Yesterday I tried running and walking in high winds. I have cycled and walked in high winds but I had not yet had the sensation of running in high wind and it is quite interesting. In cycling you feel that the wind pushes your bike to the side, and you counteract the wind.
With running in high wind I found that if I ran with the wind then my body behaved as a sail and I could feel the wind pushing me faster than usual.
Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.
This risk of drought is recognised.
I go for walks, runs or bike rides every single day, whether it’s rainy, windy, snowy or a heatwave. As a result of this I often walk along routes where mud forms. Sometimes I come home from walks and my shoes are spotless, thanks either to a drought, or paradoxically due to the rain.
Recently we had snow and it was cold so my shoes were relatively clean. I could come home, stomp a few times and my shoes would be clean.
Today the weather app said that it would start raining at 1500 so I didn’t go out for a walk. In the end the rain started at around 1630 or even later. I could have gone for a walk and I could have come back dry or almost dry.
For years I went for walks almost everyday, whatever the weather conditions. I grew tired of the habit. I have had this habit for five years or more, three of which have been during the pandemic.
Today as I walked from one village to another I looked up the hill and I saw a cloud arch framing a nearby village and I had to take a picture. The framing of the image was rather unique. It is below. Is it kitsch? There is a good chance. It was unique, so I captured it.
The Cloud Arch
I liked looking up at the sky today because it was different from usual.
“I don’t need to go for a one and a half hour walk. I said that to a neighbour before my walk. I could have cut it short, if it started to rain too heavily. Paradoxically for most of the walk it was grey and drizzling. Nothing to worry about. I was almost dry for almost the entire walk.
It’s as I walked the last one and a half kilometres that it started to rain heavily.
Wet chickens
Chickens in the rain, for a change.
A field with hay and trees
They announced rain and storms but we hardly ever get either in this part of Switzerland. I wasn’t going to use this blog for short posts but I can’t focus.
There is an article on Swiss Radio and Television that discusses the positive impact that the flooding has had on the water tables. For several years not only have we had warm weather but we have also gone with very little or no rain for months at a time.
During some weeks we were told “The water reserves are so low that we will soon need to switch to retrieving water from the lake rather than our reservoires.
One of the games I like to play is to look at the weather app and see when the rain is scheduled to arrive. I then estimate whether I will make it home before the rain. I took rain stuff just in case, to keep electronics etc dry but I don’t mind if I get wet, at the current temperature.
I went for a fifty eight minute walk and it’s as I sat down this blog post that the rain began.