The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

I am exhausted. My body is completely and totally drained of energy. Maybe I’m getting sick. I don’t even know. Here’s the story: I stayed in last night and went to sleep early so that I’d be well rested for this morning’s run in Central Park with Antonio. We started running at ten o’clock and made it down to the bottom of the park with no troubles. Then, all of the sudden, my legs just completely quit on me and I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to finish the run. I told Antonio to just finish his run without me. He’s running the Boston Marathon next weekend and I certainly didn’t want to mess up his training schedule. I still can’t figure out what happened to me. I can’t even remember the last time that I actually had to quit in the middle of a run. I’ve ran through some serious pains and aches, but today there was just nothing there. I couldn’t keep going. What’s weird is that I ran four days this week and didn’t have any troubles. In fact, I was running better than I have been in a long time. Why the crash today? The only thing that I can come up with is that maybe I was dehydrated. I’ve been trying to drink extra water all day, but I am still dragging. I’m going to sleep in as late as I can tomorrow and then go back to the park and at least run the loop, but hopefully go for two (a little over twelve miles.) I need to push myself through this. I am so upset at myself for quitting today.

So, I walked across the park and rode the subway back uptown. After taking a shower I decided to head back out to run some errands. That was a bad idea. I was, to say the least, disgruntled. All the annoying stuff that I see people doing everyday was absolutely infuriating today. Like, I’m crossing the street and I see this enormously fat woman holding two bags of McDonald’s in her hand. Are you kidding me? Are you really doing that to yourself? Then, as I’m riding on the subway, there’s these thirty-something nondescript office types talking about the movie Crash and instead of saying anything remotely resembling an original thought, they just regurgitated conversations they’d overheard at some coffee shop six months ago. (Of course, I have no evidence to support this, it was just a strong hunch.) I just couldn’t handle their little cliché conversation. I actually got up and switched cars because I felt like I was going to vomit if I heard them go on any further.

Okay, so I realize now as I read over that last paragraph that I sound insane. I’m not. I normally don’t get this bent out of shape over little things. I think it was just a combination of the fact that I was pissed off about abandoning the run this morning and the fact that I still felt like complete crap physically.

I’m not going to do a play by play of the errands because that’s really not that interesting for anyone. Instead, I’ll just say that I went to four different stores and ended up with only one out of the ten items on my list. (I also ended up with a new salad bowl and lemonade pitcher, neither of which were on the list or, for that matter, really needed.) I got home completely frustrated and feeling like I had wasted a perfectly good day.

It was then that I decided to just throw in the towel and relax the rest of the day. I watched the Yankees game on t.v., then a movie, and after that started reading Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. And that was pretty much it. Ah, this exciting life of mine…