Third time's a charm...

Well...here we are again...the third try. This one, however, is the one.

Life has changed a lot for me over the past few months...I moved out of my old apartment and moved back home with my family...I'm planning on going to grad school for the next year or so and now I will have the chance to focus on my studies and save my money.

Also, I wrote a little blog that inspired a lot of people. I did the media circuit for a while...and now I'm almost all the way back to earth.

My life has finally started to settle back down and so now, it's time for me to start it back up.

It's Memorial Day today, so I don't have work...thus, I figured, today is a great day to get back into the swing of things. The temperature is in the 70s, the weather is sunny for the most part, pools are open, birds are out...it's a good day to start a running program.

I've been here before. Hopefully, today was my last Week 1 Day 1 and I won't be back here again in a few months explaining how I'm starting over again and I promise that this time will be the time. I do have a few things going for me now...my support system is a little bigger...my family lives in the house with me now, so they're going to be pushing me out that door...it's easy to make excuses on the phone and on the internet...not so easy when they're staring right at you telling you to go run.

This afternoon, I moseyed on over to Granny White Park...the sight of several of my runs earlier this year with my friend Mandi, including the infamous snow run.

To put it lightly, today was not a snow run. Today was hell.

Week 1 Day 1 is easy. I knew that. The first time sucks a little, but altogether, by the end of Week 1, it's practically a cakewalk.

So why did today suck so hard?

If you've ever been to the South in the summer, you know about the humidity. It's stifling. Yeah, the temperature was in the 70s, but the humidity was simply suffocating. My first few one minute intervals were fine, but the longer I went, the hotter I got...and the hotter I got, the dryer I felt.

At one point, a city truck drove up behind me and started blasting his horn...mind you, this is on a pedestrian trail in a park that isn't even wide enough for a truck...

I completed two full laps around the 0.8 mile trail before I hit the cooldown.

However, because I was so hot and since I was fairly close to dehydration, I skipped the cooldown, walked to my car and turned the air conditioning on high.

Which means there are three things I learned today for summer running: a) run in the morning before the sun gets up high in the sky and heats everything up, b) drink tons of water and c) bring water with me. I didn't have any with me because I've never felt the need after a thirty minute run to drink all that much water...today was entirely different.

And it's not even summer yet.