*****self-pity alert*****self-pity alert*****

I’ve had a cold for the past week or so. Not a mild sniffle but not full-on flu either. Just an annoying and quite limiting “snot and cough” affair that has reduced me to a pathetic, slimy blob when I’m indoors and a wheezing, frail mess when I’m outdoors.

I don’t get colds very often at all. Maybe one a year at the most, so I don’t really know what to do when I get one aside from “Do nowt. Go to bed. Grumble a lot”.

The timing of this could have been a lot worse I suppose, but it could also have been better. In two week’s time I’m running a marathon. An off-road, hilly one and the first time I’ve ever tackled this kind of distance in one go on foot.

I should have been training this week and training hard – I had a few runs planned, one of them a 20 miler. It had been going well too. I’d been steadily increasing the distance and managing to balance it with some quality time on the bike as well. I’d even got used to running with a hydration pack.

I was also supposed to be riding a double century across Wales this weekend, but the prospect of 200 miles in a pacy and probably quite competitive group through a couple of Welsh mountain ranges is probably a poor strategy for recovering from an illness…

But I’ve done nothing for a whole week now apart from some damage-limitation in the form of some core strength and weights in the gym at work. Therefore it looks like I’m going to be winging my first marathon and having to deal with the “I’m just not ready for this” thoughts on the start line. Great.

Five weeks after the marathon though, I’m doing another long one. It looks like my entry into the 3 Peaks fell race has been accepted – I didn’t satisfy the entry criteria at all but I put some ‘other big stuff’ on the entry form and it looks like it did the trick – so the Rivington race in a couple of weeks will be good training for that I suppose.

What’s the worst that can happen, eh?