Let’s talk about the weather

In the lead-up to an event, I find it fun to screenshot the weather forecast each day. In my opinion, you may as well draw weather icons out of a hat as look at the BBC’s forecast 14 days out.

This is how it played out preceding my most recent event: 

In terms of max temperature reached, Saturday was the joint hottest day of the year, tying with the previous Thursday, with both days hitting 31 degrees:

However, Saturday was the real hottest day, having more hours of high heat, as shown in this chart showing official weather station temperature data:

As these charts show, the temperature was slow to fall too, and of course, those temperatures are in the shade; in the sun it felt like a humid furnace:

24 degrees at 1.30am! That’s a nice summer’s day, yet it was the middle of the night.

It also got a bit breezy on Sunday (quite pleasant, for most of the morning), building to ‘Near Gale’ by 11am, but I was nearly done by then, so it didn’t affect me much.

All of this is to say that of all the weekends this year, Saturday at noon was not the ideal time to be setting out on a 24-hour race, coinciding exactly with the hottest 24-hour period of the year. One comforting factor was that this wasn’t the first hot weather of the year, so there had been some opportunity to acclimatise at least to the mid-twenties. I could also draw on the knowledge that I’ve coped well with hot temperatures in the past (41 degrees in the Mojave desert on the PCT; 34 degrees in the Pyrenees). And, of course, everyone else was going to be dealing with the same weather, so I could only hope that I was able to cope with the temperature better than my competition!