More Running. I used to do fun things...

Against my better judgement, and some would say common sense, I decided to go out on a ten mile run early yesterday evening. The potential problem here was not so much the length (I'd done nine the previous weekend, after all) but the weather. It had been really hot all weekend and showed no major signs of changing. So a sensible person would have said: "I'll stay in and drink beers and watch the television". What I said was "I'll head out and do two hours of exercise in some excessive hotness and possibly nearly die".

Now, fair enough, it wasn't exactly Death Valley in York - temperatures were around 25 degrees Celsius. But that's quite a lot. I had however not unprepared myself for this. For earlier on the Sunday I had been shopping. I finally decided that warm jogging bottoms were no longer a good thing to wear. They are not good summer sportswear. So I bought some proper running shorts! Not stupid really short ones though - they look ridiculous on the best of people. My new shorts descend to a few inches above my knees. This gives adequate coolness, flexibility and not-looking-silly-ness.

But best (?) of all, they are like swimming trunks in that they have mesh undercrackers built into them. Hence no need to wear separate pants with my shorts. I think. It's possible you're supposed to wear underwear as well - I just guessed that that wasn't the case. Am I right? Am I wrong? It doesn't matter. I didn't wear pants and it was perfectly comfy. Hah hah - I ran all around York with no pants on! :-)

So it was lucky that I'd remembered to put the shorts on instead!

The actual run itself was fairly hard work (cos it was very hot!). I only had a half litre of water with me so I had to ration it quite carefully. Also I was going quite slowly to ensure I'd last the distance, despite this meaning that I had to spend more time in the heat that way. So my total time ended up at one hour fifty five. I'll have to pick things up a little bit to get to my arbitrary two hours fifteen minutes target for the Great North Run. I'm still managing to go without stopping though (apart from when crossing the occasional road) so I'm happy with that.

I feel like I'm moaning about the heat quite a lot. Tough. It's hot. And the air conditioning at work is f**ked (again).