July 5

[cerealjoe]

On the 5th I had the chance to experience doing a 10K race in 30C at 9PM… after three and a half hours in an overheated train (because SNCF + first day of real heat = "sorry, the A/C is out of order… we don't really know why"). In the end it was rather funky running around Toulouse as the sun was setting but it was still way too hot and humid! 30C+ and no wind in sight! At the 5K bottle station I just dumped a whole bottle on my head/back and that was probably the best part of the race, that moment of immediate cooling down. Overall I got a decent sub-hour net time given the conditions (1:00:37 in official time but we were about rather far away from the start line - see photo) but there were too many people running for the small streets we were asked to go on! My pace was all over the place because multiple times we went straight from large avenues to streets where three people could barely run shoulder to shoulder and many peeps clearly had never run before with many other peeps and they just would not keep their line. The other problem was that the race was mostly in the city centre and Toulouse has loads of bars/restaurants and people kept crossing the street or walking very slowly along the same narrow streets we were taking, it got rather frustrating after a while. But hey, it was for a good cause and all that. We had a good two or three minutes of walking just to get to the starting line… … which you can see on the right there, behind the "arrivée" line. And we finished the race when it was pretty much fully dark.