Walking Pneumonia (Sadly no Boogie Woogie Flu)

About 3 weeks ago, everyone in my house came down with some version of a day-care vectored head cold. My wife and the boys all got runny noses and stuffy sinuses and I, as is my wont, developed a cough. Everyone else got over it, and I…stayed sick. I spent a good two weeks having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night because of coughing fits until I finally broke down and went to the doctor. They gave me some heavy duty cough medicine and a steroid and sent me on my way. About a week after that, I was almost out of the medicine and the cough was as bad as ever— worse, in fact, since on Monday of this week I could barely get through a sentence in class without coughing. So, I went back to the doctor, and this time the diagnosed me with walking pneumonia and loaded me up on antibiotics. And I spent the next three solid days basically incapacitated at home on the couch. My cough has been steadily improving since I started the meds, to the point that today (Thursday) it is barely even noticeable, but I’ve been light headed and fatigued most of the time. I’m planning on going back to work tomorrow, but I’m going to give myself pretty light duty until I feel like I’ve finished this thing off.

Needless to say, my training has been temporarily derailed by all this. When I was struggling with the original cough, I kept running as much as I could (it is a source of some disagreement around the house as to how much my running contributed to my cold getting worse), but since the pneumonia kicked in I haven’t even thought about lacing up my shoes. The past two days, I took Mason for a 15 minute walk around the neighborhood. Yesterday, it almost killed me; today, I didn’t cough much at all, but it still felt like all the exercise I could handle. I’m a little anxious about losing fitness during this, but one of the big lessons I’m trying to process on this blog is that I need to learn my limitations and operate within them. If I don’t wait until my body is healed, then training through this will only make it worse. And, in the meantime, the little pulls and strains and stress injuries I’ve been accumulating get a chance to heal up. So, there’s that. Anyway it’s about time for me to head back to the couch, talk to you next time!