I have been thankfully settling into a much more regular running routine since starting a new contract for an old client.  The shower facilities here allow for a midday run, which I really am learning to love.  It’s exactly the kind of energy boost I need sometimes, especially on days that I am particularly tired.  Even better is I get to run alongside the Rideau Canal, which is always picturesque.
All is not sunshine and roses though.  There’s a problem I have with exercising during the workday: sweat.  I can cover (a rather leisurely) 6km and get a shower done within an hour, which is my self-imposed limit so that I can still keep the billable hours up.  I eat lunch at my desk, and this passes my own moral test of conscience.  The real problem with this is I have no real time to do a proper cool down, so I hit the shower as I am just really starting to sweat profusely from my run.  I have the water as cold as it will go (for some reason this isn’t that cold here at work, but it’s still brisk) in an effort to chill my scrawny core down to below sweating-level, but it’s hopeless.  By the time I am half-way done getting dressed I’m still beading up and wiping off.  Rushing is not helpful.  I get back to my desk flushed and steamy, it’s not subtle, and it’s not the healthy glow of exercise that I have.  It’s more the gland-bursting, pit-stained frantic methamphetamine-induced kind of sweat that looks like I have been wrestling gorillas with Jane Goodall in the Amazon basin while wearing two angora sweaters.  It’s alarming to my coworkers to see a middle aged man sweating like that in the middle of the day.  I have had to fight off two separate workplace safety supervisors who were trying to start CPR to save me from my very obvious heart attack.

It’s entirely possible that I am extremely out of shape since I haven’t really done a heck of a lot of running this summer, and this will get better when I’m not working so hard.  I must say that the reality of running in the winter is looking more and more attractive, where before it seemed absolutely ludicrous.  Perhaps hypothermia will extinguish the internal heat in a more reasonable time frame.  Then it’s just the frostbite I need to worry about.