Another haboob, and a workout

Monday night, July 18th, brought the second haboob of the monsoon season here in Arizona.  This one wasn't quite as majestic as the first one, but it was still pretty cool looking.

Photo taken by Cory Hanen

Photo taken by Michelle Halonen

Photo found on ktar.com

These amazing events are normally too harmless, as it's usually just a ton of dust and wind.  There were some pretty bad accidents on the freeways, as visibility was basically 0%.  Luckily, I was at home enjoying some fresh, homemade Chinese chicken salad.

I did have plans with The Captain scheduled for Tuesday morning...a run followed by a swim at an outdoor pool.  Once this haboob started to roll through, I began wondering if my outdoor swimming plans would be ruined.  Knowing that these things are usually just dust, I decided to go ahead with the plans and do the workout as scheduled.

4:30 a.m. came quickly.  My alarm woke me up, and I immediately headed downstairs to enjoy my breakfast of champions:

A Marathon Energy Bar, and a pot of coffee

By the time I made the coffee and ate my bar, it was still pretty early:

Yes, that's A.M.

I always try to wake up at least an hour prior to a workout, in order to give me time to eat some food and properly wake up before I get to raising my heart rate.  It's pretty tough to wake up when I'm just hanging out in my house, but when I get to drive somewhere to workout, or get outside pretty quickly, I usually get to see some pretty cool sunrises.  The one today was nice, but the photo didn't really do it any justice:

The sunrise at about 5:35 a.m.

From the view in my car, there were a bunch of rays of light coming up over the clouds and mountains that, unfortunately, didn't turn out in the picture.  Oh well.

Once I got to the pool, The Captain was already there waiting for me.  We quickly got ready and headed out on our run.  We did a nice little warm up, followed by three 1-mile, hard efforts.  We took about 5:00 of rest between each one to make sure we were fully recovered.  After we were done running, we quickly changed and hopped into the pool, which was almost perfectly clean.  I never would have guessed that a big, giant dust cloud just blew over this pool the night before (I was running short on time, so I forgot to snap some pictures of the pool...sorry!).  The swim went pretty much as planned, swimming 40 laps.

Tuesday was a quite successful day, regardless of the haboob repeater that blew by on Monday night.  And again, it was a smart move to schedule a workout with The Captain, because if I hadn't, sleeping in may have won the morning battle that day!