It's not the humidity. It's definitely the heat.

Give me a day that's cool and overcast with air as thick and moist as unset Jell-O^® (mmm ... Jell-O^®) and I can run for hours and hours and miles and miles ... as I so effortlessly deomonstrated on last weekend's 17-mile jaunt.

But throw in a bit of sun and some bell-bottomed, afro-poofed temperatures (that would be in the 70s, for those of you not able to follow my Jake-must-have-gotten-dropped-on-his-head-a-lot metaphors) and I become sweaty, gaspy, plodding and pink as an Easter ham (mmm ... ham).

Which is exactly what happened today. It was cool and overcast when I took off for what was supposed to be an epic 20-mile excursion, but when I hit the 4-mile mark -- at the beginning of a three-mile stretch along the lakefront with NO trees or shade of any kind -- the friggin' sun burst forth and started frying all my plans for glory.

And when I got to the 17-mile turnaround, I decided it was best to cut my losses and head home without my 20-mile prize.

And then I got all heat-strokey. Again. Long story short: I ended up running about 14 or 15 miles and walking the rest.

Of course, the clouds rolled back in when I was about 3 miles from home. But by then I was beaten into submission and my legs had started to tighten up. And I started feeling like I was developing toe blisters to boot. So my ceremonial final-eighth-mile sprint home probably looked more tragic than triumphant.

And I had been such a good boy last night. They kicked us out of the office early yesterday to get the holiday weekend par-tay started, but I'd been fighting a horrible sore throat all week so I headed home and took a nice long nap that ended up lasting four hours.

I felt much better when I woke up, thank you for asking, but I wasn't quite all there. So I decided to lie low, watching TV and playing around online, and then I slept for another 9 hours and woke up all better, thanks for asking again.

So with an all-better sore throat and epic levels of sleep under my belt, I expected to hit the trail and pound out those 20 miles as easy as pie. But it was not meant to be. Curse you, perfidious running gods!

Mmmm ... pie.