Getting over this damn Belgian flu

It’s not really the flu, but that made a better title.

It’s been a long recovery process but I’m finally, sort of, nearly, almost but not quite over my cold. It’ll be another couple days before I race. I’m not taking any chances this time. Up until this bout of sickness I’d been pretty healthy this year, only getting sick twice—once in March before San Dimas/Redlands and once in July during Cascade. Great times to get sick, I know. Judging by my training journal, those other two times were due to coincidence. This time was definitely my fault. Racing three times a week without a rest week every fourth week was too much and I ruined my chances at Univest because of it. Sam warned me about this but I didn’t listen closely enough.

The first thing I did when I realized I needed to get healthy FAST was to start growing a mustache. It’s coming along pretty well, though it’s been a week now and the progress has seemed to stagnate in the past few days. I’ll report back in another week.

Aside than the mustache, I started some heavy cough meds after I touched down here in Belgium, which seem to have helped–the most potent one being a eucalyptus slash codeine syrup. Codeine lives in the same narcotic family as morphine and has been giving me some pretty good dreams the past week. 12 hours a night of ‘em. Just solid dreaming the entire time. Dreaming of bike races, being late to bike races, dreaming of not being able to fall asleep, dreaming of eating desert foods, dreaming of waking up to check the clock in the living room to see if I’ve slept long enough, dreaming of much stranger things that I can’t put into words. OK, I’ll try: aeovcmwk ao ekdk lalsdl lsdn ioeqp snnvba slieh. See, couldn’t put them into words.

My brain is so tired from dreaming all night it needs the majority of the day to recover, so I let it watch Belgian TV, which is basically the crappiest American TV shows. Maybe my brain isn’t tired from overuse; maybe it’s just out of shape. It’s been a while since I read a book. The Deschutes public libary (yeah that’s how you spell that word) has been hounding me with emails politely asking me to return my overdue books. It’s been more than two months now since I was supposed to drop them off. I think I must owe like 21 cents by now.

Sleep by the numbers:

Tuesday (7 hour nap during the day+12 at night)=19 hours
Wednesday 12 hours
Thursday 11 hours
Friday 13 hours
Saturday 12 hours
Sunday 11 hours

That 13-hour night is a PR by the way. I don’t think I’ve slept that long in one sitting since I was a toddler.

I don’t have mono because I don’t feel especially tired during the day. I know I don’t have it because I choose denial over the truth every time. Except in the second half of that sentence.

Big news here in Oudenaarde. 1) The Ronde de Vlanderen (Tour of Flanders) is finishing in Oudenaarde next year, 2) Colruyt is being cheap again and is putting out crappy muffins instead of cookies or waffles, and 3) the TRACTOR PARADE HAS COME TO TOWN!!!!

Behold the tractors of Oudenaarde!!!!

Behold the people watching the tractors pass by on the highway on their way to the tractor festival, not actually there at the festival yet—just people setting up lawn chairs on the side of the highway to get a glimpse of an every day tractor that they see all the time here anyways since there’s farmer’s fields everywhere and there’s really no reason to have a special tractor festival or to go watch them especially on the side of the highway for three hours straight unless they’re throwing out candy, which they aren’t despite my shouting out the window for them to do so.

Behold me watching the people watching the tractors because I don’t have anything better to do either. I don’t actually have a picture of this because then I’d have to continue with the ‘beholds’ and take a picture of me taking a picture, which would require two cameras and I only have one.

This blog post has been the culmination of six day’s worth of thoughts and events. I started writing it on Wednesday.