Small victories

To set the scene, in the last month I have:

• lost 4kgs;
  
• produced a large quantity of diarrhoea;
  
• produced three solid sh7ts;
  
• had perhaps two nights' uninterrupted sleep;
  
• missed six training sessions;
  
• missed a wedding;
  
• spent a lot of time when I should have been asleep doubled up with stomach cramps; and
  
• spent a lot of time when I should have been working making exceedingly good use of the spacious and capacious ladies loos.

Surprisingly, given that I've had a whole month of gastric incompetence and averaged less than 5 hrs broken sleep a night, it's been mostly OK. The last couple of weeks when I've started losing weight more quickly have been a bit of a drag. At my current rate of weight loss, I will cease to exist around the start of 2010. But even that's not as bad as it seems, as I'm assuming that before then, my digestive system will have bucked up its ideas and started behaving normally (or at least that the absolute rate of weight loss will reduce as I get lighter).

I should probably have jacked in training a bit earlier than I did, and with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps going for a run last Sunday (just because I happened to be near some decent terrain) might have been a bit of a daft idea. It was a damned nice run, though...

I got a bit desperate last week. (It was a particularly miserable week.) I had a look on eBay to see whether anyone was flogging a spare, functioning digestive system, but sadly I found none, so it looks like I'm stuck with the irritable one I've got. Irritable is probably not the right adjective. It probably was irritable before I did my best to ignore it and continue training (despite food hanging around in my bod for somewhere between 20 minutes and 7 hrs) in the hope it'd pass. It's probably now reached the stage of being really rather pissed off with me.

I guess I'm not the most caring owner my digestive system could have had (and given the amount I eat, it's probably already done an average lifetime's work). If I ever had cause to put my digestive system up for sale on eBay, I think I'd be hard pressed to find any takers. I suppose it more or less has end-to-end functionality, seems free of ulcers, and doesn't appear to have any inflammatory disease, so maybe there could be a few people out there who'd be prepared to take it. They'd be unlucky sods, though...

On the up side, courtesy of a complete lack of rowing, I've already managed to grab about 24 hrs sleep this weekend, and am about to hit the sack in search of some more. I'm counting this as a victory - the improvement has got to start somewhere, hasn't it...?