Jonathan Meyer.

Now, I’m not usually one to complain about the heat very much. Yeah sometimes it gets to me, but that’s just part of life. You roll up your sleeves or take off your shirt and you deal with it.

I don’t complain about it often but I do know I’m not very good at suffering through the heat. When I was a kid, I remember during some baseball games getting sick when I’d stand in the outfield for too long. For those few short years that I did play baseball, I was mainly in the outfield. I think about my running now, I have such a high sweat rate and low tolerance for the heat, it all makes sense. That’s the way I’ve been my whole life.

At school a lot of the time we’ll hang out in the sauna or steam room inside of our fitness center. A large group of cross country runners all trying to acclimate to the heat and improve our performance in future races, what a fun and noble cause. I enjoy that specific feeling of heat, don’t get me wrong. However, it’s a whole different animal outside of that controlled environment.

This past week has been frankly hot as hell. I’ll even throw in the old Iowan trope, it’s not the temperature that will get to you, it’s the damn humidity. As we were doing our garage sale this weekend I remember just sitting there being miserable. I still found a bit of odd satisfaction stepping outside of the garage and basking in the gloriousness of god awful weather.

Another thing last week was my most recent encounter with a little bit of heat exhaustion. We’re out mowing and it’s in the nineties with a fair amount of humidity. We’ve all experienced that before. As we were working through our mowing list, going house to house and getting in and out of our truck, a slight little headache kicked in. I felt my cheeks get fairly red as well. I noticed myself getting a bit nauseous.

What I find the funniest about that whole situation was our drive back to the shop. After we had completed all of our yards for the day my coworker Matt was talking to me like he usually does. I don’t know if it was a touch of heat exhaustion or me just being a bad listener in the moment but I heard none of what Matt said. He called me later that night and asked how I was doing and told me he could tell there was something a little off with me. Looking back at that I laugh, but it reminded me that heat is no joke when you’re not fully prepared for it.

Not trying to be preachy with any of you because I too hate that, but I think it’s a good reminder to please stay hydrated and take care of yourself through these warm summer months. I hope we can all strive to be better than I was that warm afternoon.

Until my next bout of fighting the heat, I’m just Jonathan