Even 82 Degrees Is Way Too Hot

Summer in Portland has finally arrived.  Portlanders covet these fleeting, true summer days here, and start missing them before they’re even gone.  Of course that does not stop us from complaining about them, so brace yourself.

It’s way too hot.  This is a fact.

Two nights ago I was planning on doing a follow up blog to last year’s “85 Degrees Is Very Hot” post.  I was going to talk about how working out in hot weather is actually fine, you just have to acclimatize yourself to it.  I’m still doing a lot of hot yoga, and I’ve gone some warm-weather runs and felt much better than I usually do in any amount of heat, so I assumed that I had perfectly adapted.  I was completely wrong, which is why I deleted the entire post that I had written in my brain, and am titling this post “Even 82 Degrees Is Way Too Hot.”

Here are two examples demonstrating how too-hot it’s been:

1. Yesterday evening I did my second Team Athena track workout.  Just a quick 3 mile warm-up, some drills, 5×1000 meters at 20:00m/5k pace, and a mile or two for cool-down.  Normally this would be super easy for pretty much anyone, but it was super-hot, and I almost died.  Somehow the girls I was running with were magically impervious to the heat and didn’t seem to have a problem.  I believe this has something to do with their magical six-pack abs – they must double as some kind of cooling system.  I finished the last 1000 almost 100 meters behind everyone else.  I can’t decide if I want to describe how I felt at the end of this workout as “awesomely miserable” or “miserably awesome,” but either way,  I was very hot.

2. Today I went on a 5ish mile run with a girl I met at the workout last week.  I went to hot yoga ahead of time, to get ready for running in more heat.  Instead of getting me used to the heat like it should have, I ended up just being extra-hot.  We were going to run 6 miles, but I requested that we shorten it a bit, and I still ended up demanding that we walk a little bit at the very end.  This is the ultimate embarrassment for a runner.  I put it off for as long as I could, but then my body completely fell apart and walking was necessary while I put it back together.  Heather (the girl) seemed to be okay, but there’s still no way of knowing that she isn’t a robot.

I hope these examples are sufficient in warning you about how hot it is, and that you finish out your summer in the most air-conditioned places possible.  Definitely don’t go outside, it is too hot.

Miles run in 2012: 307