Incremental

Comes a time in a life when the brain has to recalibrate.

When I began to play adult soccer in my mid forties, for example, I was shocked at the discrepancy between what my brain "thought" I could do -- sprint to the ball -- and what I could "actually" do -- lumber like some immense herbivorous dinosaur to where the younger guys had already gathered around the ball.

This is what I called the mid-life performance shock. Between the time I had been playing as a young man and the post child-rearing mid-life man, things had changed. It doesn't seem possible to me that they had changed so much, but the decline was undeniable.

So, the current form of this re-calibration comes as a bout of pneumonia. Yes, I have succumbed to a serious bacterial infection that has shaken the foundations of my strength and health. I have to watch as muscles earned over years of training on the bike atrophy, how conditioning fades like last years rose, how I have no power over the body trying to purge itself of infection.

Of course my over-active brain has this illness over, history, long-done by now.

Here's an example: A week after I first felt sick, I was scheduled to do a bike race. I actually told people that I would be well enough (mind you, this is pneumonia) to race within a week. I was going to do a time trial, an all-out effort requiring full function of heart, lungs, and muscles, a few days after coughing up blood from a pneumonia infection. Ha!

Yes, I know, a bit irrational, but it's how my brain still operates.

I am upset that I still cannot sleep because of the fever and pain. I "should" be able to get over this thing.

The reality, the sharp, irrefutable reality, is that healing, again, will happen on its own time. My urge to cough is going to continue until it runs its course. The fever cycles and the pain are going to hang around until my immune system fights them off.

They whole process is going to go slower than I think it should progress.

Dems just the facts, sorry to say.

Incremental: it's what for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.