Week 2 Day 1 of 10K Training

Well, we are officially in a heat wave here in northern Vermont. The local weather guy said a heat wave is 3 or more days when the weather gets about 90. We are supposed to be in the 90s until Saturday. I know a lot of the eastern part of the country is going to be extremely hot this week.

Heat exhaustion involves sweating profusely and cramps and nausea and excessive thirst and headache. I have all of those things after a normal run, so it's hard to tell if I actually had a small go-round with heat exhaustion today. A way to check would have been to see if I had a "core rectal temperature above 100*F", but I wasn't willing to go that far.

I do know that it was a very uncomfortable 4.5 miles out there. I had chores to do this morning so I couldn't run early. That meant running late. So, I didn't head out the door until 6pm. The sun was kind of going down, and I soaked my running hat in water and stuck it in the freezer before heading out. I guess both those things kept it from being worse, and I actually felt ok for the first 2 miles. Then my legs started to get very heavy and I felt like I couldn't breathe in deeply enough, even though I wasn't out of breath. My intestines started to cramp, as did my calves. At points when cars went by me, I had an urge to lean out into the road. Ostensibly it was to catch a breeze as the vehicle blew past me, but in my secret heart I may have been hoping the car took me out so I could relax, laying in the ditch until the ambulance came.

I came immediately into the house, filled a water bottle, and got into the shower. I stood under the cool water, drinking and breathing deeply and trying not to faint. I have definitely felt worse before in my running life; probably even a few months ago, when I was first running 5 minutes a pop, I felt sicker. However, I haven't even felt this HOT.

I will either run at the gym tomorrow, or take it as my off day. It depends how I feel. For tonight, I am going to go sit in our air conditioned bedroom and be thankful my run didn't come down to rectal temperature-taking.