What's the Weather Gonna Do This Weekend?
And how's climate change really going to wreck my sport?
My embrace of fitness, as I have written here before, began very much as an attempt to regain control over a life that had spiraled out of control. Joke’s on me, of course. Even if you meticulously plan your training, even if you execute that plan perfectly, there are still a million things that you simply cannot control. My “favorite” thing to get all spun out about: the weather.
If you’re like me, you know you can start to see the weather forecast for a particular day — say, your race day or a day you’ve planned a long hike or a BBQ or a wedding — about 10 days out. Predictions get much more accurate, obviously, the closer you get. But if you want to start fretting in advance about something you cannot control — you know, the weather — why wait until the morning of?
As the time of publishing this newsletter, Sunday’s weather looks to be lovely: high of 60-ish, low of 50-ish. Partly sunny. It looks to be lovely, that is, unless you’re one of the 50,000 people who will be running the New York City Marathon. 60-ish is too hot by about 15 degrees. Unlike the brutal conditions at last weekend’s Marine Corps Marathon in DC, the humidity in NYC only looks to be between 50-60%. Last year, the weather on race-day was also unseasonably warm, and it was very humid too. The temperature hit a high of 75 degrees — a record high for the city on that date — and the relative humidity hovered around 75%. The weather was surely a factor for the several thousand people who did not finish.
