Smoke gets in your eyes

Unoriginal, I know. The air quality keeps getting worse here as the fires in California continue to burn. Today officially the air is unhealthy (active children and adults, and people with respiratory disease, such as asthma, should avoid prolonged outdoor exertion; everyone else, especially children, should limit prolonged outdoor exertion), another step down from "unhealthy for sensitive individuals" (active children and adults, and people with respiratory disease should limit outdoor exertion). It's ugly and smelly out. Right now we're getting smoke from a fire to the north of us in Lake County that has burned 14,000 acres and is only 5% contained. They're predicting a wind shift by the weekend but that only means we'll be getting the smoke from the fires in Monterey County which have burned 60,000 acres so far. Different fire, same result. The air in the Bay Area will not be clearing up any time soon. It's a good time to go out of town. As far out as possible.

I had thought I had breathing problems before but know I'm getting a taste of what it's truly like to have COPD or other disease with compromised lung function. I decided to skip the Team track workout yesterday and instead exercise inside with the air conditioning hopefully filtering the crap from the air. A good decision and a bad decision; I wouldn't have been able to run around the track once but I didn't do much better inside. I set up my own private circuit drills and started with a warmup on the treadmill. I ran for 6 minutes at a slow speed and was gasping when I finished. Then I did the first half of my lower body toning tape and continue to gasp. I started to run again on the TM and ended up with a fast walk. Still gasping. Then part 2 of the tape, walk on the TM, finish the tape, walk on the TM, then crunches and other core work. I was wheezing and coughing and feeling like total crap and it shouldn't have been a hard workout. Amazing how lack of oxygen will impact your physical condition.

Today I'm feeling like I have a chest cold, or horrific allergy problems. I don't know how I'm going to do the swim workout tonight and I may end up either doing an easy 2000 yards or even cutting it short. I'll make the attempt, but I'll quit if I'm hacking up a lung in the pool. I know from other times if I push my lungs they'll just hurt for a week and I don't need to do that.

And here I thought that the heat would be the big problem during tri training. I'll push myself during blazing heat and during freezing cold and during rain but there isn't anything I can do to push through the smoke. I'll have to figure out something, I can't just skip training until this clears!