The first sign that race day is nearing is, of course, seeing it pop up in your weather forecast.
It's still in the 10-day look, which I only put stock in if the predictions are favorable, but I'm glad that being neurotic has some sort of payoff.
The second sign is the stress dream. That came last Friday night.
In the dream — yep, I'm gonna be that person that yammers on about dreams — I was waiting for the half marathon to start with my friend Ashlee, who in the real world loves biking but dislikes running.
We had to wait, because the race course was actually just laps, and the marathoners got to go first. (In fact, did I start too early with them, and have to head back?)
But bad weather struck, and the start was delayed. Just an hour. Didn't seem bad. We went our separate ways, for some reason, and kept calling a hotline to see what was up.
I decided to pass my time at a bar/restaurant while grabbing something to eat — a hamburger or something, because it was around dinner time — and watched the radar.
Everyone agreed it looked promising. The skies were clearing. It was a false positive, though; next thing I knew, a serious storm was slamming the area, and the race director was postponing the race indefinitely.
So naturally I went to work from there. The dream co-workers greeted me with a request that I work some overtime shifts (reflection of real-life work busyness), and I responded ... by slamming a fist on the desk and yelling about how I didn't even know when the rescheduled race would be, and I'd been training for two months for this, and I'd spent X dollars on it, and I JUST WAS NOT GOING TO WORK, OK?
(This is not how I behave at work in real life. I promise.)
As far as stress dreams go, it's not a bad one. No forgetting things, no showing up naked, no oversleeping. I'm sure the latter will terrorize me on the night before, keeping me tossing and turning.
It just exaggerates the very mild, very normal race-week nerves I'm developing: Oh crap, I paid to run 13.1 miles soon.
Ugh.
Haha, I know the feeling. Worst race stress dream I've ever had: I make a wrong turn on a marathon course and cross the finish line without having run the whole thing. Only I think that I did. Because I'm in dream world everything is weird. Then I'm banned by all races for life. I insist that I didn't know. I didn't realize what had happened. But it's too late. No more races for me. Stressful!!!
ReplyDeleteWow, I'll take my stress dream over yours :)
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