40 degrees of seperation

My ideal running temperature is somewhere in the upper fifties, maybe to the mid sixties. But today was 40 degrees warmer than that. At 5:00 AM. No joke. The ONLY good thing about today's run was that at least it wasn't 23 miles. Everything else about today's run straight up sucked. I knew it was going to be hot, and since a 14 mile run typically takes me about 2 and a half hours, I knew I had to start EARLY so that I could finish before it got wretchedly hot.

This plan is good, in theory, except that it was already wretchedly hot when my alarm rang at 3:45 this morning. I didn't actually hear it until 4:15, and it took me a few minutes to get mobilized-- first I ate a bagel (yummy carbs!) and then got dressed. And I don't want to get too indelicate here, but before any length run, I like to spend some time in the bathroom. I consider it a preventative measure... I don't like the idea of pooping my pants while I'm running. But sometimes even my preventative measure doesn't really help. (This is an amazingly common phenomenon among long distance runners. You get any number of us together-- whether it's 2 or 20-- and sooner than is probably appropriate, the conversation turns to how you deal with a big poo in the middle of a big run. You sort of get over the awkwardness of that after the first few times.) So I like to run with steady access to a bathroom, and the easiest way to do this is to run in a loop where I know of a good bathroom, a good water fountain, and if I'm lucky, a place to store a couple energy bars and bottles of Powerade. The UMBC campus is about a mile away from my apartment, so on most days I run there, around their 2 mile loop. I know where there's a clean bathroom and the building is usually open, and the water in that water fountain is SUPER cold. So on my short runs during the week, this is pretty ideal. But on the weekend the bathroom is usually locked. Plus, one full mile of this two mile loop is uphill. This also means that one mile of it is downhill, but somehow the downhill never seems as steep as the uphill.

So I like to run around the Yard at the Naval Academy. They have two good distance loops-- an "outer" is about 4 miles, and an "inner" is about 3. Plus there are a couple of measured one mile loops, so it's really not hard to run around any particular distance you need, and that's what I did today. I parked about a mile away, ran to the Yard, and ran three outers, and then ran back to my car. Sounds so simple, right?

Right. Except that when I arrived at 5:30, it was already like 84 degrees, and with the humidity, it felt like 90. One of the most brutal things about humidity is that it completely invalidates the function of sweat. We sweat to eliminate water when we're overheated, and when this sweat evaporates, it's supposed to have a cooling effect. I'm certain this must work in places other than the east coast... but I've rarely been able to experience it, because most of my summers have been spent in the swamplands of Virginia and Maryland. It blows my mind that when settlers first came to America, places like Williamsburg and Annapolis were among the first to be settled. There was no central air conditioning back then! I want to know what idiot disembarked from his ship, put the flag in for Britain, and said, "This is it, boys! We have arrived at our destination. Take a good look around, because we are making history. And while we're at it, lets set up permanent colonies here so that people can suffer for GENERATIONS." They must have arrived during winter. Although I will say that it does help explain how they mistook what we now know to be America as the West Indies. If it was hot and muggy outside, they were probably like, "Oh! Bullseye!"

Anyhow, I was pretty sure I was going to die on my run today. I stopped at every water fountain I could, and I actually stepped into air conditioned buildings every so often just to use them as my own personal cooling stations-- usually I would stay in just long enough for my face to go from tomato red to a normal shade of post-exertion pinkish.

The first few miles I ran were before the sun was really up-- it was lightening up outside by the time I started running, but definitely not dawn yet. But by the time I finished, the sun was beating down in full force. It was pretty terrible and I just wanted to melt into the pavement. Around mile 4 or 5, I got to run through the sprinklers, though. That was nice. I had to stop and walk a little more often than I would have liked, and with all the stopping in AC buildings, the run took way longer than I would have liked-- it took just over three hours. But I did it, and I didn't pass out, and I can nap all afternoon if I like.

It was kind of interesting to see plebe summer in action. I think this is the first time I've actually been on the yard DURING plebe summer, except last 4th of July when they weren't doing plebey things anyways. I got to see the Detailers leading PEP, and it was kind of fun to listen to them run in cadence-- I can definitely see how that sort of keeps you going... I wish someone had been doing a cadence next to me the whole time! Maybe I would have been able to keep better pace.