Field note · February 12, 2023 · 2023 · February, week 2 · 2 min read · by Jay
Dawn is a temperature
Every long session in this house starts in the dark, because dawn is the only hour cool enough to get the work done.
People see the dawn photos and think it's about the view, the buoys at first light, the empty road, the bikes on the rack before the sun's up. It is a nice view, and we're not going to pretend we don't like it, but the view isn't why we're out there at that hour. We're out there because in Honolulu dawn is the only hour cool enough to get the work done, and most of how we train follows from that.
The coolest hour here is the one before sunrise. By the time the sun is up the humidity is already high, and by mid-morning a long run is happening in completely different conditions than the ones it started in, so the window for a long session is roughly 5 to 7:30 a.m. If a session doesn't start inside that window it usually either gets shorter or it gets ugly, which means the long ride starts at 5, the long run starts at 5:30, and the ocean swim starts when there's enough light to see the buoys. The weekend does not begin at a reasonable hour, February through November, and we've stopped pretending otherwise.
A 4:30 alarm gets decided the evening before, because the morning version of us can't be trusted to find a sock. So the evening version fills the bottles and puts them in the fridge, lays out the kit, puts the bikes on the rack, decides what breakfast is, and goes to bed early enough that the alarm is survivable, which past fifty means earlier than it did at thirty. The evening version of us puts the sock where the morning version will trip over it. None of that is discipline so much as logistics, and we both did enough 4 a.m. formations in the Army to know the difference.
During the week the window is smaller because the day job starts, so weekday sessions are short and early, usually done before most people's first coffee, and the long stuff waits for the weekend, when the window can stretch to two or three hours before the heat ends it. What you get for all of that is an empty road, a flat ocean, and the city before it's awake, and you also get a workout finished before anything else in the day can cancel it, which is the real reason we keep doing it. A 5 a.m. session can't get bumped by a meeting, a phone call, or a visiting nephew, because by the time any of those show up it's already done and the bottles are back in the sink.