oh my God what the HELL are you doing

• Posted on July 15, 2009 at 10:56 pm

Let me paint a little picture for you here.

It’s about 4-5 in the afternoon. In the middle of July. In Texas. Not the! hottest! part! of the day, but still hot enough to where I wouldn’t want to run or even powerwalk or really even gently mosey around the track at the park even if I could do so naked with a lawn sprinkler on a very long hose attached to my head. Because it’s fucking hot.

It is so hot that I do the “fill water bottle halfway with water, put in freezer at angle all day, fill rest of way with water just before use” trick, I ride the two and a half miles home, and if I’m using an uninsulated bottle the ice has almost completely melted by the time I get home.

It is so hot that the expected number of active sprinklers on any given street is a major factor in route planning.

It is so hot that every outside cat you see is sprawled out in a shady spot and panting. When a cat sprawls out and pants, you know it’s hot.

You step outside and immediately your sweat glands open the floodgates and your exposed skin bakes to a rotisserie-chicken-like golden crackly brown and your lips attempt to peel themselves off your face and escape to cooler climates. And because the humidity is something like 80-90%, your sweat does not do its job because it cannot evaporate because there is nowhere in the air for it to go. It just clings to you and makes you even more miserable. Your sunglasses fog up on the inside if you stop moving for even an instant. Every stretch of asphalt laid down in the last three years or so reeks of hot tar.

Are you getting a good picture of this in your mind now? Good. Because there’s one more thing I would like you to add to it: at least two people jogging or powerwalking around the track at the park in this Godawful inferno wearing those silver or black thick plastic sauna suits.

I’m not even talking about people who look like they might be martial artists or boxers or whatever trying to make their fighting weight, I’m talking about, like, grandmas.

And I see these people chugging along the track in their horrifying silver-or-black thick plastic suits and I–I just–sauna suit grandmas, could you come over here a minute, can I ask you a question, can I just ask you one tiny little question…

WHY

It is a million degrees out there and they are huffing around in wearable saunas, some of them going full-tilt boogie around the track without so much as a drop of water with them, seriously, head-to-toe black or silver thick plastic suits at the hottest time of the year in the hottest hours of the day, I think I know what they think it is doing (melting off fat) and I am not a personal trainer but I am pretty sure it is not doing what they think it is doing.

But y’know what… if those suits actually did melt fat? And all I had to do was walk three miles a day in a 105-degree heat index in one of them?

I’D RATHER JUST KEEP THE FAT, THANKS

I don’t have enough DO NOT WANT macros in my entire macro folder to express just how much I DO NOT WANT. Seeing the sauna suit grandmas just makes me want to pick them up over my shoulder, carry them to the snow-cone stand across the street, and bury them up to their necks in shaved ice and fan them with giant palm fronds until their faces lose that alarming tomato-ish hue. Someone is going to die out there one of these days.

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