great, how could I beat the world record and make the 2012 Olympics on an empty stomach? This was serious. Thankfully my work colleagues rallied and nothing else mattered…my running career was on the line. What could be done? Alas, our cook Kate came up with a great idea – she could cook me something! Problem solved, I was back on track. She even made me spaghetti bolognese & gave me enough for two people! Result! Now this is where I was dumb.

By the time I ate it was nearly 1pm. I ate the bolognese because I was so chuffed and grateful that Kate had gone out of her way to make it specially (you want to have seen the faces on the rest of the staff as they knew lunches weren’t on that day – it was a Saturday and we were finishing at lunch). There was a lot, but I could handle it. Again, I get dumber…

The aforementioned car sharing friend, Sarah, had kindly donated her cereal bar as I had had no brekkie. I ate this too – not two hours before a race! What is more, I found an energy bar donated by a friend from the gym in my sports bag and I bloody well ate this too!!! Now seriously, would any of these people have known or even cared had I not eaten their wares??? Right, so why did I feckin eat them all?

As a consequence I felt bloated and ran like a donkey – a dumb-ass to be precise. I finished in 46 minutes, a far cry from Olympic gold and still well off my holy grail, 44mins. I was gutted. I punished myself with a ten and a half mile run the next day. Ha, that’ll teach…er…me!

I didn’t get out to train again until this evening (Weds). I hadn’t run since Sunday so tonight’s ‘sesh’ would be a sharp, athletic, interval session at superhuman speeds…Well it would have been – had I packed my feckin trainers!! No joke, my trainers languished at home -the irony wasn’t lost on me as my trainers sat idly and useless in the “utililty” room as I stood in the gym changing room all dressed up with nowhere to go… 😦

“Dumbass, just go for a swim and a sauna” was the advice from my gym-mates. So I did. Great. Fantastic. Well refreshed, I decided to head for a well-earned (??) shower – well, the sauna does invoke some heavy breathing!? I went to my locker and as I pulled the towel from the locker I just remembered my $1,000,000 watch was sitting…nope – falling…to the floor. I quickly stuck out a (bare) foot and stopped it smashing against the ground. Phew I sighed…and whinced, as the blood poured from by big toe. I decided not to go to Accident & Emergency as this would make me look like a big girl’s blouse. Instead I manfully strutted to the shower basking in the glory of having saved my watch. The cut in the big toe was worth it.

I returned to my locker, checking out the blood on the gym towel and the rapid rate it was expelling from my toe as I went. It was a cut for a noble cause and, as I pulled my sports bag out of the locker , I remembered… my watch was sitting…nope -smashing against the ground.

One of the bits landed beside my bloody big toe…dumbass.