A slap and a kiss.

Hey bloggers. How are you? You look good.

Sorry for dropping off the earth this week. I've been preoccupied with other things, mainly my pride and joy, my baby boy, the one and only Five-Dog! had become very sick, and almost died. Rest assured he has been recovering very well and he is better every day. Nobody really knows exactly what was wrong with him, but the theory is that some infection took hold very quickly and his body never had time to catch up. He wasn't eating, and later he stopped doing everything, and would just stand in one place and make a funny noise. When I got him to the vet, his fever was over 105 and the vet was even afraid he would go into shock and check out. But they got him rehydrated through an IV and pumped him up with some antibiotics and he responded very well.

He's slowly been regaining his strength and he has been making up for all the meals he missed when he was sick. I'm finally feeling comfortable that he's going to be okay.

Another troubling event for the week happened when I was home on Tuesday, waiting on a phone call from the vet, and I was urinating (sorry, but that's what I was doing), and I noticed that my heart was pounding extra forcefully, and then I woke up on the bathroom floor. So that was interesting.

I'm actually not too worried about a little fainting spell, since I think it was just a result of napping, and then rising very quickly to run to the bathroom, but I must have fell in a rather awkward way and I strained many things in both ankles and my left knee. Even now, 4 days later, my ankles hurt a lot if I move them too far to the left.

And while I was on the bathroom floor, contemplating my place in the universe, I recieved the phone call that I had been waiting for. And, from the timeline given to me by the vet, it was clear that at the exact moment that my baby boy was finally breaking his fever and beginning his recovery, I was beginning my own. That may be a surprise to you, but not to me. You see, Five-Dog! and I share a psychic connection, much like Elliot and E.T. Each event in our lives, both positive and negative, affects the other party on a metapsychophysical level.

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So, I'm a little beat up, but running well in spite of it.

I ran 7 miles Thursday morning, including three laps on our little bridge. I had a few sharp pains from my incident on Tuesday.

And this morning, I had a great long run, 20 miles! If I run easily on flat ground, my ankles and knee feel fine. There were some difficult miles, mainly between 12 and 14, where my quads were burning for no good reason, and I started to dread the downward spiral of pain and fatigue, but it passed, and I had several enjoyable miles after that point. Perhaps the Five-Dog! was having a bad dream at that moment or something, and then maybe he woke up and found some leftover dog treat that he forgot to eat.

And this long run has done a lot for my confidence. The pace was good enough for a 4:31 marathon, which should let me keep up with old Dean-O for my race in October. Dean says he's gonna run between 4:30 to 5:00 for his little tour de US, which the pace charts say I can do, but there's no real evidence for it, so it's still pretty intimidating for me. Hopefully, I won't have to kick him in the knee or anything to slow him down.

The rest of the week has been a fairly comical sequence of nice surprises and kicks to the teeth.

Listening to: Elvis Costello - River in Reverse (Wake me up; Wake me up; Wake me up with a slap or a kiss.)

Anyway, post too long already.
Keith out.