Yesterday's Rain

Saturday's run was questionable. I don't have a problem with rain, but I'm not crazy about lightning. It was just drizzling a bit, threatening to rain, but there was lightning in the distance when I started running on the canal with some friends in Team D.

The run was supposed to be an hour, out for half an hour, then turn around. The lightning got closer, it started to pour, and most of us were finished and gone long before an hour was up. I was soaking wet by the time I got back to my car, with only about 6 miles done.

But I had talked with a couple of friends who were planning a long run on Sunday. So I was back out on the same canal bank trail at 5:30 AM on Sunday, the next day.

I think I've mentioned it before, but it's hot in Phoenix, Arizona. We try to work around it, by running early or after the sun goes down, but there's really not much one can do except get used to it.

You get used to it partly by learning to sweat. Like Pavlov's dogs, Phoenix area runners begin sweating as soon as the sun hits their backs, or as soon as they take more than 50 steps in a minute. Then the evaporative cooling helps us keep our core temperatures in a range we can survive.

Even though the rain on Saturday brought the temperature down quite a bit, it also raised the humidity. That makes it so the sweat doesn't evaporate so quickly. My body sweats more trying to cool down. I was running around soaking wet two days in a row.

And on Sunday, I was soaking wet from yesterday's rain.

It's a familiar situation, but it struck me as terribly ironic over the long miles that morning. I guess I thought about it too much, and I wasn't going to stop thinking about it until I wrote it down.