Officially it is the last day of spring down here, but already the days are long, hot and humid and punctuated by occasional thunderstorms. In short, summer is upon us. I was therefore up well before dawn this morning to log another run in the spreadsheet before the heat of the day set in. And while the temperature was a balmy 22C, the humidity was a wretched 93%. Accordingly I settled for a shortened version of my main street circuit, but it was still tough going out there.
To make matters worse I had decided to wear one of those ‘fake’ tech tops. You might have seen them – they look like a tech top, feel like a tech top and have a famous athlete’s name emblazoned across them. But they only cost A$5 (as opposed to about A$40 for the genuine thing) and are made in Bangladesh from (it seems) recycled battery acid and polymers extracted from mutant alien body parts. Unsurprisingly therefore, within a kilometre I was drenched in sweat and the cheap top was sticking to me like a lawyer.
The heat also seemed to make everyone grumpy – hardly any of the other runners and walkers out there this morning returned my greeting. Or perhaps they were just suffering more than me, I dunno. But suffering is what it was, and I have been only rarely more glad to make it home again than I was this morning. I returned home redder than an embarrassed beetroot, and had to sit slightly dazed on a bench for several minutes before I was sufficiently revived to hit the shower.
There’s a positive aspect to a hot, steamy run however. It certainly cleans out the sinuses as well as the pores, and also afterwards my joints always feel fabulous. I think getting the knees and ankles moving in hot weather somehow opens them up and gets them operating smoothly again.
Apart from the weather, the other thing that got me up so early on an otherwise carefree day off was a family dinner the other night. I found myself seated with my marathon-running sister-in-law, another sister-in-law who is an age category champion kayaker and also a GP, together with a niece who is a junior champion in javelin as well as a junior national representative in softball and is studying (is that the right word for a sports scholarship?) at one of the better US sports colleges. In such elite company the talk of course turns to all matters sports-related and I took the opportunity to ask a few pertinent questions, particularly about training and sports nutrition. The suggestions they all agreed for me personally were interesting: that I should do more upper body strength work (together with core strength of course) in order to improve blood supply to the running muscles (I still don’t fully understand the science behind this, but they all insisted it works) and that I should start using energy gels (especially the Gu brand) to ensure I overcome the stomach problems I had in the Sydney marathon and because the energy release from gels is predictably slower than anything I can concoct in the kitchen. Well, with regrets and apologies to
Caballo Blanco I’ll give it a go.
They said lots of other interesting things of course, as athletes are prone to do, and they were extremely motivating, but the other thing we all agreed on was that early morning is simultaneously the hardest time to train but also the very best. And so it was today – up and out the door before my brain had time to register what I was doing.
Well it worked, and now I feel fabulous. Physically invigorated and mentally chuffed. What a great way to start the day – I can barely remember the suffering of it at all.
12.75km, 1h18:38
YTD: 1,309.4km