The Muggy Meter

As noted in previous posts, I never complain about weather conditions in Highlands.  This is truly a "temperate" place for outdoor activities - that is, characterized by moderate temperatures, weather, or climate; neither hot nor cold.  During the relatively mild winters here (which I am nevertheless grateful for being able to escape the worst of these past few years in Atlantic Beach), I have watched with awe YouTube videos of runners training for the Boston Marathon in snowy and icy conditions in which I would not dream of running.  And during the summer we hear stories from visiting runners from Florida or Alabama who begin running in the mornings when it is still dark to avoid that dominant, humbling, brutal sunshine and humidity.

If I was going to complain, this would have been a good week to do so, with the heat wave continuing unabated and morning humidity in the upper 90s.  Bearpen Mountain was a struggle on Monday, but I was proud that it was the sixth week in a row that I climbed to the summit.  And just as last week, my intervals yesterday were the slowest they have been.  This morning we both completed only three miles.  It had rained yesterday afternoon, a torrential downpour that deposited nearly three inches at our house in an hour's time.  The garden beds looked like rice paddies.  And our gentle trickle of a waterfall out back quickly became a roaring, muddy torrent.  Loud booms of thunder shook the house again and again.

All that rain had to go somewhere besides the Savannah River Basin, so what was left was everywhere this morning, dripping from the trees, soaking the streets and lawns where we ran.  You could see the moisture rising in wraith-like columns from the street ahead, where it will climb into the atmosphere, gather into a thunderstorm, and return in another daily downpour, which in fact is exactly what began while I was writing this post.  

For the runner, humidity is more of a factor than "dry" heat, the kind of heat you can experience in July out west while never actually breaking into a sweat.  That was not the case this morning; I was drenched in sweat before I reached the end of the block.  A doctor whose article I was reading on the internet put it this way:  "As humidity increases, thermal strain and premature fatigue increase exponentially, and so running at your normal pace will feel very difficult."  Now that is an understatement!

Still, we persevere in what the Asheville meteorologists described at the beginning of the week as "brutal" on the alliteratively named "Muggy Meter."  Because what seems "brutal" to us runners who are accustomed to less trying conditions may seem "comfy," or even "refreshing" to a visiting runner from just about anywhere else in the Southeast.

So I'm not complaining.