There Was More To It, I Guess

After Friday's aborted run, I was looking forward to knocking out 17 on Saturday. During the day I started feeling more and more run down. I finally crawled into bed early (around 8:30) exhausted. I had been feeling hot during the day, but just chalked it up to living without air conditioning (it was around 94 here in Newport Beach on Friday). But then I started having the chills. I popped in the thermometer, and sure enough - 100 degrees. Not much of a fever, but now things were starting to make sense. The soreness after my easy 8 miler on Wednesday. Just being exhausted all the time for the past few days. Not being able to get comfortable for a good night's sleep.


With six more weeks left in my training plan, I'm taking a bit of a mid-plan taper to get better. I'm going to take it easy for a couple of days to see transpires (hopefully I haven' been "swined"). I bagged yesterday's run. I'll wait until later today to decide whether to try to get an easy run in.

There's another factor at play too. This morning my eyes were burning from the smoke from the fires burning north of Los Angeles, and I'm more than 40 miles away. You have no doubt heard about the wildfires here in Southern California. For us this is kind of like a "season." When it gets hot and dry (yesterday was 96 with 9% humidity in Pasadena), we can count on fires. It's just a normal occurrence here in Southern California. I captured some photos of the smoke being generated. This first photo is from Costa Mesa - about 40 miles from the fires:




Here's one from about 30 miles away:


This photo is from downtown L.A., about 20 miles from the fire lines:

As I type this on Sunday afternoon, I am happy to report there is a definite sea breeze blowing in. This means lower temperatures and higher humidity - something that will definitely help the fire fighters and hopefully let those evacuated (about 12,000 homes at last count) breath a little easier.