Victory laps

Recently I found a bed bug. On my bed. Because I have several good friends who have been devastated -- financially and emotionally -- by New York City bed bugs over the past couple of years, panic immediately ensued. Was our capture definitely a bed bug? How did it get in here? Was it just a single stowaway from a crowded subway ride home, or was it a sign of many more to come? And weren't the couple hundred dollars we spent last year on mattress and pillow and box spring covers (after our neighbour revealed that she had bed bugs) worth anything?

After confirming with the exterminator that this was indeed a bed bug (his email to me after seeing the photo: "Def bed bug"), we decided to hire a dog. This dog, who makes multiples of what I do on an hourly basis, was guaranteed to sniff our place out and pinpoint, with 95% accuracy, whether or not we actually had bed bugs living in our apartment (we had no signs of them otherwise). It seemed right to share the dog with our neighbours and have all apartments "inspected," since the dog can sniff rather quickly -- as dogs typically can -- and easily cover 10 units in less than one hour.

And so Zdenek and I posted a large notice in thick, black font to the front door of our building. ATTENTION RESIDENTS, it began, We have reason to suspect that we might have bed bugs... We invited our neighbours to sign-up, at no cost to them, if they wished to share the dog services. Now, if I were one of my neighbours, I would have gladly jumped at the chance to have a dog sniff for blood-sucking vampire bugs around my mattress. But I didn't know what to expect from my neighbours because, truth be told, we didn't really know many of them! There are 14 other tenants in our building and, until posting our note, Zdenek and I had met exactly four of them. Although announcing that we might have bed bugs didn't seem like an ideal way to introduce ourselves, it was the quintessentially New York way.

Happily, every single neighbor signed up for the bed bug inspection (using the pen that Zdenek ingeniously taped next to the note). A few days later, I raced home after work to meet the exterminator and bed bug dog, who, unlike the bug, was an adorable specimen (part beagle, part Jack Russell terrier). Soon it was time for her to earn her keep. She immediately passed the control experiment -- sniffing out the site where the exterminator, Jeff, had planted a vial of bed bugs (sealed with 75 micron mesh) under our couch cushion. Then came the real test, in which she had to make two nerve-wracking laps around our apartment to see whether she could sniff out any "wild" bugs.

I am delighted to report that the hound detected no interesting scents in our tiny abode. And as she then proceeded to make the laps around every other apartment in the building, I watched nervously from the corridors with Zdenek and my landlord. With each bug-free apartment, I felt a little more weight lift off my shoulders. And when our entire brownstone was finally declared bed bug-free, I actually did a little dance.

Since the inspection, I've slept much more soundly and have resumed focusing on the marathon that is less than two weeks away. I have only one more set of interval workouts tomorrow and then it's taper-time until May 2. It's been sixteen weeks to get this far, and I've run all of the required laps that are meant to get me to the start line well prepared. But when it comes right down to it, the most significant laps of the last few weeks were those made around my apartment on four legs.