Oh, this ain’t healthy.

Start­ed with bare­ly eat­ing yes­ter­day. I guess I only ate break­fast the day before, but my stom­ach has been tied up in knots and I haven’t been hun­gry. I’m hav­ing to choke down Clif bars just to get by. Of course, liv­ing on Clif bars is con­ceiv­ably enough to cause my stom­ach to be tied up. Must look up “causal­i­ty” in the dic­tio­nary some day.

I slept OK Mon­day night, but last night I went to sleep at about 11pm and woke up at 2:45am wide awake. After spend­ing two and a half hours star­ing at the ceil­ing, I decid­ed to come in to the office and go for a swim in the Bay. My first triathlon is in a week and a half, so I need to get some Bay swim­ming in soon.

First thing I fig­ured out is that the Bay is a lot cold­er at 5:30am in Octo­ber than it is dur­ing the after­noon in July. I now real­ize that I absolute­ly need a full-length wet­suit. I did­n’t even get in beyond my waist, I just fled and went for a run instead. This is OK, I need a dif­fer­ent wet­suit any­how. I can bare­ly raise my arms over my head in the one I bor­rowed, and that’s prob­a­bly part of why I swim in the Bay at less than half the speed i do in a pool. Only part, but still: need wetsuit.

So instead I ran this morn­ing. My fan­ta­sy life had me about to run dou­ble-dig­it mileage, but I set­tled on a more-appro­pri­ate 8.4 mile route, which I com­plet­ed in just over an hour and a quar­ter. Lit­tle faster than 9 min­utes per mile, sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing I was run­ning on an emp­ty stom­ach, jit­ters, and the shame of the Bay’s tem­per­a­ture spank­ing me back to shore.

I went to show­er and stepped on the scale. I was at a starved and dehy­drat­ed 174 pounds. A week ago I had a morn­ing weigh-in at 183. Grant­ed that 183 was after a week­end of load­ing up on pas­ta for the half-marathon, but still. This can’t be a good sign.