It's Too Darn Hot

     It happens every year, so I don’t know why when we string together a couple of our delightful Midwestern cauldron hot, and gooey humid, days like we have now that we react the way we do. But we indeed do, vowing to move somewhere else, hiding inside, avoiding virtually any outdoor activity that we can. We desperately feel for those that HAVE to work outside, and that’s the one emotion that is an understandable and admirable one.

     At the very least it gives us a talking point with any stranger, and leads to well-meaning, but ultimately silly, bromides like “Try to keep cool” as you are headed outside into conditions so oppressive that even the prairie wind doesn’t help, it just gives you the feeling that you opened an oven door and stuck your head in.

     It’s always an interesting conversation as to what is worse, extreme cold, or extreme heat. There are certainly pros and cons. You can dress to keep warmer, but even stripping naked doesn’t really help when the heat index is 108. Butt,hen again your hands and feet don’t end up physically hurting like they do when it’s frigid.

     I guess I would opt for hotter temperatures, even though neither makes me smile. I am someone who has gotten frostbite in the worst possible place you can imagine. Just take a guess, guys. Thawing out downstairs after dressing inappropriately for a winter run has to rank among the most painful twenty-five minutes of my life. But then again, I came very close to not being around to write this due to another dubious decision while running, this time in the heat. I chronicled it in my book “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”…..

      “I began running avidly in my mid-20s, and a few years later I ran in my first road race, a 10K that was shorter than the distance I ran every day. My regular running route at the time was just over seven miles, and a 10K is just over six. When I did my regular route I never drank water along the way. In fact, in addition to the seven-mile daily runs, on Sundays I usually ran 12-14 miles. So, I didn’t think a 10K was any particular challenge.

     But the day was much warmer than expected. I ran my daily runs fairly fast, usually around seven-minute miles. This was my first race, I was no doubt a little fired up, so I was running faster than that. I literally was stupidly scoffing at the thought of using the water stations. It would take its toll. My younger brother Jim was riding a bike along the route encouraging me. With about a mile to go, he told me I was in ninth place and that the runner in eighth was about 100 yards ahead, and he encouraged me to catch him. I replied, “Jim, I ain’t catching anybody.” I was exhausted.

     I literally don’t remember the final mile. There was a group of friends and family waiting at the finish line. My brother had ridden ahead and told them I was in ninth. They watched as the eighth place, ninth place, and tenth place runners finished. No sign of me. Then my sister-in-law looked in the other direction, and saw that about 50 yards away I was lying in the street. I had blindly turned the wrong way at the end.

     I had heat exhaustion and severe dehydration. I was rushed to the hospital, and my temperature was higher than the thermometer, which topped at 108 degrees, could register. The doctors told me later if the hospital had been any further away than the two miles that it was, I would have died. I was out for about eight hours, but somehow, I made it through. They were worried that I might have suffered some brain damage. Perhaps they were right.”

     One benefit of hot and cold for me is golf. The courses are wide open. I will play when it is cold enough that it’s dicey as to whether the course will even be open, and really the only place I don’t much notice how miserably hot a day is, is on the golf course. The only real problem there is if you are sweating so much that it drips off your nose down into your sight line while putting. Recently on a particularly gallingly hot day I was headed onto the course while a group was coming off in mid-afternoon. One man just looked at me quizzically, shook his head, and said, “Good Luck”.

     But relief from the most oppressive of conditions is often just a bank of thunderstorms away. We have some dandy ones in this part of the country, but I had to be in another land to get a dose of weather’s fury that dwarfed what we see here. It was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico a few years ago. It’s a favorite of my wife and I’s, but our first taste of the city taught us a little lesson about the Mexican calendar. Again, from “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”….

     “On our first visit, we got a great deal on our hotel suite because it was the last week before the autumn busy season. We found out why. The first couple of days were paralyzingly hot and humid. We went for a walk downtown one day, and because we slipped into a couple of jewelry stores merely because they had air conditioning, my wife has a couple of hundred dollars of jewelry she wouldn't have otherwise. We actually went back to our condo and each laid on a bed with an ice cube tray on our foreheads.

     We had arrived on a Saturday and it wasn't until Monday night that relief finally arrived about 10 p.m. when a vicious thunderstorm roared through. Our hotel room was about 10 floors up with a covered  deck which faced away from the ocean, and toward a view of the mountainside where homes seemed to be literally waiting to topple down into the sea. The rain came down so hard it was difficult to see those homes, but they were repeatedly illuminated by lightning strikes that came about every half second. It looked like old historic films I’d seen of the Battle of Britain. It was utterly fantastic, maybe five times more explosive than any other thunderstorm I have ever seen.

     We awoke the next morning to beautiful sunshine and warm, not blistering hot weather. Amazingly, all those expensive homes were still hanging on the hillside, and somehow, all of the rainwater was just gone, disappearing into the sandy soil and the ocean itself.”

     Yes, some relief is always in sight, and it brings with it the positive of suffering through 95 degree days with seventy percent humidity. When we get a day of say, 87 and fifty-five percent humidity, conditions that would have New Yorkers or Californians groaning, we feel it as a delightfully pleasant climate.

     So, as we desperately use a program as a fan at Starlight theatre, or purchase one of those little hand-held fans that mist water (I have one from a July excursion to Disney World, another past poor bit of timing), just know that a lovely fall day is coming.

     It sure as hell beats driving in the snow.