October 27th: Lausanne, I think...oh so sick.

So, let’s say you’re going to eat dinner in a bar. A bar that doesn’t have very many people in it, despite it being a Friday night. You’re running a half marathon in two days, so you don’t drink and you want to eat something healthy. Despite a mostly fried menu they do have one salad. The bar is nearly empty. Friday night. Would you order the salad?

So I made that brilliant choice and paid for it dearly the next day. I slept pretty bad that night, then woke up feeling pretty raw the next morning. We had planned to rest a bit anyway before the race; all we needed to do was get to the expo to pick up our packets (and since the internet in the hotel wasn’t working, we really had no idea where the expo was).  I tried to get out of bed and made it as far as the living room before the room started spinning…then had to immediately run back to the bathroom and spent the entire rest of the day so sick I could barely move. (Note the complete lack of pictures - I didn't take a single one!)

Mark went out, found a grocery store for some food, and somehow found the expo to get our packets while I stayed in bed, curled up in a miserable ball. I was so frustrated and disappointed when he came back with the packets; the whole point of coming to Switzerland was for this race, and as I sat there holding my number and race shirt I knew there was no way I was going to be able to make it through a half marathon the next day. I figured I’d have to just make it a DNS (Did Not Start) until Mark happened to mention that you could still change the race distance. And because he’s fantastic and for some reason doesn’t seem to get sick of dealing with my crazy ideas, he went back to the expo and dropped me down to the 10k, the shortest distance available. Screw the food poisoning…I was running the damn race!

My new start time was only a little after Mark’s the next morning, so we both took it easy for the rest of the day. I read a book on my Kindle and we watched an X Factor marathon and some British dating shows. By the end of the day I was able to keep some soup and ginger ale down. And thankfully, Europe turns their clocks back a week early so we had an extra hour that night for sleep (or in my case, to try to function).  By the time we went to bed it was starting to snow, so we knew we were in for an interesting race the next day.