A.M. This week was supposed to be a taper for the Rocket City Marathon. Now with the illness things are a little different. I need to do the impossible. Allow the body to heal. Avoid losing fitness more than I already have and try to recover what I have lost. At the same time try to build a glycogen store and some freshness in the legs. Do not get a second round of sickness. Be ready to race on Saturday. I was pondering those issues on Saturday night while I lay there with 102 F fever and considered dropping out of the race. Then I heard a voice in my mind that let me know the Lord wanted me to run the marathon and do my best. I hoped that it was just a voice of delirium from the fever, but I had heard that voice enough to know the difference. Plus the impression remained once the fever was gone. I have made some progress since Saturday night. I know how to take those fevers down. It returned in the middle of the night and I kicked it waking up with a nice 97.7 F temperature in the morning and feeling ready to run. I prayed to know how far I should run, and felt that I should run 10 with a 1 mile pickup to access the damage. So I ran with the kids first. Jacob did 0.5, Jenny and Julia 1, Joseph 1, and Benjamin 5. During Benjamin's run I did the pickup. He stayed back as he is still not 100%. I did the mile in 5:37, then turned around and ran back to Benjamin maintaining the same effort. This gave me about 1.15 of tempo running. The pace felt interesting. The legs could handle it, and were not giving in. However, I noticed that the breathing was quite labored. This gave me an idea . The problem could be caused by the drop in the red cell count. I figured it would be difficult to have the best of both worlds - high white cell count, and high red cell count at the same time. So if white go up, the red would go down. So I decided to add some iron supplementation to help the recovery. After running with Benjamin I added about 2.85 more to make the total 10. What is interesting is that I was volunteering 6:30-6:40 pace without thinking about it, and at that pace I was not bothered by breathing.
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