Run Luau Run

So when I wrote my Priorities blog post on Monday, I wasn’t being completely honest.  I didn’t lie mind you – I have been studying my butt off all week and will continue to do so until I get my certification.  I just wasn’t being completely honest about why #AutismStreaks was going on the shelf for a while…

It comes down to some very basic chemistry – in order to create an exothermic chemical reaction, one needs two things: a fuel and an oxidant – for endurance runners (really for any runner running over 400 meters…see?  I’m studying!) that means glucose and oxygen.  You take one of those two things away and it doesn’t matter how well trained an athlete is, s/he is going nowhere fast.

For the past several (about 3) weeks I have been having some breathing issues.  Don’t panic…my doctor doesn’t seem too worried at the moment so I’m not either.  BUT it has made running extremely difficult – toward the end of last week, even running 1 mile was an exhausting task.

More than anything I am frustrated.  I have almost always run through injuries; my general feeling being that I could usually run an injury back to health – whether it was my foot or my back or my hip or my knee, unless the pain was acute, I usually would run through injury and within a day or two that injury would be gone.  I have even used the same method with illness – whenever I would feel a cold or flu coming on, I would run; run hard to create an internal body environment that would be unpleasant for any virus that was considering setting up shop.  Again, this would usually work and I would be well within 12 hours.

This has been different.

My breathing is shallow; deep breathing takes concentrated, uncomfortable effort.

If I can’t breath, I can’t run – it’s simple chemistry.

I’m hoping my doctor’s sense of non-urgency is warranted and that this goes away as mysteriously as it appeared and I can get back to running at least semi-regularly.

Keep your fingers crossed!