It’s hot right now. Really hot. Like, legs sticking to your seat, sweat collecting on the back of your neck after two minutes outside kind of hot. Germany is having a bit of a heat wave right now, and Osnabrück is right in the middle of it. Today, we hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 40 degrees Celsius, but I always feel like Fahrenheit temperatures make everything sound more dire!) It’s too hot in the loft to sit at my desk and write, so I have to make do with my lap as a table on the couch downstairs.

It just so happens this is the week my training plan starts up to hopefully run my second-ever half-marathon. Sounds like everything lined up perfectly, right? Waking up in a pool of sweat at six-thirty in the morning is not exactly motivating me out the door and into the already-too warm air, but a training plan is a training plan so on go the running shoes (albeit with plenty of sighs, grumbling and staring forlornly at my guy’s breakfast.)

I’m lucky that I found a good running route near me. The roads in Osnabrück are extremely bike friendly. There are plenty of crosswalks for pedestrians and even an all-pedestrian zone in the Old Town. But running? That’s a different story. It’s not that you aren’t allowed to run on the cobblestone streets of center city, it’s just that no one does it. I mean it. No one. I get the strangest looks when I head out at a jogging speed from our apartment to the outer circle encompassing the Old Town. That’s why I go so early in the morning, as usually there are only a few delivery truck drivers and café employees to watch me go by.

Northern Germany has the reputation of being flat, and usually, it seems like it is. There aren’t big rolling pastures like back home in Central New York, and there are certainly no mountainous regions like Bavaria. However, I managed to find plenty of hills to huff and puff up on the start of my run.

I need to get back into shape.

You would think running would be easy, seeing as how I’ve been running in some capacity since I was about seven years old. But it is easy to fall out of shape and hard to get back into shape, so it’s a work in progress right now.

And the heat… The heat doesn’t help. I’m grateful that big chunks of my route are protected by giant trees separating the path from open farm fields.

Of course, with half-marathon training comes longer distance training, and today the plan called for five miles, which meant leaving the comfort of that tree-lined path to run out through some horse pastures in the glaring sunlight. I guess I should be thankful I took off when it was 77 degrees out instead of 104, but at the time I don’t think I was feeling grateful for much of anything.

My turning point is this really pretty little lake called the Rubbenbruchsee. I plan on writing a future post about everything you can do at this lake and how nice it is for a walk with a friend, but when you are sweating from every pore, the big body of water seems less like a relaxing backdrop and more like a slap on the face. I admired it for about .2 seconds today before turning around for my slog back home.

For the rest of the day, I’m downing bottles of water and waiting for the weekend when the heat is supposed to break a bit and settle into a more comfortable version of summer. That is, unless I sweat to death in the un-airconditioned library this afternoon for my German-speaking class. I’ve never been big on AC, but my will is breaking a bit right now.

Tschüss!