Lazy Hazy Malayzie

Joy here...It's been two weeks since we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, and life has been rather hectic.  We've had to get over jet lag, live out of suitcases, find a place to live, deal with transportation, get phones, sort out our banking, figure out long-term medical insurance, visit with friends and family, and not let our training get totally derailed by the heat and the humidity.  And, to be honest, we've done a pretty darn, good job of it so far (if I do say so myself).

The hill - 8X - trust me, it's steeper than
it looks!

As I mentioned in my first blog since arriving, we did our run workouts - including our drills and strides - out there with the monkeys and the heat and humidity.  One of my workouts included 8 hill repeats, so like a good little student, I was out there running my little heart out up and down the closest hill.  To be sure, I garnered more than one odd look, but I was not to be deterred.  Coach Woods had given me a task, and dammitalltohell if I was to fail at it!

Then with 8 run workouts under our belts in our first week-ish of being in Malaysia, the dreaded Malaysian haze set in.

If you're unfamiliar with the haze, let me take a moment to explain it to you.  Haze in the atmosphere is generally due to large scale burning in Indonesia.  Deforestation there leads to smoke pollution that blows north to Singapore and Malaysia.  Then you add to that a healthy dose of domestic air pollution, and you find yourself breathing a toxic soup.  (Here's what the Malaysian gov't says about it...basically that it's just a fact of life.  And here's a bit from the Singaporean government:  

Transboundary smoke haze from land and forest fires during the traditional dry period between June and October has been a recurrent feature in the southern ASEAN region in the past few decades. These annual fires are caused mainly by land clearing and “slash and burn” agricultural practices in Indonesia, particularly Sumatra and Kalimantan. In the northern ASEAN region, agricultural burning activities are common during the traditional dry season between December and March can also cause large scale smoke haze at times.)

What this meant for our workouts is that we didn't do them for four days in a row.  We were essentially house bound.

The haze is so thick that you can't even see the trees
in the distance.  The jungle merges with the sky in a
haze of milk water grey.

Haze hazardousness (say that 10 times fast!) is measured in what is called the "Pollutants Standards Index" or PSI.  A PSI reading over 100 is considered unhealthy, and the PSI readings for Kuala Lumpur have been hovering around 115, which means we aren't supposed to be out there doing cardio vascular workouts breathing in all that crap into our lungs.

So we sat about like lazy louts doing our best to avoid the haze, but feeling having lazy hazy days ended up being less fun than it might sound.

By the end of the third day we were getting antsy, and by the end of the fourth day, I was ready to run, haze or no haze.

As luck would have it, over night the skies grew dark, clouds blew in, and rain washed away the haze, and after four days of no running, I awoke to clear blue skies.

I put on my brand new running shoes and out the door I went...

These shoes were made for running,
These shoes were made for running,
And one of these days these shoes are gonna run all over you!

Over and out,
Joy