Well there, I got back out the door and got a run in after two miserable days off. It seems that whatever creeping crud, I had last week finally decided to smack me upside the head and really did a number on the old fart.

Enough so that I willingly went to Express Care to rule out that it wasn’t some kind of serious shite. You know that Walking Pneumonia, Bronchitis, or nasty Sinusitis kind thing that can ruin your month, not just a week or so of no or crappy training kind of sickness.

Yeah, me the guy that hates seeing medical professionals until there is no choice, got in the truck and drove myself to see them – I think that the last time I did that for anything other than a routine physical was probably before I stopped teaching in 2011.

So what was the verdict? A case of mild allergies.

Which relieved the hell out of me, but I sure as shit would hate to see what serious allergies are like if what was going with me on Sunday morning was “mild”. I have had seasonal allergies for many, many years and know what allergies are like. I have never felt that bad. None of my usual remedies even touched this crap.

Another thing to consider is that we had been inundated with the smoke plume from the Canadian wildfires for most of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, so I am thinking something in that plume that may have had some part in the severity of whatever was/is still going on with me.

However, and…unfortunately, the wife who does not have allergies and SD2 who does, but not as severe as me also exhibited many of the same symptoms. So I am not sure if it was simply a mild allergy reaction or some combination of allergies, wildfire smog and some bug wacking the crap out of me all at the same time.

However or whatever it was, it seemed to react well to the recommendation of a Claritin and Flonase combination, along with the aspirin that I added in to get rid of the two hammers beating on the noggin and body ache, sweats and chills that were happening at the same time.

No running on Sunday, to say the least.

Then yesterday, while I was feeling better, I was still pretty weak and the head was rather fuzzy around the edges (well…worse than usual). Which meant another day off from running, but I did errands, mowed the lawn, walked the dogs and all the other usual stuff. Hell, I even had my running clothes on and stopped at the parking lot at Shaw’s in Waterville to go running and decided at the last minute that it just was not a great idea.

Today, I felt a bit more human, but my resting heart rate was still up quite a bit for me and while I felt fairly decent, everything was still a chore to do. That old just do it attitude was still needed to get things done.

Damn it is still pretty chilly for June, I needed a jacket and a couple layers underneath to be comfortable in 41*F. The heat is still coming on in the house and I am wearing long-sleeves most of the time lately as evidenced by my laundry when I folded it tonight.

After walking the dogs, I decided to run down towards Goodhue and see how things shook out. I have several good turn-around points on this course and if I started feeling bad, I figured that it would be easy to bag the run. I did run with a short sleeve shirt and long sleeve shirt on and while I rolled up the sleeves, I wasn’t all that uncomfortable having it on.

The first quarter-mile was nasty. I hawking up white gooey globs of crap from my lungs and the body just couldn’t find any kind of rhythm. By the time I got down to the mile point, I was seriously thinking about turning around but didn’t.

I was still coughing and hawking up white nasty stuff for the next couple of miles. The more crap I got rid of, the better I was feeling and while I was going at a pace that I usually find very comfortable, today it seemed almost like it was race pace and when I started coughing up a lung, the run got rather miserable. However, I didn’t see any green slime and no red splotches in what I was bringing up so I kept going.

I was getting rid of whatever was in the lungs and the body seemed to know that it was needed.

Just before I got to the 3.0-mile mark – Yeah I was being stubborn – I coughed up a chunk of crap about double the size of a silver dollar out of the lungs and suddenly felt a lot better. It seemed like I could breathe a helluva lot better.

The heart-rate was still higher than it usually is for this pace, but at least I was breathing a lot more normal after that and the pace picked up all by itself – down to a faster than I expected pace. Although I did continue to get rid of a more of the white crap from my lungs, it was a lot longer between coughing attacks.

While it wasn’t a world-beater run by any stretch of the imagination, I did get 7.0 miles done in just over an hour. However, the best part was that I sweat just a little, hocked some pretty nasty crap out of the lungs and while more tired than usual after the run, felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted.

I definitely feel better now, than I did before running and that ache in the bottom of the lungs when I took a real deep breath that was the real reason that I was so willing to head off to Express Care, is no longer there. She heard something in my lungs, but it wasn’t enough to worry about – I worried about it. I have a history of having bronchitis and have had pneumonia, so I do not want to go down those roads, again.

I don’t like to second-guess medical professionals, but I gotta wonder about the mild allergies idea after I coughed a bunch of crap out of my lungs and I now feel better.

Whatever, the recommendation of Claritin and Flonase seemed to help spur and speed up or at least let my body get a handle on whatever it was and allowed me to work on getting back to being me, which is good enough for me, but I still gotta wonder what was going on.

Now to get the resting heart rate back down to normal for my levels and get rid of the crap that is still getting hocked up after some nasty coughs.

In other words – a pretty productive day.

Yeah, I could not resist.