Gosh, it was nearly four years ago that I first attempted to post this classic Noel Coward song, to accompany a description of the masochism of trying to run during the hottest part of the day.
Today, having been busy with some e-mailing and such during the morning, I didn't set out from my Del Ray holiday headquarters on my run down to, and along, the Potomac until exactly 12pm. Venturing out at noon, in such a hot country, is asking for trouble!
Luckily, the weather is relatively cool today. But the humidity down by the river hits you like a brick wall, and has almost invariably been halting me in my tracks over the past couple of weeks, sucking all the energy out of me, reducing me almost instantly to a long restorative spell of walking.
It's probably a little unrealistic of me to be attempting an 8 or 9-mile run when I am around 20lbs overweight. But I feel that, if I slow down enough, I ought to be able to manage it - to keep going at a very modest plod for 80 minutes or so. Alas, it seems not. I seem to have lost the 'forever pace', the speed where I am sufficiently within my capacity for exertion that I can keep going and going and going - indefinitely, if necessary (I have most often tended to use this slower-than-usual pace when exploring new routes, and am uncertain how long it's going to take me to get back to my point of origin).
It is dispiriting to be reminded that I have been "woefully out of shape" and struggling with my running for at least four years now. I am starting to worry not just that I have run my last marathon, but that I may soon have to accept that I can't run any more at all. Boo.
Well, I will try to raise my spirits with this sublime celebration of the Englishman abroad from Mr Coward. (I hope I am not going to be a jinx again: the previous clip I posted was pulled only a couple of months later.)
There are good versions of this also by Colin Baldy and The Muppets, but the original is still the best.
2 comments:
Ah: so you *are* in the DC area. When you mentioned the "freak storm" and subsequent power outage a few posts back (I'm catching up en masse, as you probably noticed), I wondered about that. My eldest nephew lives in Maryland and works in Washington; he and his little family went without power for over a week.
So sorry to hear about the running. I know how much it's meant to you!
I soldier on with the running. I had thought it would be a good way to get the weight down, but I'm starting to think that I'll need to do a bit of crash-dieting to address that issue before I can try to do much long-distance running again.
That storm was remarkable - though I was quite oblivious of it at the time. I was holed up in a windowless bar with some friends for most of Friday evening. We knew it had been raining very hard, and that there was some lightning that had been causing the lights to flicker occasionally. But we'd had no idea at all that there had been 15 or 20 minutes of hurricane force winds.
It was only when we started walking home around midnight - finding our path strewn with downed trees and telegraph poles, noticing that many streetlights were out, rows of houses all dark, some people sitting forlornly out on their stoops to cool down - that we realised something really extreme had happened.
Around central Alexandria, the cellphone network was down for most of the following day - as were the cable TV service and/or the Internet for many people. My host suffered those vexations, but - by happy chance - his side of the street was the only area within several blocks in any direction which didn't lose its electricity.
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