Parkway Rest Stop

Mad Dogs and Englishmen...

I'm sitting here drenched with sweat, but I wanted to write this while my latest lapse of good judgment is fresh in my cruller.

For reasons I will spare you, yesterday I did not have a chance to do the morning "walk". Those of you who do that kind of thing regularly know that missing a day makes the following day's walk more pressing. Unfortunately I awoke later than I had expected and after noodling around the house on the computer for a while and otherwise wasting time, it was 11 o'clock by the time I was ready to head out.

When I opened the front door of the air-conditioned house, it was like being inside a blast furnace. The sun was blazing, the air was heavy, still and chock full of humidity. Instead of immediately going back inside, I thought, "Don't be a wimp, Jimbo. How bad can it be?"

It was very bad.

At about the 2/3 mark of a three and a half mile walk, the digital thermometer on the bank in the center of town was alternating between 91 and 92 degrees. Traffic was reasonably heavy at that time in the center of town, and the exhaust fumes from the cars and trucks stubbornly hung in the air.

I had drained my water bottle, and I had to choose between waiting in the sun to cross the busy street to buy a bottle of cold water or continue on just to get out of the heat. I chose the latter.

The last mile was most uncomfortable. Normally I use walking time to think about things to write, but today all I did was count steps until my private version of the Bataan Death March was over.

So, what kind of knucklehead goes out in the midday sun? That would be "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" ... and Jimbo.

Posted by Jim at August 13, 2005 12:04 PM | TrackBack