Ew ew ew ew ew ew.

I ate a bug.

My run was lovely, just lovely - I ran all 5 miles and felt absolutely fantastic. In fact, as I was nearing what must have been mile 4 or so, I was thinking that if I felt this good then perhaps a marathon wasn't an impossible and overly painful goal for me someday. I was in the middle of calculating how many 5 mile runs a marathons actually contains (~5.2), not even paying attention to my breathing, when out of the corner of my eye and faster than I could react comes this thing flying at my face. The next thing I knew it had lodged itself directly in the back of my throat, so far down I could not cough it up.

After a quick couple of coughs to try and dislodge the little bastard, I made the decision to swallow it. It was big enough that I could feel its little exoskeleton lodged in my throat, and I swear I felt it wiggling. I swallowed. It remained. I swallowed again. Still it remained. Alas, the problem with swallowing while running is that there is no saliva. My mouth and throat were very dry. I tried chewing on my tongue to dredge up some spit. No luck. Eventually, through sheer force of will (and repeated convulsions of my esophagus no doubt) I thought I felt it go down.

I just kept running through the whole thing. After I finished my great run and spent a few minutes stretching I drank about a gallon of water to try and flush the feeling out of my throat.

I think I can still feel it there.

Does that count as extra protein, I wonder?

Ew.