A Hot & Manic Sunday Run

Man, I don't have much to blog about today. Well, I do... like at least mentioning how stoopid that "IRS" thing was -- I'm here to help my dad as he recovers from open heart surgery... and then there's that? It's an intrusion, it's uncool and uncalled for.

Also uncalled for is the temperature in South Carolina. I'm not an indoor person! What I mean is I don't like to stay inside all day and not have a care in the world for going outside. Just going down the driveway to the curb to get the mail can be a mini-adventure in Hell. That's not right! So why won't the government control the weather already?! Turn the heat down!! I can handle in excess of 85 just fine. I can handle 95. But there's just something so wrong about beginning to sweat through your clothes just from walking out the door. It's a good thing me being here to help take care of my dad as he recovers from his heart surgery... but I'm just not liking this heat so much.

Ahhh, well, I don't want to be everyday secluded inside where there's air conditioning, ceiling fans, and oscillating fans -- even with the high heat it's nice to get some exercise OUTSIDE. It might only be just 30 minutes of walking and 10 minutes of running... but that's better than sitting on my ass all day!

93°, sunny just before walkin out the door @ 12:50 p.m. Could be worse but still way warm in the SC Lowcountry

Sunday Run, early afternoon: 10 minutes 16 sec

- 3:54

XXXXXXXXXXXX ·June +11sec· XXXXXXXXXX

5 runs in July: total time about: 1 hour 31m June: 1 hour 47 minutes May: 4 hours 46 minutes

Today's run was HOT!! And not like sexy or erotic hot... like body temperature nearing, oh, about 140 degrees HOT. Not really that high but it felt like it.

Also so tiring. Maybe I shouldn't have run but I had planned to and was eager to. Not enough sleep last night (or the night before) took a bit of a toll on me. But I still put the clothes on and the shoes on and got out there.

This morning I worked on a new playlist for the heat, one that would give me about ten minutes of running and one with each song consisting of a low Beats Per Minute count. Too many BPM would be a distraction and could possibly wear me out too soon. So I set up a mellow pace and an abbreviated time to match how I anticipated feeling out there. To go longer (and faster) than that in this heat would NOT have been a good thing.

My time was accomplished but not easily. A song and a half in I gave up and headed for some shade. I didn't stop moving (yet) but relief (in the form of very slow walking) was needed. Back to the start of the trail is where I headed, back where I had my frozen Gatorade waiting for me. For around ten minutes I sat in the shade, enjoyed cold sips as well as putting the bottle on my wrists and neck to help cool me down, and soon decided that I'd finish my run.

Walking down the trail again, I began listening to the song that I stopped [running] on and at about that moment I started running for the second time. My rest recharged me enough to finish my planned playlist. Immediately I turned around and was on my way back to the rest of my icy (but quickly melting) Gatorade. That was some sweet relief but what I really wanted was to collapse asleep and wake up sometime later, magically transported back to Terry Ave where I could turn the fan on high, lay my head, cool down, and forget there's that weather outside.

After a long, mostly cold shower here I am, typing this up and still sweating. Soon I'll be back to normal but pushing myself in the heat like that, I dunno.

Running tunes...
	Manic Street Preachers Lifeblood 2004

1985
The Love Of Richard Nixon
Empty Souls
A Song For Departure
I Live To Fall Asleep
To Repel Ghosts
Emily
Glasnost
Always/Never
Solitude Sometimes Is
Fragments
Cardiff Afterlife

Once again, here's a band that only recently entered my ears for the very first time. Nope, I'd heard Manic Street Preachers before. I'm not sure why. Maybe if I living in Wales I'd know who they are but somehow they escaped me.

Pretty good music. Apparently this album is a lot different than other stuff for them. They were punk(-ish?) once upon a time? I believe it but you'd never know it here. This is more like Echo & The Bunnymen or something along those lines. There's no edge here but it's some good music; I dug listening to it.

Check out the allmusic review: Instead of being the return to form it was clearly intended to be, Manic Street Preachers' sixth album, Know Your Enemy, sucked the life out of the band, collapsing in a heap of bad reviews and ill will. It was such a wrong move that even the band acknowledged that things went wrong, so they took some time off to regroup, issuing a hits collection Forever Delayed in 2002, with a B-sides and rarities comp Lipstick Traces following in 2003. The decks being suitably cleared, the band eased back in late 2004 with their seventh album Lifeblood, a record that takes the MOR/AOR inclinations of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours to heart. Gliding by on smooth surfaces of synthesizers and lightly sequenced beats, Lifeblood is simpler and hookier than the lumbering Know Your Enemy, which is a relative blessing: it results in a record that's easier to enjoy, even if its smoothness doesn't gloss over memories of what the jagged, visceral band the Manics used to be. Even on the grandiose, arena-ready Everything Must Go, they sounded like a tense bundle of nerve and ambition, a clear byproduct of punk, but here they sound not far removed from the legions of po-faced, sincere but dull groups that stumbled through the colorless aftermath of Britpop at the tail-end of the '90s. Apart from a sense of craft that thoroughly identifies them as pros, what separates them now are what have always been their hallmarks: Nicky Wire's perpetually adolescent literate literariness -- which, at this point, is either endearing or infuriating (though as lines like "so God is dead/like Nietzsche said" and titles like "The Love of Richard Nixon" pile up, it's hard not to tip toward the latter) -- and James Dean Bradfield's keening, earnest vocals. When the music hit harder, Wire's words made more sense and Bradfield's singing tugged on the heartstrings, but with music as slick and seamless as this, they seem a touch anachronistic, the lone holdovers from when the band lived with abandon, giving their music an invigorating, reckless edge even when it was incoherent. But growing up was never going to be easy for the Manics -- they were either going to break up, embarrassingly ape their former glories (which they came perilously close to doing on Know Your Enemy), or they were going to deliberately, somberly enter adulthood, as they do here. Since they craft solid records, Lifeblood is a pleasant listen, but once you peel away the keyboards, sensitively strummed guitars and tasteful harmonies and concentrate on Bradfield's nakedly open voice and Wire's terminally collegiate lyrics, it's hard to escape the unintentional pathos that winds up defining the album and, conceivably, the band's latter-day career.

find a dload @ Back On The Road

320 kbps mp3 download