Week 4, Session 3

2min Run, 3min Walk X 6 reps.
Playlist: Comedy Bang Bang - Paul F. Tompkins, Erinn Hayes, Dan Telfer

Well, that was pleasant. Three minutes of walking. I guess they're buttering me up for the switch to 1 minute from here on. It was nice while it lasted.

If you don't live in the Pacific Northwest, you may have heard that it rains a lot here, especially in the fall, the winter, and the spring. That's not strictly true. While it does tend to stay constantly wet, you couldn't really call it "rain" most of the time. No, most of the time, the clouds come down and touch the ground. In most places, you'd call that "fog." We don't get a lot of fog here. Here we get "wet air," that is, air that you can walk through, get wet, and not feel like you've been rained on. And, oh boy, if you stay out in that stuff, say for 37 minutes or so, you will get wet. I got pretty wet today. You can tell which people on the street have lived in Vancouver a while, because they don't usually carry umbrellas - at least not until you can actually see the rain. When the air is wet, an umbrella does no good at all. The microscopic droplets don't fall in a way that an umbrella will protect you from. In fact, sometimes they don't fall at all. They just coalesce onto your clothes as you move... or stand still. The newbies and transplants crowd the sidewalks with their gigantic umbrellas, oblivious to the fact that they aren't really helping and that you can avoid getting wet by just not staying outside for too long.

This wet air gets pretty cold though. It doesn't cool your body down in the way that you would like it to - the way regular rainfall would. It just makes your extremities cold. That's fine for the legs, as they get pretty hot when you're running. But your hands and forearms just sit there, swaying back and forth, getting wetter and colder as the run progresses. I'm now beginning to understand why so many runners around here wear long sleeves and gloves. I'm going to have to start doing that.

p.s.-  that's a good podcast up there (Cake Boss). It feels good to laugh hard when you're running. It clears the lungs and makes you forget for a few seconds that you want to stop.