I spent most of the winter in New England, gutting out 2 to 3 miles in-between (and during) blizzards, trying to find days the windchill was above zero and wishing for those glorious summer days.
Well…now they're here and they suck.
All summer the weather has pretty much run in a cycle of 2-3 days of heat and humidity surrounded by lots of cold rain. 60 degrees all week, and then suddenly it's 90 with 90% humidity for a day. Then the rain comes back. So do you do your long run in the rain or the humidity? If you have my schedule over the last couple of months, you try and find a long enough stretch when you're free and it's still light out and hope for the best.
I've been trying to acclimate myself to the heat, but it's hard when it won't stay hot. Tuesday I wore a long-sleeve shirt. Two days prior to that, I had to wring the sweat out of my singlet mid-run.
Let's back up a little.
On June 23rd I did my second half-marathon, the Bands on the Run race in Lewiston, Maine. It was humid and I imploded. Total clusterfuck. I threw up my GU packets and got dehydrated and you can guess the rest. It was bad enough that I almost have to do the race again next year, for no other reason than revenge.
So I've been trying to do better with running in the heat and humidity, but it's a tricky thing to acclimate to a temperature when the temperature fluctuates so much.
Flash ahead to Sunday. Long run on a 13-mile loop near my parent's summer camp. 3 miles of it is on a pretty busy road, but the rest is a desolate, including a dirt road where you might see 2 vehicles over the entirety of the 5 miles. And there's a lake at the camp, so you can cool off at the end. Perfect, right?
It's hot out. Very hot. Pushing 90.
The 3 miles on the busy road goes pretty well, other than the sense that I'm running through an oven. There's no shade and the only breeze comes from traffic. I'm drenched, but still things are going ok-ish.
I make the turn and the horseflies find me pretty much instantly.
I had a problem with them on my last long run, but they went away when it started raining. If you've never had the pleasure of dealing with these things, basically they dive-bomb your face until you either kill them or they find something better to attack. And when they bite, it hurts. They're all kinds of evil. A half-mile into the dirt road and I've got 5 or 6 of them circling me. You can't really out-run them and there's no breeze so they just won't stop. After a while, you aren't running anymore, you're just churning your legs while you flail your arms and slap yourself in the head.
To make matters worse, I'm starting to overheat. The GU goes down ok (I think my problem in Lewiston was not drinking enough water with it, so I've started doing the GU in 2 parts), but I can feel my body temp getting too high. I've read that part of acclimation involves stopping, so I plan to stop for a bit at mile 5, which should be well ahead of when I'd need to stop and won't feel like as much of a failure, if that makes sense.
The stop cools me down and gives me a chance to kill more flies, but it also seems to attract more. So I cut the break short.
It doesn't really help.
Around mile 6 it stops being fun, even in a masochist way. I'm drenched in sweat and look like Pigpen, only instead of dirt there's horseflies circling me. If there was a store or something, I'd jump inside to try and lose them, but there's nothing. I stop for a minute around the 7.5 mile mark to try and kill some more. It doesn't work.
I make the turn at mile 8 onto pavement, which is slightly better, but only because there's more traffic and those bursts of wind from cars passing sort of kind of helps a little. By mile 9 I'm miserable. This is fucking bullshit.
Oh, and my anti-chafing shirt is so wet that it's chafing my nipple. Wring the shirt out and sure enough, bloody nipples. I'm almost out of water by this point. I'm so over the whole thing.
At 10.2 miles, I stop. Fuck this shit.
The shirt goes over my head, which is the first thing that's actually helped keep the flies away. I walk the rest of the way back. It takes forever.
Sigh.
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