60-Hours to D-day

On Thursday, carbo-loading day, I woke up with swollen lymph nodes and could barely swallow water let alone eat pasta. I also had the beginnings of a flu.

I knew immediately what it was. I had this condition once before on my wedding day when stress and anxiety also caused my lymph nodes to swell making it hard for me to swallow food and water. I could not even eat at my own wedding reception and spent part of my wedding night at the Chong Hua Hospital emergency room.

The marathon foodie panicked!

I drank bio-flu, overdosed on vitamin C, forced myself to drink liters of water using straw, went home from work before lunch, skipped reading the news that night, and slept hoping it would all go away in time.

When I woke up, Kris Aquino was being her usual annoying self on SNN. Thankfully, the swelling has subsided significantly and it was OK to chew and swallow food once again. I ate bread and left over pizza and went back to sleep.




On Friday I made arrangements with my BFF Mary Valero that should anything happen to me on race day, her husband Atty. John Lood, who is practicing in Manila, will have to take care of emergency arrangements. Mary, being Mary slapped me back to reality, told me I'd be perfectly fine and promptly treated me to all-you-can-eat pizza, pasta and potatoes.

Then there was nothing else to do. I had no pleadings that were due and my bag had been packed the week before. The only chore left was for marathon foodie to buy her race day bread -- wheat pandesal from Postrio and small tub of peanut butter. Not that there was no pandesal where I was going, except that my wheat bread pandesal has been with me through all of my race mornings and training runs and LSD's and I didn't want to change one bit of my training routine on marathon day.



On Friday night I cooked myself a big batch of pasta puttanesca with tofu and held my own carbo-loading party at home. As I cooked in my tiny kitchen not thinking about running, everything seemed right with the world. Although still not entirely sure whether I had it in me to finish all of those 42 kilometers, I felt calm knowing that I've done my best to prepare for the big day.

The Saturday flight to Manila was uneventful. I went home to my husband Eugene's place, ate Jolly Spaghetti and Chowking noodles all day and read "Triumph -- the untold story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics" by Jeremy Schaap. Once again I started questioning myself and thought that my longest run was only 32K, what happens after that? "We'll only know for sure after you run 26 miles tomorrow Haids. So stop thinking and just read your book." I realized that at this point, there's really no use fretting an that there should be no more room for self-doubt.

Suddenly, I couldn't wait for race morning to arrive.