Whew
It's sure hot here. It's pushing 90 in the shade with an easy 85% humidity, so we're talking serious crush your ass in 5 minutes heat. (I realize that isn't too horrible for much of the country, but to a lifelong Yankee that's been relatively inactive in heat for a while, it's fucking awful. And I'd like to see you Southerners take subzero winter days.)
Yet I went running. Dumb? Well, it depends on your point of view. I wanted to see what it was like to run in this type of weather again, something I haven't done in three years at least, and it's insanely rough. I ran a half mile, almost collapsed while stretching, ran a quarter mile, almost collapsed again, kind of staggered a dozen meters and trotted another quarter mile, and that time I started getting tunnel vision and horrible cramps in my diaphragm. Walked fifty meters, jogged a couple hundred, walked a couple hundred, then ran the final 300 or so. Collapsed in the garage on the dog table sucking wind like a god damn Hoover, then after a few minutes I could walk again and I made it up here, stripped, and started drinking water in a cross breeze from my window fans. I'm still overheated, but I feel alright as long as I don't move too much. Did I mention I was wearing a tight black cotton/poly shirt? Yeah, dumb. I was trying to simulate GA conditions but I ended up almost killing myself.
I'm going back out around 7 PM, I think, or maybe around dusk.
I can not believe I used to run XC in summer heat like this. Dear lord. Run around the lake was a summer event, usually in August... that's a 9 mile or so two person race, you see; a fast person is paired with a slowish person and they run half laps until they meet, turning around and running back, meeting again, etc. The faster person ends up running more of the course, and it's chafe city for the balls.
Lacking a good way to close this... I guess I'm just a hot weather pussy for now. I'm going to go out every day in midafternoon and run at least a mile--but do my real running in the cool parts of the day--and try to build up my heat resistance. I know I can get over it, because while I didn't like running in the heat back in those XC halcyon days, I still pulled off an average of 8-9 mile days at a good clip. Can you believe the athletic director said we couldn't take our shirts off while we were running on the HS grounds my junior year? What the fuck is that? I'd like to see that jackass out there running with us to compare 9+ miles with a damn shirt on to 9+ miles without one. Guess he didn't grasp thermodynamics and heat exchange and shit like that, because it can be an easy 10 degree difference.
(Compare the shirt which absorbs IR, reflects heat from the skin instead of letting it escape, and prevents sweat from evaporating... to running with a bare chest. Even the slightest breeze can turn a 95 degree day into a very bearable 80 degree running temperature. Hell, I've been actually cold on runs in the summer without a shirt on!) What a stupid fucker. Is it really that hard to understand why the dry sock and wet sock thermometers will show different readings with wind? Duh, that's the whole fucking point of sweating.
