Things are Getting Hot Down Here

I'm back in the south of France, having been whisked here in one short morning by the TGV. I love watching the French countryside go by from the TGV window; the landscape changes at hyperspeed and if you look away for ten minutes, you could miss a lot. So I spent the three hours from Geneva to Montpellier with my forehead pressed against the glass of the upstairs window in first class (there were no seats left in second, quel domage) and watched as the lush greenery of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence changed to the rocky and shrubby plains of southern Provence, patchworked with lavender fields and criss-crossed by rows of poplar trees. As the route heads directly south through the Rhone valley, you can almost feel the air getting hotter and dryer with every passing mile. When I disembarked at Montpellier to catch my connection to Narbonne, it had to be at least ten degrees hotter than when I boarded in Geneva a short three hours prior.

This is the first time I've lived in a hot climate, and certainly the first time I've trained in one. I can see that there are going to be some things to learn, and there's going to be a lot of laundry to do if I continue to change my clothes at my current rate. Thankfully my apartment stays cool becasue it's in an old stone building, but when I walked out my front door this morning, it only took ten minutes to break a sweat. And I was only walking to the market. And this was at 9am. My poor little herb garden isn't coping well either; it was a sight of mass carnage after my three-day absence. I am suddenly planning on making a lot of dishes with fresh herbs to make use of the specimens that are wilted-beyond-consolation (for dinner tonight: Amaranth Tabouli, to use up some of the sad-looking parsley and mint), while trying to revive the others with water and encouraging words.

I'm now off to do a brick training session with two tri-club friends, Arnold and Sabine. Arnold is the club's president and chief advice-giver for those training for Ironman; last time I rode with him he barked instructions on my gear choice with every change in camber, and then afterward he told me I could be quite a good athlete if I stopped looking at the views and talking about the poppies and the butterflies all the time. I told him that was easy for him to say since he's lived here all his life, and he conceded the point. Sabine is not racing this season but continues to train with the club as a means of staying in shape; she's a mother of two and has a body you could bounce rocks off of. Today, the three of us are going to do interval training in the nearest wine appellation called La Clape, a protected region of endless vineyards and rolling hills, and some steep climbs that crest over to views of the Mediterranean in the distance. After two hours of that, we are going to run intervals along the banks of the canal back here in town. This all sounds like an incredibly bad idea to me since it's 10am and it has to be at least 30 degrees already, but Arnold and Sabine insist that it's good for me to acclimatize to training in the heat as soon as possible. While I'm waiting for that to happen, I'm going to keep looking at the views.