No-Breakfast Bonk?

Last night, I sort of failed to eat dinner.

I started to make dinner, but those plans fell apart, so I put aside the dish I was making -- pan-seared salmon -- and decided to save it for later. Then I threw back a bowl of cereal.

This morning, I woke up late and consequently failed to eat before leaving home (though I normally don't anyway — I usually just eat breakfast at work). I threw my clothes on, brushed my teeth, hopped on the bike, and peeled out, only to find myself fighting a signficant head-wind on what's usually my favorite (read: the fastest) part of the ride.

It actually took me a while to figure out that I was riding into a head-wind. At first I just pedaled furiously while thinking, "Why I am working this had to move this slowly?!" (Okay, the fact that my tire pressure is more than a little low doesn't help, either. I need to either figure out what happened to my floor pump or get a new one.)

By the time I made the bottom of the hill that takes me up from the riverfront into the business district, I was feeling surprisingly rotten. Still glad to be alive and happy I was on a bike, but physically beat. I made it in to work, collapsed into my chair, clocked in, and sat there, trembling, nauseated, and generally feeling awful.

I think if I had been on my bike, churning out a 50-mile ride, and had started feeling this way after, say, 25 miles without remembering to eat, it would've been obvious. Instead, I sat here feeling bad and moping until I suddenly realized, "Wait, I haven't had a real meal since noon yesterday." (A bowl of cereal — one measured cup, plus one half cup of milk — might suffice to replace most of the calories from last night's ride, but that's about it. I still started out the day close to a thousand calories in the hole.

Suffice it to say that I rectified that problem pretty quickly. It's hard to eat when you're queasy, but I've learned that when you're feeling queasy due to lack of food, the best thing you can do is suck it up and choke back your breakfast (it's way easier, of course, if you have some chocolate milk or something like that on hand).

It probably also isn't helping that I ran out of Advair yesterday morning and promptly forgot to pick up a refill. I could probably stand to move my prescriptions to a pharmacy that's actually on the way home or on one of my usual routes, but I really like my pharmacy, so I never do. That being said, the state of my breathing apparatus today tells me how well the medication works. In other words, I'm definitely feeling the lack of Advair.

The saving grace, of course, is that I got to ride at all, which still feels like this awesome secret gift that anyone could have every day, if they just got a good bike and got out there.

I think today is going to be a bit rough. I really just want to crawl under my desk and go back to sleep 'til it's time to get back on the bike.