Down, but not out

Week 15: 3/21/11 - 3/27/11 (3 weeks remain)

This week was f*&$ing horrible.

Monday: Off day.

Tuesday: 10 miles general aerobic.

Wednesday through Sunday: Fair warning: If you are averse to what may possibly be too much information, I advise you to stop reading now, and move on with the rest of your day.

OK, so I unfortunately have a chronic skin disorder called eczema; it's an autoimmune disease related to (strongly correlated with) asthma (which I also have, although it's exercise induced and very sporadic) and allergies (which I had in spades prior to completing a multiple-year course of immunotherapy in the form of allergy shots - which in my case were a godsend).

My eczema was pretty bad as a kid, although I appeared to more or less grow out of it by the time I was 5 or so, which apparently pretty common. After that, I would occasionally get some on my hands if we had some particularly inclement weather (unusually hot, unusually cold, unusually dry), but having spent the vast majority of my life in California and nearly all of the remainder in Texas, this really wasn't much of an issue...

until I got to Cambridge. As it turns out, eczema is exacerbated by very cold air, very hot air, very dry air, and skin irritants (like sweat and soap), so running long distances in the cold dry, New England winter air, sweating all over yourself, coming back into your apartment that your roommate likes to keep uncomfortably warm using our building's central heating, which blasts out hot, 0% humidity air, and then hopping in the shower and lathering up to clean yourself off is pretty much the perfect storm in terms of things that will aggravate the hell out of this condition. Furthermore, not having had a serious outbreak in 20+ years, I guess the thought never occurred to me that it might become a serious issue.

So when I started to see the first symptoms appearing, I didn't really think very much of them, I figured that my skin was just unusually dry because we'd had an uncharacteristically cold snap (even by our standards), and it would probably clear itself up in a couple of days. A couple of days turned into a couple of weeks, and unfortunately by the time it dawned on me that the problem was a) not going away and b) in fact appeared to be getting substantially worse as time progressed, I had pretty much missed the boat on the preventative care opportunities and was now well into full-on panic-level damage control.

Unfortunately, by now roughly 70% of the surface area of my body was involved. So at this point, I pretty much reasoned that I had two choices: I could a) quit, or b) man the fuck up and keep training. Having invested a considerable amount of time and energy in qualifying for the Boston Marathon, I opted to go with option b). Unfortunately, in spite of my best efforts to treat the symptoms, my condition kept steadily deteriorating as the weeks went on, until this week.

Tuesday morning I went into work in the lab, and when I sat in my chair, it felt like somebody was twisting a red-hot dagger in my back. The pressure of sitting in my chair was actually causing me significant, constant physical pain, to the point where I was more or less totally cognitively ineffective, and the thought of having to go outside and run around and sweat all over myself under those circumstances (thus further exacerbating my condition) was actually, finally, more than I could bring myself to do. Out of desperation, I decided that the only thing to do was to basically stock up on food, barricade myself inside my dorm room for several days, Howard Hughes like, so as to escape the cold, and try to heal myself up to rejoin the fight.

So that's pretty much how I spent my spring break. Woop-de-doo :-/.

Total weekly mileage: 10