Thursday-27th. Day (year) of the ear.

I rode for an easy 3 hours today. Average heart rate at about 130. The weather was all over the place, early this morning it was so frosty it looked like snow (I didn’t get up early, I just got a glimpse of it through the sleep in my eyes as I stumbled to a from the bathroom). Anyways, I went out riding in the early afternoon when I saw that it was sunny, although still cold. I stayed in the hills all day and experienced heavy, big drops of cold rain, hail, very light snow, extreme wind, and sun. I was tired today from yesterday, and surprisingly close to bonking by the time I got home. I hadn’t brought very much food and if I had made it a four hour ride instead of 3, I think the last half hour would have really sucked.

One other thing that has been sucking is that my left ipod earbud keeps falling out. I think it has to do something with a nagging ear infection that I’ve been fighting since September. When the race season ended last year with the Eugene Celebration SR, I noticed a slight itch in my right ear. That itch turned into a burning sensation that would wake me up at night. It oozed fluid and built up large quantities of wax. I finally did something about it in late January. The first doctor I went to said it wasn’t an ear infection, and told me that the only thing wrong with it was all the wax. He had a nurse irrigate it and he said it would be fine. It was not fine. Two days later, it started acting up again. About two weeks later, it got so bad that the built-up pressure forced me to down about 6 ibuprofen. The next day I went into the university health care center and the doctor there gave me some antibiotics saying, “Wow, you certainly do have an ear infection.” I cursed the other doctor under my breath. Freakin idiot.

It was 10 days later and I thought my ear itching days were over, but when the later doctor stuck the ear microscope thing in my right ear to examine the infection, she swapped it over into my left ear to see if ol’ lefty was infected as well. He was not…at the time. But I’m guessing that when she put the scope into my left ear, she transferred the infection over into it. So by day 11 the left ear was burning with a passion just like the right one had been for half a year. Now I have no infection in my right ear, but my left ear definitely has something growing in it–and it seems to be swollen, which causes my ipod earbud to spit out on rides. Is it too much to ask for at least a month of clean and uninfected ears!!??