Heat

The Met Office has just issued its first heatwave warning of the year, and it's certainly looking like a scorcher this weekend. There are good and bad aspects to this. On the upside, there's sitting in the garden with a cold beer watching the children play happily in the paddling pool. I might even get around to erecting our canvas gazebo - which is so enormous that it was visible on Google Earth for a while - so we can eat outdoors without getting frazzled. On the downside, though, there's tossing and turning in sticky sheets all night unable to get to sleep. If global warming continues, home air conditioning might become more common in England, but until then we'll have to rely on keeping the windows open and hoping for a cooling breeze.

At least running first thing means I'm likely to hit the coolest time of day, though it was still a bit on the muggy side this morning. I'm about two and a half weeks in to my current running programme now, and my fitness is improving noticeably. It seems to take me about a mile to warm up, and then I hit my stride and run quite comfortably. I'm still on run 2/walk 1 minute intervals, and I'll keep that creeping up gradually. In a few weeks my longer runs on Sundays will be far enough to head down towards the river, and I'm really looking forward to that.