Guyana - 1: Asics - 0: Michael - ?

With the sun blaring in and the dogs yapping away at 6:15 this morning, what better thing is there to do than get up for a run? Nothing that I can really think of, especially considering how much cooler the temperature will be at this time of day. So, that’s what I did; I got up, made a quick bagel with peanut butter, drank quite a few gulps of water, put my contacts in, changed into running clothes, grabbed a Gatorade, then headed out the door at 6:45 with the goal of heading west on the seawall to the Pegasus Hotel, then backtracking and heading east to where the concrete portion of the seawall ends, then back to where I started at the Celina Resort, resulting in around a 7.5 mile run according to Google Maps.

Well, of course, the day I decide to do this long run (this feels long, I’m not in the marathon shape anymore that I was in a year and a half ago), it’s going to decide to rain. Which honestly, why should I have thought any differently? After all it is still the rainy season and it was early morning (when it seems to rain the most) with clouds filling the sky. So, as I’m approaching the seawall, it starts drizzling. At this point, I’m not too far to just turn back and go home, but I’m far enough out that, it just feels like a waste of time to not continue. Therefore, I of course decide to continue. As I’m hitting the seawall, the rain decides to pick up slightly. Oh well, it’s not so bad. Ha. About halfway to my westbound destination, Guyana decides to laugh at me with a mass amount of its tears of joy. I am royally soaked at this point, but I’m so far in that there is no reasonable reason to turn back now and I decide to try to finish it out. After all, this is the best feeling run I’ve had the whole time I’ve been down here. There was no suffering from sun, heat, and humidity like all other times of the day after around seven in the morning and before five in the afternoon. This rain finally decided to stop around thirty minutes into my run after my clothing was sufficiently drenched. But, I did manage to get the whole run in, which very likely might not have happened if I had decided to put the run off until later. Now, I’m sitting on my balcony watching the third or fourth coming of rain since I’ve been awake with my poor Asics sitting to my left, stuffed with paper in hopes to absorb some of the water that is currently drowning them.

The best image of the run today, which gave me a good laugh for a while, was when two mini-buses had to slam on brakes due to two jackasses deciding that stopping in the middle of the road to hang out was a good idea. No really, they were jackasses, you know, the kinds that go “hee-haw.”

-Michael