Mississippi Burning

• Posted: August 1, 2008
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• Author: Shéamus
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• Filed under: Observations, Workouts
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• Tags: Extreme Running, Heat

Man, it’s hot here.

As you would imagine, Friday was a day that involved travelling pretty much the entire time. We set off from our home at 7am, arriving at Heathrow Airport (London) about 9am. Our flight was at 12.15pm, but was delayed for about half an hour because of ‘heavy rain in Northern Scotland’.

Subsequently, we landed at O’Hare in Chicago around half an hour late, and by the time we got through customs and, with no exaggeration, three security checks, had literally five minutes to make our connecting flight. Unfortunately, the gate was well over a mile away, and required boarding a train. Basically, we had no chance.

You can understand why, but the level of paranoia in the United States right now about terrorism has seen the pendulum swing far too much the other way. We even had to take our shoes off and have those scanned. One of the security personnel had a near meltdown because I’d put my laptop directly on the conveyor in front of the scanner, as opposed to in a special box. I can understand and accept protocol, but his attitude was immediately aggressive, as opposed to just passing on advice (like, in my opinion, a normal person would). Nothing happened, nobody was at risk - he was just having a bad day and wanted to share.

Whereas at Heathrow airport we were always expedited to the front of all queues because we had very young children, at Chicago we had to queue for 40 minutes while my near three-year old crashed at burned. It was, after all, nearly 10pm on her schedule.

Fortunately, our connecting flight ended up being grounded for almost an hour, so we actually made it. I ended up having to run half-a-mile through the airport to get there, and when I did the guy at the desk immediately said, “Are you the Bennett’s?” And we were. So with some luck we got on board and finally made it to Memphis International at about 7pm CST.

About an hour later, having made the short journey by car to my wife’s parents lovely home, I finally found myself running.

And as I said - man, it’s hot here.

I ran at 8pm CST. This is 2am GMT - my body was telling me it was 2am. I was, it’s fair to say, exhausted. And it was about 87F outside, and it felt like it. The air is thick like tar - it’s heavy and it takes an effort to breathe it all in. It didn’t help that I was running our new roads that actually smelt like tar, too. Nor did it help that during my run around this loop that took about 2.5 minutes each lap, I was continuously ‘attacked’ by these very small, almost black little frogs that would leap out in front of me, as if curious about the repetitive thumping of my footsteps as I approached. Then they’d suddenly see what and how big I was, panic, and leap back in. However, in that split-second I would swerve madly to one side or the other to avoid squishing them, and they would do the opposite. This happened each and every lap at differing points. Total insanity.

Two flies flew into my mouth. Two big ones, too. And I swallowed both. And then did that really over-the-top gagging and choking thing that everybody does when this happens. This has never happened to me while running before. I imagine it will happen every day here.

Every time I made one point of the loop, this huge dog came rushing out to bark me on my way. Thankfully, it was chained up, but it has my scent now and it can only be a matter of time before all of this gets turned into Cujo 2 - The Running.

But the heat is the big story. It’s been pretty hot back in the UK the last week or so, but it’s not like this. This is, well, different. And it was 8pm, too. God only knows what running at midday is like - I’m not sure I really want to know, to be honest.

Splits and chart:

My mileage for July, incidentally, was 127.19, which was some 40 miles more than June.

Update: I woke up around 6am today and it was much, much cooler outside. So, from tomorrow onwards, it’s very early runs for me, and I’m looking at a few days of 20-30 minutes maximum just to acclimatised to the weather.

Until then, I’ll have to brave another bout with the frogs and the dogs this evening. Wish me luck. They’ve started to develop a taste.

Ps. I forgot to reset the time on my Garmin, so the workout was still on UK-time. That’ll be fixed for the next workout!

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