The Los Angeles Marathon has issued the following weather advisory for this weekend:
Basically, it’s going to be warm to hot for the run. And the warnings are valid — hydration is always a key to any marathon event, regardless of the temperatures.
One of the reasons I try and muddle through training runs (the aforementioned “raw miles” and the longer weekend runs) in any given weather conditions is that you never know what the weather gods will rain down upon you on race day. And yes, I do mean that literally and figuratively and with puns fully ablazin’. Like the US Postal Service’s apocryphal slogan:
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
This is apparently inscribed on New York’s James Farley Post Office but has no official status as the motto of the USPS. Indeed, according to that know-it-all Wikipedia, the phrase itself is a translation of Greek historian Herodotus’s description of the Persian postal service:
It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.
— Herodotus, Histories (8.98) (trans. A.D. Godley, 1924)
But I digress. The point is that since you never know what the race day might bring, you might as well prepare for whatever by training in all kinds of weather. It’s also amazing to think that I will be going from unseasonably warm temperatures here in Los Angeles to the frozen chills of Antarctica in a few short weeks.
After all, if there’s something worth doing, it’s worth doing to the extreme.