Thursday, July 19, 2007

Melbourne Morning

I used to hate waking up in Winter in Melbourne. The sky is still pitch black at 8am. The alarm clock makes me feel like I've woken up from the dead. My room is drop frozen cold.

Then I discovered the joys of oil heaters. They aren't the same as heated fans (which can be dreadfully dry) and the highly dangerous electric bar heaters (that have no safety switches) which have burnt down many homes and incinerated its occupants.

The trick is to maintain the room at a relatively decent temperature- about 16C - 18C is fine. You can do that with the oil heaters. If you turn it up any warmer - your electric bill is going to burn a massive hole in your pocket.

If you are a guy and live in a safe area - you can also try the morning run. That'll certainly wake u up. Maybe my ancestors came from the North Pole or somewhere cold- but I found that if I go running in cold weather about 2C to 5C  with just a simple t-shirt, shorts, runners, my body internal temperature compensates for the cold. The first 10 minutes - the cold is just horrible- but it just caused me to start running faster and getting hotter. And once your body system starts - you'll just feel warm all day.

Thats the trick of living in cold weather countries. You need to get your body's internal temperature to adjust to the cold weather. One reason why people can't do this- is because  they keep on piling clothes, turning on the heaters til they are blazing hot, and generally do everything possible to prevent their body from acclimatizing to the cold weather.

By no means am I advocating you run in very cold temperatures like Moscow -40C or in weather which is very windy, wet. The wind chill factor will kill you for sure, no joke.


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