As I’ve said and implied many times before, I am a beast of the hoof: if my legs or feet are permanently incapacitated for some reason, there’s no point in continuing to live. Although I’m far from that stage, I have had some setbacks this month.
My trip to Ulleungdo and Dokdo left me very depleted, physically and emotionally. Not only did I get sick on the boat, but I hardly had anything to eat in the three days I spent off the mainland; the meals the tour company provided were laughable and hardly substantial. Not that there were too many choices eating out… I suppose I should have simply brought all the non-perishable food I could, but hindsight isn’t particularly valuable.
In any case, I’m still in a pretty big funk. After the island trip, I had a horrible fever that knocked me completely off my feet: no teaching or running. I’ve NEVER had a temperature that high. Even when I have the flu, I usually still feel like stretching my legs, because the running euphoria offsets the feeling of being sick for a time. For some reason, whether it was that fever, or the island trip, or the increasing heat, or something else entirely (at this point, I might even consider that the tea I brought back from Japan is radioactive), I’ve had a complete lack of energy this week. When I tried to run on Monday I had a terrible pain in my chest: felt like my heart was about to explode. That too has never happened. I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m pretty freaked out about it. If I don’t feel better soon, it’s really going to start taking its toll.