Last night I dreamt I was running. It was one of those vivid dreams, so real it doesn’t seem like a dream at all. In my dream I was fast and light, like those runners I can’t help but envy as they zoom by me effortlessly in the park. In my dream I wasn’t wearing a belt with a glucometer and didn’t have any blood sugar issues at all. I was swift almost floating, like Mercury.
- The Roman God – Mercury
When I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get ready for my morning run, I didn’t remember my dream at all. I got up, got dressed, checked my email and the Chicago marathon results and headed out running towards my group’s meeting point, about a mile away from my house. We met up, said our hellos, and started our warm- up run which was a couple miles long. We ran to one of the few hills in Tel Aviv where you can do some hill training. The drill was to sprint 200 yards up the hill and come back down, slowly recovering and catching our breath. During my second sprint up it occurred to me that I wasn’t feeling as light and fast as I had during my previous run. It wasn’t slower than usual but that wonderful feeling of lightness wasn’t there.
It took me a minute of trying to recall my last runs to realize I never actually had a run where I felt light and fast. It was all a dream, a very vivid dream, but a dream. I couldn’t believe I had actually dreamt about running. I have dreamt about many things but I don’t remember ever dreaming something like this.
What I’m left with from that dream is a powerful image of myself running and an almost supernatural feeling of flight, like lightness. It’s so far from what my runs are really like, with my shoes hitting the pavement hard, my test strips shaking in my pack, the glue from my infusion set melting away, my blood sugar often doing things I don’t want it to do.
Usually running with diabetes feels like running with shackles but sometimes, just for a moment, I get that dream-running feeling which makes it all so worthwhile.
