I find it fascinating, the amount of salt I excrete when I sweat. It's really quite amazing. Sure, I've seen the stained t-shirts other people wear, with the salt rings on them, especially on the really long-haul runs. But I don't think I've ever seen the veritable film of salt dust on others that coats me after a day like today - hot enough to really sweat; low enough humidity that the moisture evaporates.
The salt is left behind in a subtle pattern of small white dots, like miniature dried-up Old Faithfuls, marking exactly where my sweat glands are. By the time I'm done with a good run, like today, my skin looks like a Lichtenstein background. When I brush my hand across this strange moonscape, I become - in miniature - the Destroyer of Mountains, razing them and turning them to dust. This finely powdered salt - highly sought by five-star chefs for its purity and fine granularity, I might add - then coats each individual arm-hair, turning my skin into a miniature forest of denuded birch trees.
When I shower, I can taste the salt coming off my skin.
Pictures at bottom of this post! In the meantime, I'd like to point out Bloglines.com, which you can use to subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog - or anyone's blog. Makes keeping up very handy. If you use Mac OSX Tiger, or Konfabulator on a PC, you can even use the Bloglines Notifier Widget, which puts the number of unread entries in your subscribed blogs on your dashboard or desktop. Neat.
3 comments:
Maybe you could harvest and sell the salt.
Don't forget that because of your CF, your sweat has much more sodium and chloride in it, then the sweat you're seeing on other runners. (I wonder if that should impact on your fluid replacements...)
i thought no one sweated like i do. it's so gross. i know for a fact i have extra sweat glands. ok, maybe not for a fact but i strongly suspect.
still, there's this sense of pride i get from that white residue. nice run, nice effort.
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