I woke up this morning suddenly, with a distinct feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. I refused to start out the day in the kind of self-fulfilling-prophecy bad mood that would have been so easy to fall into, so I got up and went on a 6-mile bike ride. Sometimes physical exertion can banish the dread. I would have gone for a run, which would have been even better because I would have been dead tired by the end of it, but I knew that if I'd gone for a run I wouldn't have held back and I would have overdone it. Since I haven't run in a while, I knew that I'd have either injured myself or, at the minimum, ended up in pain for the next three days.

I would like to think the exercise helped a little with the feeling of dread, but it's still here, nagging at me. When I feel like this, I want to run far, far away.