Dear reader, I've been under the weather lately. I won't bore you with the details except to say it's nothing that would warrant a note from my mum requesting me to be excused from PE, carpool, or making dinner...although if anyone wants to forge that note it would be worth ten times its weight in gummi bears, if you know what I'm saying.
Just...sick.
When I'm sick, I don't have many great ideas about getting better. I sort of ignore the whole thing, if possible. Yes, I drink more fluids. Yes, I wash my hands. Yes, I tell everyone I'm feeling fine.
But I do have one trick up my sleeve. I do have one secret cure:
I still run.
Do you know what happens to a body that is feverish and racked with spasmodic coughs when you take it out for a run??
It shocks the living daylights out of it.
As you take the first few steps, it looks at you and says, "Really? Is this your idea of a joke?"
But if you refuse to dignify passive aggression with a response, the body's insistence upon affliction will falter. It gets befuddled. It becomes confused. A moment ago, it thought itself entitled to a morning of self pity and hot tea, yet now it finds itself in the great outdoors, engaging in activity that fairly reeks of good health.
So what does the body do?
Why, it capitulates, of course.
The bold choice of running trumps the body's sick note, the audacity of exercise steamrolls its pathetic sniffles, its delerium and cough, and with every step it grows stronger, clearer, better.
It really is the most amazing cure you could ever imagine.
Is it rooted in sound medical knowledge or is it on par with the professionals of yore who believed a good bleeding was in order when a patient had the misfortune of remaining sick for too long?
Because why is it, as the day wears on, the fever and cough return with a vengeance? Why is it my body seems to take a perverse delight in making me feel ten times worse than I did before?
Is this its way of saying:
Take that, you crazy throwback to the Middle Ages!
Take that, you deserver of maggots, leeches, and plagues!
Who thought she was too immortal to stay in bed today?
Who's gathering ye rosebuds now??