I swear, it almost seems like fate is placing several obstacles in my way leading up to race day just to challenge me and steel my nerves. As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been dealing with some wonky knee pain over the past day or two. I was hoping that some rest would allow my body to recover, but over the lunch hour I was still hobbling up the stairs. My colleague and I were heading back from lunch and he saw me trudging up the stairs with difficulty.
“Hey, you wanna take the elevator?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“You’re in pain.”
“Who’s in pain?”
“You seem to be struggling.”
“Who’s struggling?”
Why would I take the elevator to go up one level? Whatever. I came back to me desk to eat the footlong tuna sub that I got. I’m trying to be observant so I followed the whole meatless Friday thing. I figure that over the next 6 Fridays I can try to hunt out 6 different vegetarian or seafood options and add them to my lunch rotation once the season of observance is up. After eating the whole thing, out of curiosity, I took a look at the nutritional content of a footlong tuna sub on The Daily Plate. I had a mild freak out when I saw that the whole thing was around 1000 calories, give or take, depending on what you put on it. That’s nuts! What amuses me about this is that I recall thinking after 6″ of the sandwich that I was feeling satisfied. I just decided to finish the sandwich though because I didn’t want to hold a sandwich at room temperature for X amount of hours. Figures.
So, where am I going with this? Well, after that sub I decided that I should just take the walk to the station. I figured that even though 2 kilometres doesn’t amount to a big calorie burn, it’d make a dent in the sandwich I had. Man, it was cold. Yes, we’re in winter, but earlier today the temperature was actually up at 9°C. By early evening the temperature dropped 15-20 degrees, and a cold wind made things even colder. By the time I got to Bloor, I was just happy at the thought that I’d soon by warming up on the train.
So, let me set the scene. The sun had set, but the sky remained a bright blue. The evening skies had grey clouds scattered all over. They were dropped small bit of flurries every now and then to enforce the fact that the season wasn’t over. I thin crescent moon was shining down with pleasant Venus like a beacon just above and to the right. At the southwest corner of Spadina and Bloor was a crowd gathered to watch some supposed cheerleaders. The crowd seemed to consist of people on bikes who’d all stopped to gawk. The cheerleaders were on top of the domino statues, trying to make clever rhymes between the words “sass” and “ass.” Random pedestrians waiting for the light to turn were looking over with a look of “who are these idiots?” betraying their thoughts. Over by the Scotiabank is that girl with the dog, seemingly homeless. Although, she wasn’t there all winter, so she must have been somewhere. Beside her are several gifts of cups of coffee and or left over take out containers.
As I walked past everything, I was musing to myself about how everything just seems to be alive. As I thought about it, I could feel my posture correcting itself. I was walking tall and full of confidence in the world. Just then, my right foot slipped on a patch of ice. See, the sudden cold snap froze a lot of the melted snow from the warm weather earlier in the day. My left foot held steady, but my root foot continued. I bore my weight downward, somehow jamming my right ankle in the process. My hands were out to the side, perhaps as a gut-reaction to get some balance. I could hear people behind me gasp at my slip. I felt kind of cool to have been able to keep my balance. How could it have been cooler? Well, imagine the scene at the end of Shaolin Soccer where some random chick slips on a banana peel, does some weird kung fu awareness thing and puts her hand down to do a full-on flip. Hah. So, I regained my composure and kept walking. As I kept going, I could feel that the ankle that I jammed was really hurting. At the station, as I rode the escalator down I was really working it around by trying to rotate things but man, it hurt.
Here I am now at my desk trying to ice the area while blogging. I’m not being really successful at it. Tomorrow I really need to watch how it feels, and if it feels really bad I’m going to heavily medicate myself. All of this sucks. I want to be the best that I can be on Sunday, but all of these issues are making it tough do what I can.
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