Humidity I hate you!

It’s 5:30am when the alarm goes off.  I am determined to drag myself out of bed this morning after failing to do so yesterday (and several failed days over the past few weeks).  So, I get up and force myself to get ready for a run.  Prerun snack of fig newton’s and water (check)…bathroom (check)…running clothes (check)…feed animals to give food a head start in digesting (check)…running tether so Bennett can run guide (check)…  By 5:40am Bennett and I are heading out the door.  Even though it’s early, its 74 degrees and very humid.  The humidity makes the early morning air feel oppressive as we start our run.  It seems wrong to have to run in the humidity even when we got up early for our run.

The first few blocks of a morning run my legs are still trying to wake up.  I have to keep telling myself that I will hit my running stride and the run will start to feel good.  This morning my legs hit that point somewhere around Lincoln Park, but my lungs never did.  The humidity never agrees with me, but the degree to which it disagrees with me varies.  Today my lungs and the humidity did not get along.  Rather than the early morning run becoming a meditative time with the city only half awake, it was a time to focus on breathing…willing my lungs not to wheeze.  The last half mile of our three mile run I could feel my lungs losing the battle.  This is such a frustrating experience because I know I can run further and faster than I did this morning.  And its runs like these that make me think I am crazy to expect my body to get through so many long runs during the summer.

As a child, I had exercise and illness induced asthma.  Basically I grew out of it, and for the most part forgot about it.  When I started trying to run, and my lungs suddenly had to process oxygen much faster, I struggled with breathing easily (but don’t we all when we push our fitness level?).  Once I mastered a basic level of running fitness, my lungs only freak out in the extreme cold, humidity, and the rare times I have allergy problems.

I know my body handles weather changes much better than it did two years ago when I started running.  I also know that the more I struggle through these humid runs, the better my body will handle them.  I know everyone has bad running days; that’s part of training.  Sometimes though, you have to hate those people who are out there, running along, lungs functioning perfectly…while I wheeze along, lungs delivering suboptimal levels of oxygen to my poor muscles.  Magically, within a few minutes of finishing my run, my lungs decide to work again…oh how I hate humidity!